Fulbright: A Biography
By Randall Bennett Woods
Cambridge University Press, 711 pages, $29.95
In the spring of 1970, when Sen. J. William Fulbright’s mail had become especially vitriolic because of his stand against what the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had denounced as the “constitutionally unauthorized, presidential war in Indochina,” Fulbright received a consoling letter from a constituent back in Arkansas. Though the man had never voted for the Democratic senator, he acknowledged that “it gets increasingly harder to hear lonely voices such as yours calling for common sense, human reason, and a respect for the brotherhood of mankind. . . . Keep nipping at their heels.”
That’s one apt image of the longtime chairman of Foreign Relations–a feisty terrier forever raising alarms about misbegotten or misdirected U.S. government policy abroad. Actually, bulldog would come nearer the truth, given Fulbright’s tenacity and clout during 30 years in the Senate. He died in February, two months shy of what would have been his 90th birthday.
Fulbright became a dissenter on U.S. actions in Vietnam and Cambodia, all right, and had spoken well of war protesters. Yet he was too conservative personally and too much of a political pragmatist to join in protests; in fact, he took care not to appear so radical as to endanger his credibility. Anyway, writes Randall Bennett Woods in this comprehensive biography, Fulbright thought “extremism in the service of any principle was deplorable.”
Here is another image: Fulbright was a racist, a Southerner, a son of a well-off farmer and banker, and someone who appreciated that support for civil rights measures in Congress could kill him at re-election time. He doubted the worth of such measures in any case. Moreover, just as Fulbright thought the United States ought not interfere with the political and cultural autonomy of other nations, he considered it wrong for the North to impose alien notions like racial integration on the South.
“On a personal level,” Woods says, “he judged people by their manners, personal cleanliness, and education, not by their skin color; but he did not feel compelled by Christian duty or social conscience to use the power of the state to remedy historical wrongs, correct maldistribution of wealth, or legislate equality of opportunity.”
Not until the 1963 March on Washington did Fulbright experience “a glimmer of an awakening.” Nonetheless, he opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as well as voting rights legislation the following year.
Ponder yet one more image of Fulbright: that of an august but tired incumbent beaten by Gov. Dale Bumpers in 1974. Why did he lose? The perennially internationalist Fulbright had neglected Arkansas, and his positions on Vietnam, Watergate and the Middle East, where he favored a more nearly evenhanded approach to Israel and the Arab powers, were unpopular. More important, though, according to Woods, the senator’s heart was no longer in it.
Out of office, Fulbright focused his energies on the Middle East, even hiring out as a paid lobbyist for Arab leaders. He became obsessed with the erroneous notion of a Zionist conspiracy bent on getting the U.S. to do Israel’s bidding. Later, Fulbright cheered the liberalizing trends in Moscow–he had been an early proponent of U.S.-Soviet detente, after all–but was as surprised as anyone at the speed with which the Soviet Union collapsed and cold war confrontation subsided.
As part of his research, Woods, professor of history at the University of Arkansas, spent about six hours a day with Fulbright over 11 days in the fall of 1988. By then, he had had a couple of strokes, “but for at least an hour each day Fulbright achieved complete lucidity,” Woods writes in a preface more interesting than most. (For one thing, it alerts us to a future biography, one by Fulbright aide Seth Tillman, identified here as the senator’s “intellectual alter ego during the 1960s.” Tillman and Fulbright put out the modest book “The Price of Empire” in 1989.)
Woods uses this metaphor to sum up the contribution of Fulbright during the senator’s decades of round-the-clock lucidity: “If Fulbright was not always right, he was generally healthy, a foreign affairs gyroscope dedicated to keeping the ship of state in trim.”
That is a more than fair but exceedingly tepid assessment with which to conclude an admirably in-depth examination of one of the most distinguished, world-renowned members of Congress in this century. But what Woods may lack in rhetorical forcefulness, he makes up for in thoroughness. He can’t have left too much out of this biography, which begins with Fulbright’s ancestors and winds up in the summer of 1993.
James William Fulbright wanted for little during his growing-up years and then had the privilege of leaving a backward state behind in 1928 to study at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. The experience widened his horizons, stretched him intellectually and made him a lifelong Anglophile, even to the extent of loving England’s parliamentary system of government.
Back in Arkansas about a decade later, he became, at age 34, the youngest university president in the nation, though he had none of the customary credentials for administering an institution like the University of Arkansas. He ran successfully for a U.S. House seat in 1942, deciding right away that he would be a “national” lawmaker in service of the ideals of Wilsonian internationalism. Two years later, Fulbright was elected to the Senate. He became a member of the Foreign Relations Committee in 1949 and its chairman in ’59, a post–and bully pulpit–he held until being turned out of office 15 years later.
It didn’t take long for Fulbright to claim a piece of the spotlight–by championing the emerging United Nations–and to make an enemy of Harry Truman–by suggesting that the president turn the Oval Office over to a Republican following the 1946 midterm elections, in which the GOP gained control of both houses of Congress. Ever after, he was “Senator Halfbright” to Truman.
The achievement that still carries Fulbright’s name, and that was his first and abiding love, also came early in his tenure. The Fulbright Exchange Program began in 1948 with 35 students coming to the United States and 65 Americans going abroad to study. Says Woods: “The exchange program was one of the few things in Fulbright’s life about which he felt passionately. In its defense he could become emotional, irrational, vindictive. . . . Those who wished to hurt him came quickly to realize that the way to do it was by damaging the exchange program.”
Belief in international education was to Fulbright almost what tenets of faith are to religious people. For such people, by the way, especially those who professed to have a direct line from God, Fulbright had little use; he seemed to Woods not to have given much thought to religion at all. Fulbright preferred to take nothing on faith, to shun rules and absolutes. “Above all,” Woods writes, “Fulbright considered himself a realist, and he perceived that the great goal of his labors was to restore American foreign policy to a rational basis.”
As a realist, Fulbright avoided the ideologue’s difficulty with handling “old myths and new realities,” words he chose as the title of one of his books, of which “The Arrogance of Power” is the best-known. Thus was Fulbright able to preach active internationalism when isolationism was ascendant and to advocate a reduction of America’s role abroad when he thought it overly aggressive or malevolent. He could urge strong executive action when he deemed that appropriate or work to rein it in, as with the “imperial presidency” of Richard Nixon.
That kind of latitude sacrifices consistency and creates contradictions. But these went largely unseen or ignored by Fulbright–he left it to others to worry about them. Woods writes that he could be stunningly obtuse, ignorant and apathetic in some areas, as well as stubborn, haughty and inconsiderate.
Fulbright was inconsistent on Cuba, for example. He denounced the Bay of Pigs invasion approved by John F. Kennedy but, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, pushed for a U.S. invasion of Castro’s island. The hardline idea, Woods says, came from Tillman.
If Fulbright had been unbending, however, he could not have figured so importantly in changing public opinion about the Vietnam War. Though instrumental in gaining passage of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that gave Lyndon Johnson carte blanche in Vietnam, Fulbright subsequently decided that the war was morally wrong. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings he led in 1966 opened a lot of eyes about the truth of America’s disaster in Indochina.
In some ways, though, the senator was immune to change. He remained committed to rationality, reasonableness and progress-through-education. And he stayed blind to the fact that not everyone put an equally high value on these traits. “Gratuitous violence and ideological fanaticism and their antidote, uncompensated self-sacrifice, were phenomena foreign to his nature,” Woods notes.
Finally, Fulbright continued to be enamored of collective security and international cooperation, high ideals that have yet to take root in a world dominated by nationalism and a fondness for, if not big wars anymore, bitter little ethnic and/or racial and religious conflicts.
He said in 1973 that he was “a seeker still of a world system of laws rather than of men, a believer still in the one great new idea of this century in the field of international relations, the idea of an international organization with permanent processes for the peaceful settlement of international disputes.”
Fulbright was, indeed, a seeker–an imperfect one, to be sure–and a visionary. He was a bulldog, an elitist, a Southerner never totally divorced from his regionalism. He was a hugely intelligent presence in Washington whose services the U.S. is fortunate to have had, and whose legacy, the Fulbright exchanges, keeps on serving. By the same token, Woods serves us and history well by so ably detailing the life of this immensely interesting American.
