Statesman, Scholar, J.W. Fulbright Dies Leading Critic Of Vietnam War, U.S. Foreign Policy

J.W. Fulbright, 89, former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a leading critic of U.S. conduct of the war in Vietnam and chief sponsor of an international studentexchange program that bears his name, died Thursday at his home in Washington. He had suffered several strokes.

An Arkansas Democrat and a symbol of independent thinking on world affairs, Fulbright served in the U.S. Senate from 1945 to 1975. He was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee for his last 16 years in office, becoming one of the most influential men ever to hold that position.

He became a focal point for congressional opposition to the Vietnam War after televised hearings on the Southeast Asian conflict before the Foreign Relations Committee in 1966. His stance helped mobilize widespread public dissent against U.S. policy on Vietnam that became a key ingredient in President Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election in 1968.

Fulbright argued that the Senate had yielded its responsibility for oversight of the war and other foreign-policy matters to presidents who had abused their powers. He tried to make the Foreign Relations Committee a counterbalance to the actions of a powerful executive.

He was in constant demand as a speaker at academic institutions and other forums throughout the country.”He was a very close friend of mine, and if it hadn’t been for him I wouldn’t be here today,” President Clinton said on hearing of Fulbright’s death. Later he added, “I am just profoundly grateful today for the conviction that he imparted to me when I was a young man, that we could make peace with the world if we seek better understanding, if we promote the exchanges among people, if we advance the cause of global education.”

Fulbright was a Rhodes scholar and a former president of the University of Arkansas. He was an internationalist for his entire public life, and he fought isolationism at home in the years before the U.S. entry into World War II. He served one term in the House of Representatives before his election to the Senate, and while serving in the House, he introduced the congressional resolution that led to the creation of the United Nations.

In the Senate, he was influential in winning approval of the nuclear-test-ban treaty of 1963, the atmospheric nuclear non-proliferation treaty of 1968 and the ABM and SALT 1 agreements of 1972.

But his most lasting contribution may be his sponsorship of the Fulbright program, in which 4,800 grants are awarded annually to U.S. students, teachers and scholars for research and teaching in more than 130 countries around the world, and to foreign nationals for similar activities in the United States. By the end of 1994, more than 200,000 scholars had received Fulbright fellowships at a cost to the government of $1.2 billion.

Fulbright’s thinking on the United States and its place in the world was an amalgam of principle and pragmatism. He believed in a strong national defense but refused to regard communism as a monolithic threat to the national interest. The views that guided his career were summarized in 1964 in a widely reported speech he made to a nearly empty Senate chamber.

“The myth is that every communist state is an unmitigated evil and relentless enemy of the free world,” he said. “The reality is that some communist regimes pose a threat to the free world while others pose little or none, and that if we recognize these distinctions, we ourselves will be able to influence events in the communist world in a way favorable to the security of the free world.”

He exhorted the country to “cut loose from established myths and to start thinking some `unthinkable thoughts’ - about the Cold War and East-West relations, about the underdeveloped countries (and) the changing nature of the Chinese communist threat in Asia.”

In 1966, he expanded on those themes in lectures at Johns Hopkins University in which he warned against the “arrogance of power which has afflicted, weakened and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past.”

The war in Vietnam, he said, was wrecking plans for social reform at home and poisoning the national spirit, and he attacked the Johnson administration for attempting to describe the conflict in terms of a moral crusade. In 1967, those lectures were published in book form, “The Arrogance of Power,” which became a bestseller.

Fulbright’s independent turn of mind was evident in the early 1950s, when he was one of the first to stand up to the redbaiting of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R-Wis. In 1954, Fulbright was the only senator to oppose the annual appropriation for the permanent subcommittee on investigations, McCarthy’s forum.

In 1961, he stood virtually alone against President Kennedy’s advisers in opposing the Bay of Pigs invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. When it failed, Kennedy said to Fulbright, “You’re the only one who can say, `I told you so.”’

Fulbright was a loyal supporter and trusted ally of President Johnson during the early years of his presidency, and he sponsored the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that gave the president almost blanket authority to conduct the war in Vietnam. Fulbright later contended that John son had been less than forthright about it and that sponsoring the resolution was the “most humiliating experience” of his career.

In 1965, he broke with the White House when the United States intervened in the Dominican Republic. A year later, he began to speak out forcefully about his disillusionment with U.S. policy in Vietnam.

His most scathing attack on U.S. foreign policy came in a 1972 book, “The Crippled Giant,” in which he charged that U.S. policy-makers appeared to be “driven by a sense of imperial destiny.” Excessive use of force in foreign affairs, he said, would leave the United States “a moral wasteland” and destroy the constitutional balance of power between the president and Congress.

In domestic matters, Fulbright’s views were akin to those of other Southern senators. In the formative years of the civil-rights movement, he dismayed many of his admirers outside the South with his votes against civil-rights legislation in 1957 and 1964, his failure to object when Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus defied federal orders to desegregate the Little Rock schools and his support of the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional.

James William Fulbright was born April 9, 1905, in Sumner, Mo. He was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1993.