(b. Sumner, Missouri, 9 Apr. 1905; d. 9 Feb. 1995) US; Senator from Arkansas 1945 – 74, Chairman, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 1959 – 74 Fulbright took a BA at the University of Arkansas, an LLB at George Washington University, and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He taught law at George Washington University and the University of Arkansas and became president of the University of Arkansas in 1939. In 1942 he was elected to the House of Representatives. In 1944 he was elected to the Senate and served as Senator from Arkansas for the next thirty years.

His interests lay very largely in the field of foreign affairs. In 1946 he sponsored the bill which created the international educational exchange programme which bore his name. He supported the general lines of American foreign policy during the Cold War, though he emphasized the importance of economic and cultural issues as well as military and political containment. In 1959 he became chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He supported American policy in Vietnam in the early 1960s and in 1964 he sponsored the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave broad powers to the President in his conduct of the war in Vietnam. In 1965 he began to question American policy in Vietnam and in 1966 he held hearings on the war in Vietnam before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The hearings provided a major focus for the expression of opposition to the war in Vietnam and he became increasingly marked as a leading dissenter with regard to American policy in Vietnam. His position on Vietnam led him to clash with his fellow Southerner, President Johnson. After the 1968 election Fulbright encouraged President Nixon to negotiate an end to American involvement in Vietnam.

On domestic matters Fulbright took the conservative standpoint of a Southern Democrat, especially on civil rights. He adopted this standpoint for reasons of political necessity as much as of conviction, since his intellectual bearing and haughty manner made him vulnerable in his bids for re-election in Arkansas, especially when he became a dissenter on Vietnam. In 1974 he was defeated in his final bid for re-election. Highly regarded as a scholar in politics, he was the author of many books on American foreign policy, such as The Arrogance of Power (1966).

James William Fulbright (1905-1995) was as educator and politician, who, while a United States senator, sponsored the Fulbright Act of 1946, providing funds for the exchange of students, scholars, and teachers between the United States and other countries.

William Fulbright, politician, lawyer, educator, and writer, was born on April 9, 1905, in Sumner, Missouri. He received his bachelor of arts degree at the University of Arkansas in 1925. Attending Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar, he won a bachelor of arts degree (1928) and a master of arts degree (1931). During the following year's tour of Europe he developed his interest in international affairs. In 1932 he married Elizabeth Williams, and they had two daughters. George Washington University awarded Fulbright a bachelor of laws degree in 1934. After serving as a special attorney in the antitrust division of the U.S. Department of Justice (1934-1935), he joined the faculties of George Washington University (1935-1936) and the University of Arkansas (1936-1939). Fulbright served as president of the University of Arkansas from 1939 to 1941.

A member of the Democratic party, Fulbright entered the U.S. Congress as an Arkansas representative in 1943 during World War II. That September the House of Representatives adopted the Fulbright resolution that favored creation of the "appropriate international machinery with power adequate to establish and to maintain a just and lasting peace," as well as United States participation in that effort. Fulbright entered the Senate in 1944 and gained much influence during his long tenure (1959-1974) as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

The Mutual Educational Exchange Program

The Mutual Educational Exchange Program, the Fulbright Act, was established by the U.S. Congress on August 1, 1946. This legislation authorized the use of U.S.-owned foreign currencies obtained from the sale of post-war surplus military equipment to finance grants for Americans to study, teach, or conduct research abroad, as well as for foreign citizens to study in the U.S. Since 1949 more than 100,000 nationals have participated in these exchange programs. It was later administered under the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961 which provides the legislative authority for the program. The main objective of this Act is "to enable the government of the United States to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries … and thus to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations between the United States and other countries of the world." The program operates in more than 135 countries and binational commissions were established by executive agreements in 43 countries. The J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board (BFS) in Washington, D.C. is composed of 12 educational and public leaders appointed by the President of the United States. It has statutory responsibility for the selection of all academic exchange grantees, the establishment of policies and procedures, and the supervision of the Fulbright Program worldwide.

Fulbright's Influence on Foreign Relations

Fulbright rose to prominence as a member of the Senate Banking and Currency Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee. As chairman of the former committee he conducted an investigation of the stock market in 1955. But Fulbright emerged primarily as one of the Senate's leading critics of American foreign policy, which he believed to be unnecessarily rigid and unproductive. In 1959, becoming chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright urged Congress to widen the scope of executive action and criticized the State Department for its rigidity in negotiations with the Communist powers. On domestic issues Fulbright remained moderate; on civil rights he was orthodox from a Southern point of view, yet without a trace of bigotry.

As a U.S. senator, Fulbright gained much influence during his long tenure (1959-1974) as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He became a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, particularly of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. By 1963 the problem of Vietnam was beginning to dominate America's external affairs. Long convinced that American fears of communism were being transformed into a positively antirevolutionary posture in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Fulbright attempted to curb the foreign interventions of the Lyndon Johnson administration. In his 1965 committee hearings on Johnson's decision to send troops into the Dominican Republic, he argued that the President's advisors had exaggerated Communist participation in the Dominican revolution. In 1966 Fulbright's committee conducted a search investigating U.S. involvement in Vietnam and held hearings on U.S. relations with China. Eventually he denied the President's right to send American forces into hostilities without congressional approval. Despite his attacks on the Vietnam War, Fulbright won his fifth term as senator in 1968 with a surprising 59 percent of the Arkansas vote.

During the mid-1960s Fulbright published his foreign policy views in Prospects for the West (1963), Old Myths and New Realities (1964), and The Arrogance of Power (1967). Running for his sixth term as senator in 1974, Fulbright was defeated in the Arkansas Democratic primary, and he resigned from the U.S. Senate at the end of the year.

U.S.-Polish Educational Exchanges

The Office for U.S.-Polish Educational Exchanges was established on March 22, 1990, after a binational agreement was signed between the governments of Poland and the United States, later known as the Polish-U.S. Fulbright Commission. The Commission's mission is to offer qualified Polish and American nationals the opportunity to exchange significant knowledge and educational experience in fields of consequence to the two countries. It also aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of Polish-American relations and to broaden the means by which the two societies can further their understanding of each other's culture. The Polish government acknowledged the importance of the Commission's work by contributing to its funding. The Ministry of National Education provides the office space for the Commission, stipends for American students, salaries and housing for American scholars, travel costs for Polish grantees, and a two-week orientation program for U.S. grantees.

Polish Fulbright Alumni Association

In January 1992 the Polish-U.S. Fulbright Commission put notices in a number of Polish newspapers inviting former fulbrighters to contact the Commission. Some 160 alumni declared their wish to join the association. The Polish Fulbright Alumni Association (PFAA) and its Statute were registered by the Polish Court in February 1993. At its first meeting it was announced that Fulbright had been awarded Poland's highest award for a foreigner, the Order of Service of the Polish Republic. During a special ceremony at the Polish Embassy in Washington in December 1993, a delegation of PFAA and the Commission handed the Cross to Fulbright's wife, who represented her husband.

When Fulbright died in February of 1995, more than 250,000 scholarships had been awarded bearing his name.

Further Reading

The full-length biography of Fulbright is Haynes Johnson and Bernard M. Gwertzman, Fulbright: The Dissenter (1968). Karl E. Meyer, ed., Fulbright of Arkansas: The Public Positions of a Private Thinker (1963), contains a brief biography and a selection of Fulbright's public statements.

For more information on James William Fulbright, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: Apr. 9, 1905, Sumner, Mo.
• Political party: Democrat
• Education: University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, graduated, 1925; Rhodes Scholar, Oxford University, 1928; George Washington University Law School, graduated, 1934
• Representative from Arkansas: 1943–45
• Senator from Arkansas: 1945–74
• Died: Feb. 9, 1995, Washington, D.C.

In 1964, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright led the effort to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The resolution gave congressional support to President Lyndon B. Johnson to retaliate against any hostile military acts by North Vietnam. Fulbright assured other senators that the resolution was not an act of war and that President Johnson would consult with Congress before escalating the conflict. The next year, however, when President Johnson sent U.S. Marines to intervene in a rebellion within the Dominican Republic, Senator Fulbright became concerned that the President was not telling Congress and the public the full truth. If Johnson had exaggerated the situation in the Dominican Republic in order to justify sending troops, Fulbright wondered, might he be doing the same in Vietnam? In 1966, the Foreign Relations Committee launched a series of “educational” hearings on the Vietnam War, inviting both defenders and critics of the war to testify. The hearings began a national debate on the war and made Senator Fulbright one of the leading dissenters against American foreign policy.

See also Gulf of Tonkin Resolution; Johnson, Lyndon B.

Sources

• Randall Bennett Woods, Fulbright: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

1905–95, U.S. Senator from Arkansas (1945–75), b. Sumner, Mo. A Rhodes scholar, he was admitted (1934) to the bar and served (1934–35) in the antitrust division of the U.S. Dept of Justice. He taught law at George Washington Univ. law school (1935–36) and at the Univ. of Arkansas (1936–39), becoming president of the university (1939–41). In 1942 Fulbright was elected as a Democrat to the U.S. House of Representatives and in 1944 to the Senate. He gained international recognition from the Fulbright Act (1946), which provided for the exchange of students and teachers between the United States and many other countries. He was one of the first to criticize Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations into reputed Communist influence in the United States and was instrumental in bringing about McCarthy's downfall.

Fulbright served as chairman of the Senate banking and currency committee (1955–59) and, as chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee (1959–74), he conducted frequent open hearings to educate the public and to reassert the Senate's influence in long-range policy formulation. An outspoken critic of U.S. military intervention abroad, Fulbright opposed the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), the landing of marines in the Dominican Republic (1965), and the escalation of the war in Vietnam. However, Fulbright could be conservative as well; he voted against civil-rights legislation in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1974 Democratic primary in Arkansas, he was defeated for the senatorial nomination by Dale Bumpers. He wrote Old Myths and New Realities (1964), The Arrogance of Power (1966), The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (1970), The Crippled Giant (1972), and The Price of Empire (1989).

James William Fulbright served as a U.S. senator from Arkansas from 1945 to 1974. Fulbright played an important role in shaping U.S. foreign policy as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His opposition to the Vietnam War and to unbridled presidential power in foreign affairs contributed to major shifts in the conduct of U.S. foreign relations.

Fulbright was born in Sumner, Missouri, on April 9, 1905, the son of a prosperous Arkansas businessman. He entered the University of Arkansas at the age of sixteen, and graduated in 1925. From 1925 to 1928, Fulbright attended Oxford University, in England, as a Rhodes scholar. This educational experience deepened his intellectual interests and provided a strong background for public life. He graduated from George Washington University Law School in 1934, and then taught at that school for two years. In 1936 he accepted a teaching position at the University of Arkansas. In 1939 he was appointed president of the University of Arkansas. At age thirty-four, he was the youngest college president in the United States. His tenure was short, however, as a new governor dismissed him in 1941.

Fulbright then turned his focus to politics. As a Democrat he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1942. In 1945 he was elected to the U.S. Senate. His previous time as a Rhodes scholar led him to sponsor the Fulbright Act of 1946, 22 U.S.C.A. §245 et seq., which awards scholarships to U.S. citizens for study and research abroad and to citizens from other nations for study in the United States. The establishment of the Fulbright Scholarship exchange program has proved to be an enduring legacy.

Fulbright, although personally a moderate on matters of race, believed in the 1950s that he needed to move to the right on race issues to protect his political future in Arkansas. This led him to sign the Southern Manifesto, a 1956 document signed by Southern senators and representatives that expressed their displeasure at the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (Brown I), 347 U.S. 483, 74 S. Ct. 686, 98 L. Ed. 873 (1954), which struck down state-sponsored racially segregated public school systems, and Brown v. Board of Education (Brown II), 349 U.S. 294, 75 S. Ct. 753, 99 L. Ed. 1083 (1955), in which the Court directed that schools be desegregated with "all deliberate speed." The manifesto condemned these decisions as abuses of judicial power and approved of Southern resistance, by all legal means, to the demand for desegregation. Fulbright doomed his national political prospects by signing the manifesto.

In the 1950s Fulbright became a close friend and colleague of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat from Texas. In 1959 Johnson engineered Fulbright's elevation to chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Following the election of John F. Kennedy as president in 1960, Johnson, now vice president, urged Kennedy to appoint Fulbright secretary of state. Johnson's efforts failed, in large part because Fulbright had supported the Southern Manifesto and racial segregation.

During the Kennedy administration, Fulbright opposed the United States' indirect involvement in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, in which Cuban exiles made a futile attempt to overthrow the premier of Cuba, Fidel Castro. When the Vietnam War escalated under President Johnson, Fulbright became a consistent critic of presidential foreign policy. Fulbright had supported Johnson's Vietnam policy in the early part of the conflict, sponsoring the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, Pub. L. No. 88-408, 78 Stat. 384, which allowed Johnson to wage war without seeking a congressional declaration. Within a year, however, Fulbright had become convinced that Johnson had misled him about events that had brought about the 1964 resolution. See also Cuban missile crisis.

Fulbright used the Foreign Relations Committee as a platform to criticize Vietnam policy. In January 1966 he held televised hearings on Vietnam. Leading opponents of the war testified that the conflict was going badly and that the United States did not have a legitimate role to play in Vietnam. Fulbright called Secretary of State Dean Rusk to appear three times during the hearings, repeatedly asking hard questions about U.S.-Asian policy. These hearings and additional ones in 1967 gave credibility to the antiwar movement and damaged the Johnson administration's credibility.

Skeptical about U.S. foreign policy and the attitudes of those who conduct it, Fulbright criticized policy makers in his books, Old Myths and New Realities (1964) and The Arrogance of Power (1967). His opposition continued during the Nixon administration.

In 1974 Fulbright was defeated by Dale L. Bumpers in the Democratic primary election. He served as a Washington lobbyist following his defeat, and remained active in the Fulbright Scholarship program.

Fulbright died in Washington, D.C., on February 9, 1995.

Quotes:

"In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but its effects."

"The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute."

"In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine."

"We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every ten minutes."

"It seems to me that it is these extremists who are advocating a soft approach. Their oversimplifications and their baseless generalizations reflect the softness of those who cannot bear to face the burdens of a continuing struggle against a powerful and resourceful enemy. A truly tough approach, in my judgment, is one which accepts the challenge of communism with the courage and determination to meet it with every instrumentality of foreign policypolitical and economic as well as military, and with the willingness to see the struggle through as far into the future as may be necessary. Those who seek to meet the challengeor, in reality, to evade itby bold adventures abroad and witch hunts at home are the real devotees of softnessthe softness of seeking escape from painful realities by resort to illusory panaceas."

"To me, the irony of this involvement with size, as I observed earlier, is the unwillingness or inability of so many Americans to identify themselves with something as vast as the United States. Bigger cars, bigger parking lots, bigger corporate structures, bigger farms, bigger drug stores, bigger supermarkets, bigger motion-picture screens. The tangible and the functional expand, while the intangible and the beautiful shrink. Left to wither is the national purpose, national educational needs, literature and theater, and our critical faculties. The national dialogue is gradually being lost in a froth of misleading self-congratulation and cliche. National needs and interests are slowly being submerged by the national preoccupation with the irrelevant."

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