Fulbright, James William

▪ 1996

      U.S. politician (b. April 9, 1905, Sumner, Mo.—d. Feb. 9, 1995, Washington, D.C.), was the congressional sponsor (1946) of the international foreign-exchange program that by 1995 had provided Fulbright educational scholarships to some 250,000 persons and served with distinction as a U.S. Democratic senator from Arkansas (1945-74) and influential chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee (1959-74). After graduating from the University of Arkansas, Fulbright attended Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, earning two degrees. In the U.S. he received a law degree from George Washington University, Washington, D.C., before teaching at the University of Arkansas, where he served as president (1939-41). In 1942 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and in the following year he introduced a resolution that led to U.S. approval of participation in what became the United Nations. In the Senate he cast (1954) the lone vote of dissent against financing Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's anticommunist investigations and later that year helped compose the bill of particulars attached to the censure motion that effectively ended McCarthy's communist witch-hunt and his political career. A pragmatist with an eye toward reelection, Fulbright consistently voted against integration and civil rights bills. He made his most notable mark in foreign affairs, advising Pres. John F. Kennedy not to invade Cuba in 1961 and opposing Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson's 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic. Though Fulbright voted in favour of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed Johnson to wage war in Vietnam with congressional approval, he later regretted the action. His opposition to the war was set forth in The Arrogance of Power (1967). His committee's televised hearings on U.S. policy toward Vietnam and China gave respectability to antiwar protests. When Fulbright was unseated in the 1974 primary election after his opponent maintained that new blood was needed in Washington, he joined a law firm and worked as a lobbyist. In 1993 Pres. Bill Clinton bestowed the Medal of Freedom on his mentor.

* * *