J. William Fulbright

James William Fulbright (April 9, 1905 – February 9, 1995) was an American politician, academic, and statesman who served as a United States Senator from Arkansas from 1945 until his resignation in 1974. As of 2023, Fulbright is the longest-serving chairman in the history of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. A member of the Democratic Party, he is best known for his strong multilateralist positions on international issues, opposition to American involvement in the Vietnam War, and the creation of the international fellowship program bearing his name, the Fulbright Program.

Fulbright was an admirer of Woodrow Wilson and an avowed anglophile. He was an early advocate for American entry into World War II and aid to Great Britain, first as a college professor and then as an elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives, where he authored the Fulbright Resolution expressing support for international peacekeeping initiatives and American entry into the United Nations.

After joining the Senate, Fulbright expressed support for Europeanism and the formation of a federal European union. He envisioned the Cold War as a struggle between nations – the United States and imperialist Russia – rather than ideologies. He therefore dismissed Asia as a peripheral theater of the conflict, focusing on containment of Soviet expansion into Central and Eastern Europe. He also stressed the possibility of nuclear annihilation, preferring political solutions over military solutions to Soviet aggression. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, his position moderated further to one of détente.

His political stances and powerful position as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee made him one of the most visible critics of American involvement in the Vietnam War. Although he was persuaded by President Lyndon Johnson to sponsor the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, his relationship with the President soured after the 1965 U.S. bombing of Pleiku and Fulbright's opposition to the war in Vietnam took root. Beginning in 1966, he chaired high-profile hearings investigating the conduct and progress of the war, which may have influenced the eventual American withdrawal.

Fulbright was born on April 9, 1905, in Sumner, Missouri, the son of Jay and Roberta (née Waugh) Fulbright. In 1906, the Fulbright family moved to Fayetteville, Arkansas. His mother was a businesswoman, who consolidated her husband's business enterprises and became an influential newspaper publisher, editor, and journalist.

Fulbright's parents enrolled him in the University of Arkansas's College of Education's experimental grammar and secondary school.

Fulbright was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a Democrat in 1942, where he served one term. During this period, he became a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. During World War II, there was much debate about the best way to win the peace after the Allies presumably won the war, with many urging the United States to reject isolationism. In September 1943 the House adopted the Fulbright Resolution, which supported international peacekeeping initiatives and encouraged the United States to participate in what became the United Nations in 1945. That brought Fulbright to national attention.

In 1943, a confidential analysis by Isaiah Berlin of the House and Senate foreign relations committees for the British Foreign Office identified Fulbright as "a distinguished new-comer to the House." It continued:

A young (age 38) wealthy ex-Rhodes scholar, whose major experience so far has been of farming and business. He has already shown versatile competence and ability in business as special attorney in the Anti-Trust Division of the Justice Department and as president of the University of Arkansas. An alert and intelligent member of the committee who recently drew a comparison between the British practice of making grants to her allies and America's World War practice of making loans on fixed financial terms, to show that it was America which had departed from the general international practice in the matter. Fulbright would like to see the United States obtain only non-material benefits from Lend-Lease, namely, political commitments from the countries receiving it, that would enable a system of post-war collective security to be set up. An internationalist.

Fulbright's career in the Senate was somewhat stunted, his tangible influence never matching his public luminescence. For all his seniority and powerful committee posts, he was not considered part of the Senate's inner circle of friends and power brokers. He seemed to prefer it that way: the man who Harry S. Truman had called an "overeducated SOB" was, in the words of Clayton Fritchey, "an individualist and a thinker," whose "intellectualism alone alienates him from the Club" of the Senate.

In his first bid for the Senate, he won the 1944 Democratic primary by besting both incumbent Hattie Carraway, the first woman ever elected to the U.S. Senate, and Homer Adkins, the sitting governor who had fired him from the University of Arkansas. He easily won the general election against the Republican Victor Wade, a common result in the heavily Democratic South of the era. He went on to serve five six-year terms.

He promoted the passage of legislation in 1946 establishing the Fulbright Program of educational grants (Fulbright Fellowships and Fulbright Scholarships), sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States Department of State, governments in other countries, and the private sector. The program was established to increase mutual understanding between the peoples of the United States and other countries through the exchange of persons, knowledge, and skills. It is considered one of the most prestigious award programs and operates in 155 countries.

In November 1946, immediately following the midterm elections in which Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress amidst President Harry S. Truman's plummeting popularity in the polls, Fulbright suggested the President appoint Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI) as his Secretary of State and resign, making Vandenberg president. Truman responded by saying he did not care what Senator "Halfbright" said.

In 1947, Fulbright supported the Truman Doctrine and voted for American aid to Greece. Subsequently, he voted for the Marshall Plan and to join NATO. Fulbright was very supportive of the plans for a federation in Western Europe. Fulbright supported the 1950 plan written by Jean Monnet and presented by French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman for a European Coal and Steel Community, the earliest predecessor to the European Union.

In The Arrogance of Power, Fulbright offered his analysis of American foreign policy:

Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But... when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.

Fulbright also related his opposition to any American tendencies to intervene in the affairs of other nations:

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations – to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work.

He was also a strong believer in international law:

After his retirement, Fulbright practiced international law at the Washington, D.C. office of the law firm Hogan & Hartson from 1975 to 1993. Elizabeth, an effective campaigner and popular figure on the Capitol Hill social scene during her husband's long political career, died on October 5, 1985, after a long illness. On March 10, 1990, Fulbright married Harriet Mayor, a longtime assistant and former executive director of the Fulbright Association, in a ceremony at his home in Washington's Kalorama neighborhood.

On May 5, 1993, President Bill Clinton presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Fulbright at his eighty-eighth birthday celebration from the Fulbright Association.

Fulbright died of a stroke at his Washington, D.C. home on February 9, 1995. He was 89 years old. A year later, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary dinner of the Fulbright Program held June 5, 1996 at the White House, President Bill Clinton said, "Hillary and I have looked forward for some time to celebrating this 50th anniversary of the Fulbright Program, to honor the dream and legacy of a great American, a citizen of the world, a native of my home state and my mentor and friend, Senator Fulbright."

Fulbright's ashes were interred at the Fulbright family plot in Evergreen Cemetery in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

In 1996, The George Washington University renamed a residence hall in his honor. The J. William Fulbright Hall is located 2223 H Street, N.W., at the corner of 23rd and H Streets. It received historic designations as a District of Columbia historic site on January 28, 2010, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 18, 2010.

On October 21, 2002, in a speech at the dedication of the Fulbright Sculpture at the University of Arkansas, fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton said,

I admired him. I liked him. On the occasions when we disagreed, I loved arguing with him. I never loved getting in an argument with anybody as much in my entire life as I loved fighting with Bill Fulbright. I'm quite sure I always lost, and yet he managed to make me think I might have won.

During the removal of monuments during the George Floyd protests, Fulbright's legacy was examined by the University of Arkansas community with respect to an on-campus statue and the name of the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Fulbright was a 1925 alumnus, professor, and university president from 1939 to 1941. A spirited debate discussed his reputation as a racist who defended segregation and signed the Southern Manifesto. Defenders noted his record on international affairs and education, especially the Fulbright Program. One Fulbright biographer who knew Fulbright claimed he was not a racist, but supported segregationist policies expected of a Southern senator at the time, while another biographer summarized Fulbright's legacy as "a political giant in Arkansas, in both good and awful ways". A university panel voted to remove the statue and rename the college, but the University of Arkansas System Board of Trustees (which Fulbright once chaired as UA president) voted to keep both due to a state law requiring Arkansas General Assembly approval to remove monuments.

1950 elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Fulbright, J. William (1947). Heywood, Robert B. (ed.). The Works of the Mind: The Legislater. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. OCLC 752682744.

Fulbright, J. William (1966), The Arrogance of Power, New York: Random House, ISBN 0-8129-9262-8

Fulbright, J. William (1971). The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. New York: Vintage Books.

Fulbright, J. William (1963). Prospects for the West, William L. Clayton Lectures on International Economic Affairs and Foreign Policy. 1962/1963. Harvard University Press.

Fulbright, J. William (1964). Old Myths and New Realities and Other Commentaries. Random House.