The pre-eminent distinguishing characteristic of J.W. Fulbright's career in the Senate was independence -- from presidents, members of the cabinet, fellow senators, the media, even on occasion, his constituents. These are the people whom most senators try to cultivate. Mr. Fulbright was not disdainful of his relations with them, but he never (well, almost never) let those relations get in the way of speaking out for what he believed in, or of criticizing what struck him as mistaken.
While still a freshman senator, Mr. Fulbright provoked President Harry Truman by suggesting that Truman resign after the Republicans won the 1946 congressional elections. Truman dismissed the suggestion as coming from "an over-educated s.o.b." To Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Mr. Fulbright was "Senator Halfbright" for his opposition to what Mr. Fulbright called McCarthy's "swinish blight" and for being the only (repeat, only) senator to vote against funds for McCarthy's witch-hunting investigating committee. To President Lyndon Johnson, Mr. Fulbright was a "nervous Nellie" opposing the Vietnam war.
The list could go on. Even before Mr. Fulbright became chairman of the Foreign Relations committee, he made it emphatically clear to the committee staff that it was to divorce itself from Arkansas. "You leave Arkansas to me!" he said. "You are not even supposed to think about Arkansas. I'll trim on domestic affairs if I have to, to stay in the Senate, but I won't trim on foreign policy." One of the ways he trimmed was his early opposition to civil rights.
A number of people, Arthur Schlesinger prominent among them, have asserted that this kept Mr. Fulbright from becoming secretary of state in the Kennedy administration. Mr. Schlesinger has written that Robert Kennedy advised his brother, the president-elect, that Senator Fulbright's civil-rights record would alienate the Third World. This advice may have been given, but if so, I think it was mistaken.
When I first started traveling around the Third World for the Foreign Relations Committee in the early 1950s, I was surprised to find that the two best-known U.S. senators were J.W. Fulbright and Joseph R. McCarthy. Mr. Fulbright was admired for his sponsorship of the educational exchange program that bears his name. (To the end of his life, this was the accomplishment of which he was proudest.) McCarthy was disliked for his vituperative demagoguery.
It is also a fact that Senator Fulbright sent a message to the president-elect via Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia that he, Mr. Fulbright, did not want to be secretary of state. He thought that could be more helpful to Kennedy in the Senate than in the State Department.
Further, the Fulbright message went on, his most likely successor in the Senate would be Orval Faubus, the governor of Arkansas who had provoked President Eisenhower into sending troops to integrate Little Rock's Central High School.
This was another manifestation of the senator's independence. A secretary of state is not his own man; he is the servant of the president. In Mr. Fulbright's conception of the job, a senator is the servant only of his own conscience.
Years later, after Senator Fulbright was defeated in the Arkansas Democratic primary in 1974, President Ford offered him the ambassadorship to London. Mr. Fulbright had many ties with Great Britain going back to his student days at Oxford. He would have adorned the American embassy, and he would have gotten along well with the British. But he declined, citing his wife's health which was then fragile. However, I thought then, and I still think, that a deeper reason was that he did not want to be in a position where he would receive instructions from the secretary of state in telegrams signed "Kissinger."
Senator Fulbright's celebrated break with President Johnson was initially precipitated, not by Vietnam, but by the Dominican Republic, which was invaded by U.S. troops in the spring of 1965. Extensive investigation and hearings left the Foreign Relations Committee so divided that a committee report seemed out of the question, but Mr. Fulbright felt strongly that the intervention had been a mistake.
In his scheme of things, you could say that a policy was half-baked without being personal; but he knew that Johnson viewed the world through a different prism. Mr. Fulbright was reluctant to destroy what had been a close personal relationship with the president, but he did so.
One reason was his thought that the policy of intervention ought to be debated in public. Another was the thought that liberal Latin Americans ought to be given some evidence that there was dissent to Johnson's policy in the United States government.
The Dominican case opened the first crack in what came to be the yawning credibility gap over Vietnam. If the president is so impetuous and dissembling about the Dominican Republic, Mr. Fulbright wondered, how can he be trusted about Vietnam?
This led naturally to the Foreign Relations Committee's hearings on the war in southeast Asia. These hearings made dissent respectable. The protesters were not just a bunch of scruffy kids. Others who thought the war a nutty idea and who said so before the committee included the president of the Bank of America, a former commandant of the Marine Corps, a retired three-star general, and veterans of the war itself. (One of these, John Kerry of Massachusetts, is now a member of the committee before which he testified then.)
In an era when politics was becoming increasingly driven by polls, J. William Fulbright held with Edmund Burke that a representative owes his constituents his judgment and that he betrays them if he sacrifices his judgment to their opinion. Further, as he said in a 1968 speech, "criticism . . . is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism, a higher form of patriotism, I believe than the familiar rituals of national adulation."
His career defined what a senator ought to be.
Pat M. Holt was a member of the professional staff of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee from 1950 to 1977.