WASHINGTON -- President Clinton yesterday eulogized former Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright, who gave his aspiring protege his first taste of national politics and warned him against the arrogance of power.
Speaking at a well-attended memorial service at the Washington National Cathedral, Mr. Clinton remembered his one-time mentor as a lifelong student and teacher, establishing the scholarship program that bears his name and that gave tens of thousands of students the opportunity to learn about the world beyond America's shores.
"We come to celebrate and give thanks for the remarkable life of J. William Fulbright, a life that changed our country and our world forever, and for the better," Mr. Clinton told the family and friends of the austere and scholarly former senator, who died of a stroke last week at the age of 89.
"In the work he did, the words he spoke and the life he lived, Bill Fulbright stood against the 20th century's most destructive forces and fought to advance its brightest hopes."
Mr. Fulbright represented the president's home state in the House and Senate from 1942 to 1974.
Mr. Clinton recalled Mr. Fulbright's early and lonely opposition to President Lyndon B. Johnson's prosecution of the Vietnam War as personally courageous and politically costly because it pitted him against powerful members of his own party.
But it followed the pattern of the Arkansan's political life, which was marked by speaking out on behalf of the fledgling United Nations and against the spread of the atom bomb and Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts.
"Time and again, for 32 years as a congressman, a senator, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, he worked for progress and peace, often against great odds and sometimes at great personal cost," Mr. Clinton said.
Mr. Clinton, while a student at Georgetown University in the mid-1960s, served as a low-level clerk on Mr. Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee staff at the time that the senator was beginning to speak out against the war in Vietnam.
It was partly because of Mr. Fulbright's example that Mr. Clinton opposed the war and undertook elaborate efforts to avoid serving in the military.
"He lived with passion, tempered by reason. He loved politics, but cautioned against the arrogance of power," the president said.