FULBRIGHT HITS PRESS REPORTS OF SPEECHSS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000200900039-2
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 9
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 17, 1999
• Sequence Number: 39
• Publication Date: May 18, 1966
• Content Type: NSPR

Sanitized - Approved Favor
cpyr44-a18 1966
I Ak I IN I L
P75-0014
? ? pored his criticism when he
Fulbright tilts' said his only important corn-
, plaint about the press is the
'failure sometimes to convey
Press Reports the essence of messages and
not just the parts that lend
themselves to controversy.
Of Speeches have made it clear that my
Fulbright said". . . I hope I
complaint has to do with what
is emphasized not what is crit-
icized.",
The Chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee
said he regretted some of the
things he , said in recent
Central Idea, in Talk
Sometimes Ignored,
Senator Declares ,
united Pram International
Sen. J. William Fulbrigh
(D-Ark.) said yesterday that
the press sometimes ignores
1 idea of his speeches,
Tim into a contro-
versy over a minor observa-
tion.
Fulbright said the press has
a responsibility' to make some
reference to the major theme
of a Senator's speech if not to
actually summarize the conJ,
tents.
"So frequently have some
major newspapers neglected
to do these things that I am
beginning to despair of having
my ideas accurately conveyed
through the press.
"I sometimes find after mak-
ing a speech that my central
,oint or idea has been:ig-
nored and, instead of a dia-
logue developing around some
policy ? suggestion, I find
myself embroiled In o silly,
controVersy oVer some into&
observation Which ,would ?, as
well have been left ottt ,of the
"speech." ? , ? ?'- ?
;In' a speech ttiT the Nationat
sreper.,fle ??nor nreallsr? ef Like
about the tendency ,of power-,
ful nations, of which the Unit-
ed States is the current ex-
ample, to get puffed up about
all the terrific things they
think they ought to be doing
with their power."
Similarly, Fulbright said, he
was not setting himself up as
an authority on the morals and
recreational activities of Amer-
ican soldiers when he talked
about Saigon being a brothel.
"What I. was referring to
was the ihevitable impact pa
' t ot
a fragile A010.. SOO ef W
C
meaning I attached to them ern soldiers of different cul-
but because they lent them- ture,, background, and race,
selves to interpretations I did with plenty of money ,to
not intend." spend,,behaving in a way that
He said his speech on the is to be expected of mem at
"arrogance of power" was not war; men whose daily lives
about the arrogance of any in; are filled with hardship and,
diViduals who hold poweri"but the. dangers of death." ?
, ?
Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149R000200900039-2
lii4-V3R4 17, 19 Aan i ti zed -
The legislative legislative clerk proceeded to call
the roll.
Mr. PASTOR, Mr. President, I ask
unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. With-
out objection, it is so ordered.
-The question is on agreeing to the reso-
lution. The yeas and nays have been
ordered, and the clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. LONG of Louisiana. I announce
that the Senator from New Mexico [Mr.
ANDEssoN], the Senator from Wisconsin
[Mr. NELSON], the Senator from Oregon
[Mrs. isTsussacsa], the Senator from
Connecticut [Mr. Rnucorr], and the
Senator from New Jersey [Mr. WIL-
LIAMS], are absent on official business.
I also announce that the Senator from
Connecticut [Mr. DOD)], the Senator
from Illinois [Mr. DOUGLAS], the Senator
from Mississippi [Mr. EASTLAND] the
Senator from Ohio [1*. LAuscnsl, t
Senator from Montana [Mr. MANSFI
the Senator from Wyoming [M c-
GEE], and the Senator from Sout aro-
lino, [Mr. Russni], are necessarily ab-
sent.
I further announce that, if present and
voting, the Senator from New Mexico
[Mr, ANDERSON], the Senator from Con-
necticut [Mr. Dun], the Senator from
Illinois [Mr. DOUGLAS], the Senator from
Ohio [Mr. LAuscns], the Senator from
Montana [Mr. MANSFIELD], the Senator
from Wyoming [Mr. McGzz], the Sena-
tor from. Wisconsin [Mr. NELSON], the
Senator from Oregon [Mrs. NEUBERGER],
the Senator from Connecticut [Mr. Rnu-
corr], the Senator from South Carolina
[Mr. RUSSELL], and the Senator from
New Jersey [Mr. WILLIAMS], would each
vote "yea."
Mr. KUCHEL. I announce that the
Senator from Illinois [Mr, DIRKSEN] is
absent because of illness.
The Senator from Nebraska [Mr.
HausicA] , the Senator from Pennsylvania
[Mr. Scowl, and the Senator from Texas
- [Mr. TOWER] are necessarily absent.
If present and voting, the Senator
From Illinois [Mr. DirtasEN], the Senator
from Nebraska [Mr. HsusTKA1, the Sen-
ator from Pennsylvania [Mr. SCOTT], and
the Senator from Texas [Mr. Town.]
would each vote "yea."
The result was announced?yeas 84,
nays 0, as follows:
[No. 76 Leg.]
Aiken
Allott
Bartlett
Bass
Bayh
Bennett
Bible
Boggs
Brewster
Burdick
Byrd, Va.
Byrd, W. Va.
Cannon
Carlson.
Case
C'hurch
Clark
Cooper
Cotton
Curtis
Dominick
L'heiader,
Ervin
Pan nin
Fong
YEAS-84
Fulbright 11/Lantyre
Gore Metcalf
Griffin Miller
Gruening Mondale
Harris Monroney
Hart Montoya
Hartke Morse
Hayden Morton
Hickenlooper Moss
Hill Mundt
Holland Murphy
Inouye Muskie
Jackson Pastore
Javits Pearson
Jordan,.N.C. Pell
Jordan, Idaho Prouty
Kennedy, Mass: Proxmire
Kennedy, N.Y. Randolp
Kuchel Roberts?
1.prig, Mo. Russell, G
Long, La. Saltenstall
Magnuson Simpson -
McCarthy Smothers
McClellan Smith
McGovern Sparkman
Stennis
Symington
Talmadge
Anderson
Dirksen.
Dodd
Douglas
Eastland
Hruska
Thurmond
Tydlngs
Williams, Del.
NAYS-0
NOT VOTING-16
Lausche Russell, S.C.
Mansfield Scott
McGee Tower
Nelson Williams, N.J.
Neuberger
Ribicoff
Yarborough
Young, N.
Young, 0
So the resolution (S. Res. 179) was
agreed to, as follows:
Resolved, That the Senate commends the
President's serious and urgent efforts to ne-
gotiate international agreements limiting the
spread of nuclear weapons and supports the
principle of additional efforts by the Presi-
dent which are appropriate and necessary in
the interest of peace for the solution of nu-
clear prolifer s problems.
The mble was agreed to.
THE ARROGANCE OF POWER
, ..
11/17-TfM.?1 _IIMY. President; on
....Ni
May 5, 4ena-tor?Filisnoirr elivered the
third ortire- Unnsilan -13 rter lectures
at the School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins University, en-
titled "The Arrogance of Power." On
May 10 Senator FULBRIGHT addressed a
convocation sponsored by the Center for
Democratic Institutions at Los Angeles
on the subject "The University and
American Foreign Policy." -
There has been a good deal of discus-
sion and of editorial comment about
these speeches. I am sure that the Sen-
ator from Arkansas did not expect that
everyone would accept his analysis with-
out any reservations or all the applica-
tions of his views to contemporary for-
eign policy. I do believe that he has
raised a number of issues and questions
which deserve the kind of discussion and
debate necessary to have well informed
citizens in democratic government. In
one of his speeches Senator FULBRIGHT
stated:
I am not convinced that either the govern-
ment or the universities are making the
best possible use of their intellectual re-
sources to deal with the problems of war
and peace in the nuclear age.
The kind of critical challenges he has
been raising can be most helpful in mov-
ing us to make this intellectual effort.
I ask unanimous consent that these
speeches be printed at this point in the
RECORD. I also ask unanimous consent
that the article about Senator FULBRIGHT
which appeared in Life magazine in May
also be printed in the RECORD, since it
provides an insight into his scholarly
and reflective approach to problems and
to his character and convictions.
There being no objection, the speeches
and the article were ordered to be print-
ed in the RECORD, as follows:
THE UNIVERSITY AND AMERICAN FOREIGN
POLICY
(Speech given by Senator J. W. FULEIRIGHT
on Tuesday, May 10, 1966, at a convocation
sponsored by the Center for Democratic
Institutions, Los Angeles, Calif.)
The prospect of death, which used to be a
matter for individual contemplation, has
become in our generation a problem for the
human race. The situation to which we
have come is not a unique one in nature;
Other forms of life have been threatened
491z601)2606601
- _
with extinction or become extinct when
they could not adapt to radical changes in
their environments. What is unique for
man is that the change of environment which
threatens his species was not the work of
mindless forces of nature but the result of
his own creative genius. Unlike other forms
of life' which have faced the danger of ex-
tinction, we have had some choice in the
matter, a fact which tells as much about
man's folly as it does about his inventive-
ness. Having chosen to create the condi-
tions for our own collective death, however,
we at least retain some choice about whether
it is actually going to happen.
It is hard to believe in the destruction of
the human race. Because we have managed
to avoid a holocaust since the invention of
nuclear weapons twenty years ago, the
danger of its occurrence now seems remote,
like Judgment Day, and references to it have
become so frequent and familiar as to lose
their meaning; the prospect of our disap-
pearance from the earth has become a cliche,
even something of a bore. It is a fine thing
of course that the hydrogen bomb hasn't
educed us all to nervous wrecks, but it is
fine thing that, finding the threat in-
credible, we act as though it did not exist
and go an conducting international relations
in the traditional manner, which is to say,
in a manner- that does little if anything to
reduce the possibility of a catastrophe.
I am not convinced that either the govern-
ment or the universities are making the best
possible use of their intellectual resources
to deal with the problems of war and peace
in the nuclear age. Both seem by and large
to have accepted the idea that the avoidance
of nuclear war is a matter of skillful "crisis
management," as though the techniques of
diplomacy and deterrence which have gotten
us through the last twenty years have only
to be improved upon to get us through the
next twenty or a hundred or a thousand
years.
The law of averages has already been more
than kind to us and we have had some very
close calls, notably in October 1962. We es-
caped a nuclear war at the time of the Cuban
missile affair because of President Kennedy's
skillful "crisis management" and Premier
Khrushchev's prudent response to it; surely
we cannot count on the indefinite survival
of the human race if it must depend on an
indefinite number of repetitions of that sort
of encounter. Sooner or later, the law of
averages will turn against us; an extremist
or incompetent will come to power in one
major country or another, or a misjudgment
will be made by some perfectly competent
official, or things will just get out of hand
without anyone being precisely responsible
as happened in 1914. None of us, however?
professors, bureaucrats or politicians?has
yet undertaken a serious and concerted ef-
fort to put the survival of our species on
some more solid foundation than an unend-
ing series of narrow escapes.
What we must do, in the words of Brock
Chisholm, a distinguished psychiatrist and
former Director-General of the World Health
Organization, is nothing less than "to re-
examine all of the attitudes of our ancestors
and to select from those attitudes things
which we, on our own authority in these
present circumstances, with our knowledge,
recognize as still valid in this new kind of
world."
I regret that I do not have a definite plan
for the execution of so considerable a proj-
ect, but I have an idea as to who must ac-
cept the principal responsibility for it:
clearly, the universities. I agree with Dr.
Chisholm, who writes: "I think every uni-
versity has an obligation to consider whether
its teaching is in fact universal. Does it
open all possible channels of knowledge to
its students? Does it teach things in true
perspective to each other? Does it take the
same attitudes about other cultures as it
Approved For Release: CIA-RDP75-00149R000200900039-2
02 COIsTGRESSIONAL RECORD -- SENATE
soldiera wilt's, will pay Mat;
tlefaras -tai-thent complaint; that as a
a f ortSe 'Ainerican influx; bar girls, pros-
tittfteS,: pips, bar owners and taxi drivers
leave 'tar: to the higher levels of the eco-
istatalc pyramid; itsat mlddl?lass Viet-
mainese families have difficulty renting homes
lbeoatiSe Americans have driven up the rent
beyenct their reach and some Vietnamese
ifemilfee liaare actually been evicted from
ihotises and apartments by landlords who
prefer to rent to the affluent Americans; that
Vietnamese civil servants, junior army ?M-
IMS and enlisted men are unable to support
their families because of the inflation gen-
erated 1?y American spending and the Ptua
ffilasing power of the G.I.'s.11
the SecsetarY of Defense recently reported.
'with pride that his Department is providing
9.2 pounds of goods a day for each G.I. for
;sale in the 13.X.'s; what the Secretary ne-
glected to point out was that these vast
quantities of consumer goods are the major
source Of supply for the thriving Vietnamese
black anarket. it is reported that 30 thou-
sand 'cans of hair spray were sent to Vietnani
In March of 1966; since it is unlikely that
the American fighting men are major con-
earners of hair spray. it seems reasonable
to-suPpose that this nein has found its way
to the bleak market.
One Vietnamese explained to the New York
Times repor whom I mentioned that "Any
?time legions of prosperous white men descend
cm' a rtalimentary Asian society, you are
bound to have trouble." Another said: "We
Vietnamese are somewhat xenophobe. We
don't like foreigners, any kind of foreigners,
so that you -shouldn't be surprised that we
don't like you." 12
Sincere though it is, the American effort
to build the foundations Of freedom in South
Vietnam may thus have an effect quite dif-
ferent from the one intended. "All this
struggling and striving to make the world
better is a great mistake;" said Bernard
Shaw, "not because it isn't a good thing to
imprcive the World if you know how to do it,
but because striving and struggling is the
Worst way you could set about doing any-
thing." 13
One wonders as well how much our com-
mitment to Vietnamese freedom is also a
opmmitment to American pride. The two,
I think, have become part of the same pack-
age. When we talk about the freedom of
South Vietnam, we may be thinking about
laow disagreeable it would. be to accept a
elution short of victory; we may be think-
ing about how our pride would be injured
if we settled for less than we set out to
"achieve; we may be thinking about our
reputation as a great power, as though a
coMpronlise settlement would shame us be-
fore the world, marking us as a second rate
people with flagging courage and determina-
tion.
Such fears are as nonsensical as their op-
posite, which is the presumption of a uni-
versal mission. They are simply unworthy
of the richest, most powerful, most produc-
tive and best educated people in the world.
One can understand an uncompromising at-
titude on the part of such countries as China
or France; both have been stricken low in
'this century and arrogance may be helpful
to them in recovering their pride. It is much
leas comprehensible on the part of the
United States, a nation whose modern his-
tory has been an almost uninterrupted
chronicle of success, a nation which by
=Ow should be so sane of its own power as to
'be capable of magnanimity, a nation which
"-Neil Sheehan, "Anti-Americanism Grows
in Vietnam,' The New York Times, April 24,
1966, p. 3.
"George Bernard Shaw, Cashel Byron's
Profession (1886) Ch. 6.
by now should he able to act on the proposi-
tion, as expressed by George Kennan, that
"there is more respect to be won in the
opinion of the world by a resolute and cour-
ageous liquidation of unsound positions
than in the most stubborn pursuit of ex-
travagant or unpromising objectives.""
The cause of our difficulties in 'southeast
Asia Is not a deficiency of power but an
excess of the wrong kind of power which re-
sults in a feeling of importance when it
fails to achieve its desired ends. We are still
acting like boy scouts dragging reluatant
old ladles across the streets they do not want
to cross. 'We are trying to remake Viet-
namese society, a task which certainly can-
not be accomplished by force and which
probably cannot be accomplished by any
means 'available to outsiders. The objective
may be desirable, but it is not feasible.
There is wisdom if also malice in Prince
Sihanouk's comparison of American and
Chinese aid. "You will nate the difference in
the ways of giving," he writes. "On one side
we are being humiliated, we are given a
lecture, we are required to give something
in return. On the other side, not only is
our dignity as poor people being preserved,
but our self-esteem is being flattered?and
human beings have their weaknesses, and it
would be futile to try to eradicate [them]." 16
Or, as Shaw said: "Religion is a great force?
the only real motive force in the world; but
what you fellows don't understand is that
you must get at a man through his own re-
ligion and not through yours." 16
The idea of being responsible for the whole
world seems to be flattering to Americans
and I am afraid it is turning our heads, just
as the sense of global responsibility turned
the heads of ancient Romans and nineteenth
century British. A prominent American is
credited with having said recently that the
United States was the "engine of mankind"
and the rest of the world was "the train." 11
A British political writer wrote last summer
what he called "A Cheer for American Im-
perialism." An empire, he said, "has no
justification except its own existence." It
must never contract; it "wastes treasure and
life;" its commitments "are without rhyme
or reason." Nonetheless, according to the
author, the "American empire" is uniquely
benevolent, devoted as it is to individual
liberty and the rule of law, and having per-
formed such services as getting the author
released from a Yugoslav jail simply by his
threatening to involve the American consul,
a service which he describes as "sublime." "
What romantic nonsense this is. And what
dangerous nonsense in this age of nuclear
weapons. The idea of an "American empire"
might be dismissed as the arrant imagining
of a British Gunge Din except for the fact
that it surely strikes a responsive chord in
14 George F. Kennan, "Supplemental For-
eign Assistance Fiscal Year 1966?Vietnam,"
Hearings before the Committee on Foreign
Relations, United States Senate, 89th Con-
gress, 2nd Session on S. 2793, Part 1 (Wash-
ington: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1900), p. 335.
'6 Norodom Sihanouk, "The Failure of the
United States in the 'Third World'?Seen.
Through the Lesson of Cambodia." Re-
printed in Congressional Record, September
28, 1965, p. 24413.
George Bernard Shaw, Getting Married
(1911).
" McGeorge Bundy is said to have said that
in an interview with Henry F. Graff, Professor
of History at Columbia University, who re-
ported it in "How Johnson Makes Foreign
Policy," New York Times Magazine., July 4,
1965, p. 17.
"Henry Fairlie, writer for The Spectator
and The Daily Telegraph of London, in "A
Cheer for American Imperialism," New York
Times Magazine, July 11, 1965.
May 17, .066
at least a corner of the usually sensible and
humane Americana-111nd. It calls to mind the
slogans of the past about the shot fired at
Concord being heard round the world, about
"manifest destiny" and "making the world
safe for democracy" and the demand for
"unconditional -surrender" in World War II.
It calls to mind President McKinley taking
counsel with the Supreme Being about his
duty to the benighted Filipinos.
The "Blessings-of-Civilization Trust," as
Mark Twain called it, may have been a
"Daisy" in its day, uplifting for the soul and
good for business besides, but its day is past.
It is past because the great majority of the
human race are demanding dignity and in-
dependence not the honor of a supine role
In an American empire. It is past because
whatever claim America may make for the
universal domain of its ideas and values is
countered by the communist counter-claim,
armed like our own with nuclear weapons.
And, most of all, it is past because it never
should have begun, because we are not the
"engine of mankind" but only one of its more
successful and fortunate branches, endowed
by our Creator with about the same capacity
for good and evil, no more or less, than the
rest of humanity.
An excessive preoccupation with foreign re-
lations over a long period of time is a prob-
lem of great importance because it diverts a
nation from the sources of its strength, which
are in its domestic life. A nation immersed
in foreign affairs is expending its capital, hu-
man as well as material; sooner or later that
capital must be renewed by some diversion of
creative energies from foreign to domestic
pursuits. I would doubt that any nation has
achieved a durable greatness by conducting
a "strong" foreign policy, but many have
been ruined by expending their energies on
foreign adventures while allowing their do-
mestic bases to deteriorate. The United
States emerged as a world power in the
twentieth century not because of what it had
done in foreign relations but because it had.
spent the nineteenth century developing the
North American continent; by contrast, the
Austrian and Turkish empires collapsed in
the twentieth century in large part because
they had for so long neglected their internal
development and organization.
If America has a service to perform in the
world?and I believe it has?it is in large part
the service of its own example. In our ex-
cessive involvement in the affairs of other
countries, we are not only living off our assets
and denying our own people the proper en-
joyment of their resources; we are also deny-
ing the world the example of a free society
enjoying its freedom to the fullest. This is
regrettable indeed for a nation that aspires
to teach democracy to other nations, because,
as Burke said, "Example is the school of man-
kind, and they will learn at no other." "
There is of course nothing new about
the inversion of values which leads nations
squander their resources on fruitless and
extravagant foreign undertakings. What
is new is the power of man to destroy his
species, which has made the struggles of
international politics dangerous as they have
never been before and confronted us, as Dr.
Chisholm says, with the need to reexamine
the attitudes of our ancestors so as to dis-
card those that have ceased to be valid.
Somehow, therefore, if we are to save our-
selves, we must find in ourselves the judg-
ment and the will to change the nature
of international politics in order to make
it at once less dangerous to mankind and
more beneficial to individual men. Without
deceiving ourselves as to the difficulty of the
task, we must try to develop a new capacity
for creative political action. We must rec-
" Edmund Burke, "On a Regicide Peace,"
(1796).
Sanitized Approved For Release : CIA-RDF'75-00149R000200900039-2
MaY .17, 19ginitized - Appmmigaggi*Dascoailk-ROWA01-49R000 '2009000314M
ognt2e, first of all, that the ultimate source
of ,irar and peace lies in human nature, that
the study of politics, therefore, is the study
of man, and that if politics is ever to acquire
? new character; the change will not be
wrought in computers but through a better
understanding of the needs and fears of the
human individual.
It is a curious thing that in an era
when interdisciplinary studies are favored
in the universities little, so far as I know,
has been done to apply the insights of in-
dividual and social psychology to the study
of international relations.
It would be interesting?to raise one of
many possible questions?to see what could
be learned about the psychological roots of
ideology: to what extent are ideological
beliefs the result of a valid and disinterested
intellectual process and to what extent are
Sanitized - ApprayRafmkgRistucCeplitoRDwAoity49R000204,R92796d
,the ,light of these profound cultural dif-
xences, ehafi We,. in 1Vlark Twain's wards,
on, Conferring our Civilization upon the
toplee. that Sit in darkness, or shall we give
e
poor things a rest?"'n
'ere are, r think, some limited positive
,ethi which' the United States might take to-
rd improved relations with China. It
-WOUld a. the United States no harm in the
-
short run and perhaps considerable good in
the long run to end our opposition to the
Seating of Communist China, in the United
1lation.s and, depending on events, to follow
that up with some positive suggestions for
more normal relations. The United States
has already proposed visits by scholars and
kieWspapermen between China and the United
States, and, _although these proposals have
been rejected by the Chinese, it might be well,
though not too often and not too eagerly, to
reteind them of the offer from time to time,
In proposing these and other initiatives to
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as
major components in a policy of "without
containment isolation," Professor Doak Bar-
hett made the point that "In taking these
steps, we will have to do so in full recognition
Of the fact that Peking's initial reaction is al-
most certain to be negative and hostile and
that any changes in our "posture will create
some new problems. But we should take
them nevertheless, because initiatives on our
part are clearly required if we are to work,
however slowly, toward the long term goal of
a. more stable, less explosive situation in Asia
and 'to explore the possibilities of trying to
Moderate Peking's policies." 24
The point of such a new approach to China,
Writes Professor Fairbank, is psychological:
"Peking is, to say the least, maladjusted,
rebellious against the whole outer world.
Russia as well as America. We are Peking's
principal enemy because we happen now to be
the biggest outside power trying to foster
world stability. But do we have to play
Mao's game? Must we carry the whole bur-
den of resisting Peking's pretensions? Why
not let others in on the job?
"A Communist China seated in the UN,"
Fairbank continues, "Could no longer pose
as a martyr excluded by `American imperial-
ism,' She would have to face the self-inter-
est of other countries, and learn to act as a
full member of international society for the
first time in history. This is the only way
for China to grow up and eventually accept
restraints on her revolutionary ardor." wi
'The 'most difficult and dangerous of issues
between the United States and China is the
COnfrontation of their power in southeast
Aida, an issue which, because of its explosive
pcissibilities, Cannot be consigned to the heal-
ing 'effects of time. I have suggested in re-
cent Statements how I think this issue might
be resolved by an agreement for the neutral-
ization of Vietnam under the guarantee of
the great powers, and I will not repeat the
specifications of my proposal tonight.
,Should it be possible to end the Viet-
namese war on the basis of an agreement for
the neutralization of southeast Asia, it
Would then be possible to concentrate with
real hope of success on the long difficult task
of introducing some trust into relations be-
tween China and the West, of repairing his-
tory's ravages and bringing the great
Chinese nation into its proper role as a re-
spected member of the international com-
munity. In time it might even be possible
for the Chinese and Taiwanese on their own
to work out some arrangement for Taiwan
that Would not do too much damage either
3-, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness,"
from' Europe and Elsewhere.
Statement of Professor A. Doak Barnett
before the United States Senate Foreign Re-
lations Committee, March 8, 1960, pp. 2,
13-15;
'Pa-John l. Pairbank, 'How to Deal with the
Chi42,1nese Revolution," ibicZ, p 16.
to the concept of self-determination or to the
Chinese concept of China's cultural indivisi-
bility?perhaps some sort of an arrangement
for Taiwanese self-government under nomi-
nal Chinese suzerainty. But that would be
for them to decide.
All this is not, as has been suggested, a
matter of "being kind to China." It is a
matter of altering that fatal expectancy
which is leading two great nations toward
a tragic and unnecessary war. If it involves
"being kind to China," those who are re-
pelled by that thought may take some small
comfort in the fact that it also involves
"being kind to America."
On November 14, 1860, Alexander Hamil-
ton Stephens, who subsequently became
Vice-President of the Southern Confederacy,
delivered an address to the Georgia Legisla-
ture in which he appealed to his colleagues
to delay the secession of Georgia from the
Union. "It may be," he said, "that out of it
we may become greater and more prosper-
ous, but I am candid and sincere in telling
you that I fear if we yield to passion and
without sufficient cause shall take that step,
that instead_ of becoming greater or more
peaceful, 'prosperous and happy?instead of
becoming Gods, we will become demons, and
at no distant, day commence cutting one an-
other's throats. This is my apprehension.
Let us, therefore, whatever we do, meet these
difficulties, great as they are, like wise and
sensible men, 'and consider them in the light
of all the consequences which may attend
our action." Ze
What a tragedy it is that the South did
not accept Stephens' advice in 1860. What
a blessing it would be if, faced with the
danger of a war with China, we did accept
It today.
In its relations with China, as indeed in
its relations with all of the revolutionary
or potentially revolutionary' societies of the
world, America has an opportunity to per-
form services of which no great nation has
ever before been capable. To do so we
must acquire wisdom to match our power
and humility to match our pride. Perhaps
the single word above all others that ex-
presses America's need is "empathy," which
Webster defines as the "Imaginative projec-
tion of one's own consciousness into an-
other being."
There are many respects in which Amer-
ica, if it can bring itself to act with the
magnanimity and the empathy appropriate
to its size and power, can be an intelligent
example to the world. We have the oppor-
tunity to set an example of generous under-
standing in our relations with China, of
practical cooperation for peace in our rela-
tions with Russia, of reliable and respectful
partnership in our relations with Western
Europe, of material helfulness without moral
presumption in our relations with the de-
veloping nations, of abstention from the
temptations of hegemony in our relations
with Latin America, and of the all-around
advantages of minding one's own business
In our relations with everybody. Most of all,
we have the opportunity to serve as an ex-
ample of democracy to the world by the way
In which we run our own society; America,
In the words of John Quincy Adams, should
be "the well-wisher to the freedom and in-
dependence of all" but "the champion and
vindicator only of her own." 2T
If we can bring ourselves so to act, we
will have overcome the dangers of the arro-
gance of power. It will involve, no doubt,
the loss of certain glories, but that seems
a price worth paying for the probable re-
wards, which are the happiness of America
and the peace of the world.
26Alexander Hamilton Stephens, "Seces-
sion," in Modern Eloquence (New York: P.
P. Collier & Sons, 1928), Vol. n, p. 208.
2' John Quincy Adams, July 4, 1821, Wash-
ington, D.C. Reported in National Intelli-
gencer, July 11, 1821.
[From Life magazine, May 13, 1966]
THE ROOTS Or THE ARILANSAS QUESTIONER
(By Brock Brower)
It's hard any longer to catch the flash of
sweet-water Ozark crik that runs through
Senator J. WILLIAM FULDRIGHT'S stony elo-
quence. Mostly, these days, he's keeping to
dry, somber, history-minded warnings
against the "fatal presumption" that, he
fears, could lead America, via Vietnam, to
become "what it is not now and never has
been, a seeker after unlimited power and
empire."
All this, like as not, in the formal rhetoric
of white tie and tails. Even when he does
take an incidental turn as a plain Arkansas
country boy, everybody claims to know bet-
ter than to believe this. They count him
riph enough back home, smart enough all
around the rest of the world, and long
enough in the U.S. Senate-21 years?to
have got over -any of that he ever had in him.
The countrification is purely for emphasis
now, just his way of shooting an extra-hard
public look over the top of his tinted glasses
at the store-bought Vietnam and China poli-
cies of that other hillbilly, Dean Rusk.
Otherwise, according to those who see him
as the only temperate and credible public
critic of a whole series of Administration po-
sitions, Senator FULBRIGHT belongs at this
critical moment not to Arkansas but to world
opinion. The silly mistake too many of these
intellectual admirers of his make?even as
they put him atop a kind of opposing sum-
mit of American foreign policy?is to think
it's some kind of secret burden for him to
have come from Arkansas at all.
"They think Arkansas and the South are
millstones around his neck, says one north-
ern urban liberal, who has found out differ-
ently since going to work for his hero on the
Foreign Relations Committee staff, "but
they're wrong. He knows his roots."
In fact, there is an underlying parochial-
ism in the senator's harshest arguments
against the U.S. involvement in Southeast
Asia. Vietnam to him is "this god-forsaken,
little country" for which any Arkansas trav-
eler, remembering some of the dragged-down
patches of the Ozarks, could only feel sym-
pathy if he ever stumbled across it.
"I wonder why these people are so dedi-
cated?" he asks rhetorically about the Viet-
cong. "Why do these people do this? How
do they come by their fanaticism? Well,
coming from the South, with all its memor-
ies of Reconstruction, I think I can under-
stand. They've been put upon, and it makes
them so fanatical they'll fight down to the
last man."
It's an attitude he can see people taking
down in his own mountain corner, of Ar-
kansas, a place never so far from his mind
as some would like to have it; a place, in
fact, where he went to live at one earlier
time in his life when he left a job in Wash-
ington, D.C. and spent seven apolitical years,
teaching law part time and living on an
isolated hill farm called Rabbit's Foot Lodge.
"It was a curious hybrid," he admits, prob-
ably the closest thing there'll ever be to an
Ozark teahouse. It was built rustic enough,
out of a,dzed logs and clay calking, with lots
of wide porches all around. But whoever
put it up had clearly been to Chine and,
from down below the spring, looking back
up at the muley roolline, it didn't take much
of an eye to see it was practically a damn
pagoda. For a man who hates even the
noise of his wife's snow tires, that Oriental
log cabin offered just about the right amount
of peace and quiet. In the midst of the
acrimonious hearings over Vietnam?with
much of the uproar centering around his own
vigorous dissent from the Administration's
handling of the war?Senator FULBRIGHT
didn't mind thinking an occasional long
thought about what it used to be like down
Sanitized Approved For Release: CIA-RDP75-00149R000200900039-2
'Maj
17, mgenitized - Apa5stmigsgegRMtochk:_RAIRT7A51.90149R00000900031gt
there, with no politics "to take time and
energy away from the substance of things."
"It's very serene country," he says, brood-
ing a little. He went there to live in 1936,
bored with life in the capital as a Justice
Department antitrust lawyer. His wife
Betty was with him, very far from her own
Republican upbringing on Philadelphia's
Main Line. "It was just like taking a
squirrel who's been in a cage all its life and
letting it out in the fresh air. You know
that Main Line life? It's ba-ronial!" The
squirrel got loose with a pat of paint and
had the whole inside of Rabbit's Foot Lodge
done over in Colonial White instead of leav-
ing it Mountain Dark, but other than that
and kicking all the roupy chickens out of
the cellar Betty managed to fit right in with
local ways?a handsome, sophisticated
woman Who could still be "just as plain
as pig tracks" with anybody she happened to
meet.
BILL FULBRIGHT wasn't doing much besides
teaching at the University of Arkansas, scene
of his former glory as a Ra.zorback halfback,
a few miles away in a little Ozark town called
Fayetteville that his family a-quarter-to-a-
half owned, He loved teaching and the life
at the university; and when the trustees
suddenly decided to make him president at
the tender age of 34, he felt pretty well
settled. He could even stay right on out at
Rabbit's Foot Lodge because the university
didn't have any official manse to house its
president back then.
The only one who thought to worry about
there way out there was Betty's mother.
When she opened up her Philadelphia In-
quirer one morning and saw pictures of bales
of cotton floating around in the Arkansas
floods of 1938, she wired her daughter:
hadn't she "better come north immediately
and bring the two children." Betty wired
back that the floods were as yet 1,700 feet
below them and still 300 miles away. And
when a hurricane struck New England later
that year, they telegraphed her mother:
hadn't she better come clown to Arkansas
to avoid being hit by a falling elm tree?
That's the way they go about keeping
everybody up-to-date and informed down
in Arkansas. With a needling kind of
courtesy. In fact, nobody's ever going to
settle for a simple, straight answer as long as
there's time to work ene up into a little more
elaborative shape. The senator often goes
to work in that same way at committee
hearings, politely needling the witness in
order to elicit the fullest sort of disclosure.
He doesn't, for instance, just want to find
out what prospects were for free elections in
Vietnam in 1956. "Now [the chances] have
always been poor, and will be for a hundred
years, won't they?" he gently prods Dean
Rusk. "That was not news to you. . . .
Have they ever had them in 2,000 years of
history?" And possibly one of the senator's
annoyances with Dean Rusk is that the
Secretary keeps giving him the same, simple,
straight answers?which somehow fail to
satisfy FULBRIGHT'S Own deep doubts about
the nature of the war?and won't even try
to put his replies into any more instructive
form. But the senator can sympathize with
the Secretary of State: "It's a hell of a job."
In late 1960, when there was loose talk
around that FULBRIGHT might be picked for
Secretary of State in Kennedy's cabinet, the
possibility thoroughly distressed him: ''It's
not my dish of tea. I'd hate the protocol,
and I'd be damned uncomfortable getting up
and giving speeches with which I didn't
agree. The poor fella in that job never has
time to think for himself."
None of the kind of time for reflection
'that existed out at Rabbit's Foot Lodge,
Where the steps down to the spring are too
step to be taken any more than one at a
time, "That water was so clear and cold,"
he, likes to remember, He didn't have a
single political connection, beyond the co-
incidental fact that his local congressman,
Clyde T." Ellis, had been corning to his classes
to pick up a little constitutional law. "I
had no idea I'd ever be in politics," he in-
sists. "I sometimes wonder what would've
happened if Mother hadn't written that
editorial.
"Oh, I don't mean I ponder over it all that
much," he says, quickly dismissing that kind
of bootless speculation. Nobody else should
give it too much thought either, except just
enough to keep in mind that, despite a quar-
ter century in public life, Senator FULBRIGHT
is essentially a private man manqu?More
than any other senator, he comes forward
to address himself to issues from the privacy
of his own thoughts, and promptly returns
there as soon as his opinion has been offered.
Not that he doesn't enjoy the measure of po-
litical prominence that is his as chairman
of the Foreign Relations Committee?always
mueh in the headlines after another mum-
bled, seminal speech on the Senate floor, and
often seen around social Washington with
his wife, who dutifully mends the holes in
his protocol. But, as one of his aides ex-
plains the difference between him and most
senators: "When he's busy, he's busy behind
a closed door."
He is an anomaly, especially in gregarious
Southern politics, a man of intellect, almost
a seminarian, pursuing an aloof career as an
often dissident public counselor?he's been
called "the Walter Lippmann of the Sen-
ate"?with no more real political base than
perhaps those few capricious jottings in his
mother's newspaper long ago.
Mrs. Roberta Fulbright, an old school-
teacher herself, was the kind of woman who
makes the local Rotarians wonder how far
she might've gone if she'd ever been a man?
only they wonder right out loud and proudly,
pleased to see the local library and a univers-
ity dormitory named for her. Back in 1906
her husband, Jay Fulbright, got the family
off the farm in Missouri by setting up his
first little, two-person bank in Arkansas and
thereafter pushed the Fulbrights' fortunes to
an estimable point. But, in 1923, he died
suddenly, leaving Mrs. Fulbright with six off-
spring; Brix, FULBRIGHT, their fourth child,
was 18 at the time.
"We came very damn close to going to the
poorhouse," FULBRIGHT says, exaggerating
some, "but she managed to salvage enough
of a nest egg to start over again." That is,
she let go the bank stock but kept the lum-
ber business, the Coca-Cola bottling plant,
a lot of real estate and a few other Ful-
bright Enterprises?including a newspaper.
Eventually she accumulated enough leverage
to clean up the whole county once?but
good, throwing out a corrupt courthouse
gang and dragging her own man, Buck Lewis,
with his big horse pistol, down to Little
Rock to get him appointed sheriff.
"But her one big love, besides her family,"
says FULBRIGHT, "was that newspaper." It's
now the Northwest Arkansas Times, and
turning a tidy penny. But back then it was
The Democrat, a sorry investment, mostly
useful for printing the columns Mother Ful-
bright scribbled together after nobody in
the family was left awake to talk to her any-
more. ("She loved to talk, God, she
loved to talk! She'd wear us out, staying
up at night.") She'd write until 3 o'clock
in the morning about anything from cooking
to politics, or sometimes both at once: "Our
politics remind me of the pies the mountain
girl had. She asked the guests, Will you
have kivered, unkivered or crossbar?' All
apple. Now that's what we have?kivered,
unkivered and crossbar politics, all Demo-
crats." And so Mother Fulbright wrote a
thing or two about a Democrat named Homer
Adkins. In fact, right after Adkins' trium-
phant election as governor in 1940, she wrote
that the people of Arkansas had just traded
a statesmen Governor Car Baily, for a glad-
handcr and a backslapper.
GoVernor Adkins returned the compliment
by stacking the university board of trustees
high enough to have her son fired as pres-
ident. So then Congressman Ellis came up
to his ex-law professor, almost like it was
after class, and said since he, Ellis, was going
to announce for U.S. senator next Staturday,
"you ought to run for my place."
"I'd have never dreamed of it," says Fur.-
amour. "I hadn't even been in three of the
10 counties in all my life." But he was
pretty much at loose ends, so he got around
to those last three counties before Saturday
and carried all 10 in the fall of 1942 to win
the House seat. And when Governor Adkins
decided to run for U.S. senator in 1944, so did
Congressman FULBRIGHT; and he beat Adkins,
and three other candidates?kivered, unkiv-
ered and crossbar,
"Homer Adkins," his mother wrote as her
final word against her old enemy, imitating
his bad grammar, "has came and went."
And her son has now been and gone to the
Senate for four terms, not so much a political
success as an outsized civic achievement for
which the whole state of Arkansas feels it
can humbly take a worldwide bow: "He's just
as smart as $700." "He's known in every
corner of the world." "Who the hell'd've ever
dreamed we'd have an international scholar
from Arkansas?" "He's an institution. Peo-
ple don't vote against institutions."
"You can beat him," an adviser once told
Governor Orval Faubus, who was eager to
try in 1962, and might be even more ready
in 1968, "if you can get him down off that
cloud they got him on."
He's lucky, too, to have that cloud under
him, because he really has little taste for the
gritty, down-to-earth politicking it normally
takes to survive at home and conquer in
Washington. He doesn't chew cut with the
snuff-dippers back in Arkansas, but he's
never been a member of the inner "club" in
the Senate?nor much wanted to be?despite
his prestige and seniority. In fact, not a few
of his colleagues in the Senate view him as a
cold and scornful figure, a bit of a cynic, a
lot of "a loner," dourly impatient with most
lesser mortals?or, in Harry Truman's suc-
cinct phrasing, an "overeducated Oxford
sob."
There may be a touch or two of truth in
that indictment, but the only part of it that
could solidly be called a fact is Oxford. He
did go there for three years as a Rhodes
scholar, from 1925 to 1928, though he prefers
to think of that experience as a sort of per-
sonal liberation rather than any detriment
to his character. It freed him of the local
countryside and provided that grounding in
the greater world which ultimMely?if not
exactly at that moment ("All I did at Ox-
ford," he claims, "is have a hell of a good
time?played games and studied the mini-
mum")?led to his commanding interest in
foreign affairs.
"Remember, I'd never been anywhere to
speak of," he explains. "I'd never been to
New York or San Francisco or Washington
or any of those places. And here I'm picked
up out of a little village at an early
age * *"?he was pushed in his studies by
his father's telling him every summer: "Go
to school, or go to work"; and washing Coke
bottles bored him?"* ? * and suddenly I
go to Oxford. It has a tremendous impact
on your attitude."
The best of Europe was opened up to the
roaming hill boy within him, and he came
away from this Grand Tour and his reading of
Modern History and Political Science at Ox-
ford with a wide-eyed internationalist out-
'look that, going right over the top of his
squinty mountain conservatism, gave him a
very odd expression indeed, especially in later
politics. Unreadable, practically.
Of course, It probably has to be unreadable
if he is going to make it suit all the various
Interests that comprise both his Arkansas
constituency and his worldwide following.
At one extreme are thase,rich,,elanters from
eastern Arkansas?far less liberal than even
Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149k000200900039-2
Sanitized - ApprpmglE%AgqisfiicalbROFE7A01149R000200F0039-2.r,,6d
tuu Ai, Au
3v"
people' up in the Ozarks?who con-
htige cotton allotments and large voting
loCks,
and often truck "their" Negroes to
Ilae,polls to swell a highly deliverable part of
he total vote for FULBRIGHT. (Even this is
'iniprovenaent, according to Mrs. L. C.
past president of the Arkansas NAACP.
? T ey used to didn't even truck 'em. They'd
? lie in the &otton fields when they voted 'em.")
Knt at the other extreme is that widespread
and admiring conclave of liberal intellectuals
Who, also for possessive reasons, embrace
FT-WRIGHT as more "their" senator than any-
body they ever helped elect from their own
State. His out-of-Arkansas supporters can't
-vote for him--some are foreign nationals--
but they expect a lot from him, and he is
well aware of that expectation. So he is
trapped, representing east Arkansas at the
Sante time he is trying to function in some-
What the same intellectual manner as the
vi.r. whom Oxford University used to send
Up aS its representative to the British parlia-
Merit. As a result, r
umiroeirres voting record
Is crazy-quilt, his politics are pretty much a
Standoff, and his public countenance?un-
readable.
"Nobody knows where to put FULBRIGHT,"
says Jack Yingling, one of his past legisla-
titre assistants, trying to explain why the
Senator's independent manner seems to an-
noy so many routine-minded politicos. "He
pops up here, he pops up there."
He popped up first in 1943 with a mere
five lines of legislation that quickly became
famous as "the Fulbright Resolution," a his-
toric gesture that put the House of Repre-
sentatives on record, even a little before the
Senate, as favoring "the creation of appro-
priate international machinery"?i.e., the
United Nations?to keep "a just and lasting
peace" after the war. Two years later he of-
fered, as a kind of "economy measure," a
plan to use counterpart funds from the sale
Of war surplus overseas to finance a student
exchange program, which ended up as the
Fulbright Scholarships. He seemed to be
casting his total allegiance with those who
advocated the extension of U.S. foreign aid
programs throughout One World. But he
has since popped up as one of the sharpest
critics of "the arrogance" with which he be-
lieves the U.S. has handled the whole busi-
ness of helping other countries, too often
forcing anti-Communist military ties upon
smaller nations, thereby blunting the posi-
tive effects of the aid and creating dangers
of U.S. entanglement that need never have
existed, e.g., in Vietnam.
On domestic issues he pops up most often
ees a southern conservative, willing to fili-
buster against the repeal of the so-called
right-to-work law and able to vote against
civil rights legislation even after President
Kennedy's call to conscience in 1963?to the
chagrin of his liberal friends, who will never
convince labor that he isn't a Bourbon, or
the NAACP that he isn't a bigot. Yet the
worst political attacks upon him come from
the superpatriots of the southern right wing,
who suspect, quite correctly, that his heart
Isn't really in his racial posture and who
know that his deeper convictions include a
thorough disapproval of "our national obses-
sion with Communism" and a large distrust
of the military mind, along with considerable
boggling at what it costs to keep that mind
at ease with its grim, strategic thoughts.
"He's shocked as a kid by the expense of
the military," an aide observes. He has a
gttt reaction against the amount of money
that must go into building an aircraft car-
rier?money that cannot then be used to
build roads and schools in such places as
Arkansas?and he is appalled on similar
grounds at the expenditures for the space
?program. ("It's one of our 'greatest mistakes.
Couldn't possibly have the language and
power to say that strongly enough. I've
, made every efroit to cut (the spacel appro-
..priatipn down. I don't care about a mild,
gentle program. But this thing 'just blos-
somed from nothing into five billion dol-
lars!")
On the other hand, he greatly admires the
World Bank for offering liberal terms under
which a smaller nation can negotiate a
generous loan?while still retaining its na-
tional pride?and he would prefer to revamp
the U.S. foreign aid program to channel most
of its millions, with no military strings at-
tached, through that multilateral instru-
ment: "I never heard anybody say, 'World
Bank, go home!'"
For this high-minded approach to the
amity among nations he has been honored
with full academic pomp in country after
country as a kind of international culture
hero. But usually on these state visits he
manages to pop up at the local marketplace,
going over the fruits and vegetables and
handwork like a junketing 4-H leader. "I
like to see what they raise, what they make,"
he admits, ready to shop Fiji the same way
he would War Eagle, Ark.: "You can under-
Stand then how the superiority of the West-
erner can be so offensive. Sure, we have a
hell of a lot of money and can make bombs,
but in the local markets you can see other
people showing a lot of talent too.". He can
no more pass by a busy stall in any of the
world's bazaars than he can drive by a fruit
stand in the Ozarks without stopping for
apples. "Here he is," one of his speech writ-
ers remembers from a trip the senator made
to the South Pacific, "peering over his half
glasses at fresh fruit in Tahiti. And he ends
up back at the hotel with five different kinds
of mangoes."
In sum, no one position ever really quite
leads to another in the unfolding of FULr
BRIGHT'S scattered public stands. The sena-
tor himself rather facilely explains this sit-
uation by saying, "I like to feel free to take
each issue as it comes. On many issues I
don't have an opinion, and then I'll trust
another's judgme:nt. But that's voluntary."
However, his independence of mind also in-
volves far more complicated mental gym-
nastics. He happens to have remarkable
powers of preoccupation. "He tends to think
of one issue to the exclusion of all others,"
explains a member of his staff, and often such
an issue will assume the proportions of an
intellectual crisis with him. "He usually
has about one of these a year. Last year it
was what to do about the foreign aid pro-
gram.
"This year it's the Far East." He closets
himself in his senatorial office?much the
way a student at Oxford "sports his oak" to
study for his examinations?and reads every-
thing he can lay his hands on about what's
worrying him. Also: "We bring him peo-
ple." He mulls over the problem, educating
himself in its history and all its possible
ramifications, and then finally comes out of
his darkened chambers to give a speech or
hold a hearing or offer a bill?,sometimes to
do all three. By then, it is more than likely
that the issue has become uniquely identi-
fiable with him--more through his scholar-,
ship than his sponsorship: he simply knows
the matter best--and sooner or later, in one
phase or another, it will acquire his name.
In fact, it is amazing the number of di-
verse matters that are named FULBRIGHT,
considering he is not generally regarded as a
mover of men or a perpetrator of events.
Things occasionally pick up his name even
though he has little or nothing to do with
them. When a letter was sent to the Presi-
dent by 15 senators expressing agreement
with FULBRIGHT'S stand on Vietnam, John-
son's aide Jake Valenti began carrying it
around the White House as "the Fulbright
letter," though it was in no way his; Va-
lenti simply grabbed that letter by the easiest
handle. In a sense FuLearemes name, with
all its past associations, has become that
kind of eponym lately. It identifies a new
mode of thinking about internationl affairs--
?
inquiring, from a sense of history, how a for-
eign populace may achieve its own political
maturity, free of outside prescription, in-
cluding any based too closely on the Ameri-
can experience.
Of course, not all things Fulbright are
universally popular. He has come in for
some heavy criticism about his views on
Vietnam. But there still is no doubt that
once his name is attached to a particular
position, even his boldest detractors are forced
into a grudging respect for it. He can never
be dismissed as a maverick, the way Senator
1Vicesse of Oregon can, even when they hold
practically the same views.
FULBRIGHT has stratagems that assure him
this respect; he is deftly courteous, even with
a needling question, and he can be deftly
elusive?even seems to enjoy being elusive?
trailing off through a series of elliptical qual-
ifying remarks that end suddenly with an
abrupt, barely related question tossed back
at his original interrogator. (He'll discuss
his practically nonexistent religious views
this way or, for that matter, anything
touching himself too closely.) But he
is also accorded genuine respect because
of the astonishing breadth of view he does, in
fact, possess.
From up on his Ozark hilltop?territory
more Pioneer West than Genteel Southern?
he really can see all the way from east
Arkansas to the farthest reaches of the
greater world and he is always very cannily
relating the one to the other. He will strike
just the right note, for instance, with a del-
egation of visiting Africans after they have
explained their difficulties, by saying, as he
did recently, that he can understand their
problems: "You're about where we were 30
years ago in Arkansas.?
And, if he measures the greater world by
Arkansas, he is equally willing to measure
Arkansas by the greater world. "I come
from a very poor state," he never ceases to
reiterate, and he likes to talk about Arkansas
as if it were an underdeveloped country that
had just shaken off the yoke of Arkansas
Power and Light's oligarchical rule but still
had to depend on foreign aid. He investi-
gated the Reconstruction Finance Corpora-
tion in the early 50s, he says, to protect it
from politics, since he believed the RFC
was "the major agency for aid to the under-
developed states." Ile has consistently voted
for federal aid to education, although voters
in Arkansas distrusted Big Government mov-
ing in on them, because he believes better
schooling is clearly the one best hope for an
emergent people. "They forgave me because,
'Well, he's an old professor,'" he thinks.
But there are certain internal problems
which, he argues, no emergent people will
allow anybody from Washington to touch at
this stage in their development.
FULBRIGHT did not intervene during the
1957 integration crisis at Central High School
in Little Rock, though that incident made
Faubus' name almost infamous enough to
cancel out FULT3RIGHT'S own around the
world. FULBRIGHT was in England at the
time, and he stayed in England for what
some caustic wits said "must have been the
second semester at Oxford." The NAACP's
Mrs. Bates for one, will never forgive him:
"I've never quite understood him. He's an
intelligent guy. Why does he have to sell his
soul and his people like that? This man has
a brain and he's shown in every way where
he stands. The majority of the liberals here
told up he wouldn't sign the Southern Mani-
festo [a pledge by southern congressmen to
fight the Court's segregation decisions]. But
he did. No, I'll listen to Paubus more than
I1,1 listen to FULBRIGHT." But FULBRIGHT,
thinking of the enfranchised among the
emergent people of Arkansas insists, "You
don't trifle with them, especially about what
concerns them socially." Congressman
Brooks Hays publicly supported school inte-
gration and was widely applauded for his
Sanitizefl -Approved For Release : CIA-RDP75-00149,R000200900039-2
`414-a'y 17, Mnitized - ApuswailfssycgpAtaRki914-Risfiall0149R00020090003
07
Courage. Fatintianr was not. Hut Brooks
'IlaYs 'shortly lost his seat as congressman_
from Little Rock.
-Furasarour personally is a gradualist who
approves of the fact that both the University
Of Arkansas. and Fayetteville's public schools
have been integrated. He tries to explain
?his quandary by saying that he will not buck
-white majority "in a matter of this deep
? interest, in an area where they have knowl-
' edge and experience equal or superior to my
own." With this rather flimsy justification,
Futintiour rides out any and all criticism of.
his votes against civil rights, arguing that it
is simply a question of his political survival.
He insists he is then left free to go against his
'constituents on matters where their knowl-
edge and experience are not equal to his
own?on foreign aid, for instance, for which
he originally votcd, "even though I felt they
? did oppose it, because they thought they
'needed it [aid] more."
- -Lately, however, FULBRIGHT has been won-
'dering if his own people in Arkansas
, couldn't have done a better job with U.S.
-foreign policy than anybody in the federal
-government, including himself. "Maybe
'their instincts about foreign aid were right,"
he ponders. "As you know, I've been having
second thoughts myself. After all, how did
we get mixed up in Vietnam? You could
-say this whole thing started out of an aid
- program."
? That was a long- time ago, however, and
? his own tardiness in taking cognizance of the
? situation in Vietnam causes him considera-
ble chagrin. FULBRIGHT remembers Vietnam,
? from the '50s, as "a very small operation.
I wasn't at all concerned. I was entirely
" preoccupied with Europe. I don't recall
we ever had a hearipg on Vietnam." But
? early this year FULERiGHT sported his oak for
? another period of intense study?"a Europe
? man" setting out to learn a whole new field:
the other side of the world--and when he
came out again, he started a long series of
hearings that eventually brought him to
some grim conclusions of his own.
- In Vietnam he feels that the U.S., at
worst, inherited the position already lost by
the French in an abandoned colonial war;
or that, at best, we interfered misguidedly
in a civil struggle that might have resolved
itself sooner had the U.S. not intervened.
' The Communist involvement in the war is
-? not, for Futisaicnr, the deciding factor; and,
indeed, he is doubtful about that whole
line of reasoning: "Everytime somebody calls
It [a people's movement] 'Communist,' it's
reason for intervention." He's convinced
this approach has caused the U.S. to initiate
too many mistaken troop movements?par-
ticularly into the Dominican Republic not
too long ago?and that's "another thing
that poisons me in this direction."
Moreover, FIILLBRIGHT feels that something
Is basically wrong when the U.S. can become
so ineXtricably involved in the woes of a tiny
country like Vietnam that a land war with
China looms as a larger threat to the world
than ever did the most painful destiny the
tiny country might have found for itself:
"I'm ashamed that the United States?a big,
inagnamimous country is picking on the
little countries, trying to squash 'em. Why
don't we challenge Russia or China directly,
? if that's how we feel?" He has now come to
suspect that what has happened is that the
U.S. has gone into too many areas of the
world with an abundance of good intention
all wrapped up in aid to 83 developing coun-
tries-83 possible sources of commitment,
and subsequent overbearance?and that one
or another of these ties was bound to ensnare
. us in ,an unwaJ4ed conflict. He has sup-
. Ported foreign aid and since the proposal of
' the.Marshall Plan in 1947; but, "Back when
all this started, I didn't think the United
States would be se arrogant about it."
-That, for Fatal:LIGHT, is the abiding error.
As one of his staff puts it, he has "a strong
distaste for the destructive psychological ef-
fects of the donor and the suppliant.
That's at the core of his reasoning. You
don't humiliate people. He appreciates the
pride a little country has in telling off a big
? country."
Indeed, FULBRIGHT feels that the best hope
for peace lies in reaching some general ac-
commodation with Communist China so as
to save the little countries of Southeast
Asia neutrally whole, and he has gone on
? the Senate floor to argue that position.
So far, nobody has exactly leaped to the
support of his proposals and, indeed, nothing
of PULBRIGHT'S vigorous dissent from Ad-
ministration policy has yet emerged as any-
thing concrete, even from his own commit-
? tee. The President is still the powel
broker: "As long as he's there and there's a
two-to-one majority, he's running the show.
He has control of this Congress, including
my committee. I have a lot of the younger
members with me, but they're afraid to ex-
pose themselves. They know they can be
gutted," FULBRIGHT uncomfortably lacked
committee support even for an amendment
to the Vietnam aid appropriation that would
have dissociated the Senate from any im-
plied approval of Johnson's present course
of action.
"I hate like hell to be in the minority," he
admits. "It does give me pause." But it's
far from a new position for him, and he has
always had the inner resources to last it out
until he is proven right or wrong. Actually
he is really at his best when he is unhesi-
tatingly outspoken.
"One thing you damn soon find out," re-
calls one faculty member who knew him at
the university as a teacher, "and that's what
BILL FULBRIGHT feels." It's something he gets
partly from the Ozarks, but it's also some-
thing he gets from having been a professor.
When he speaks out, he sounds almost as if
he were exercising tenure as much as his
rights as a senator. His dissents from ma-
jority opinion seem almost scholarly obli-
gations?as if he wanted to offer a lesson
in civics, full of learned references, as much
as set down his own opinion. On such oc-
casions he is especially prone to quote Alexis
de Tocqueville, the traveling Frenchman who
more than a hundred years ago analyzed the
intellectual danger of too much conformist
thinking in this country in his classic, De-
mocracy in America. "De Tocqueville says
things so much better than I could. About
the tyranny of the majority. I always have
the feeling that book could have been written
about America 10 years ago."
Ten years or so ago FULERIGHT was quoting
De Tocqueville in his at-the-time lonely pub-
lic opposition to Senator Joseph R. McCar-
thy, whose tactics violated?above all else,
for Fatsracarr?"the code of the gentleman
that our democratic society presupposes."
FULBRIGHT has always believed that decent
conduct within the Senate, one member to-
ward another, is needful for its survival; and
when the majority of senators didn't at first
seem to find this true, he vigorously dis-
sented. It is still the vote in which he takes
the most pride, the only nay that was cast
against the appropriations for McCarthy's
investigation in 1954. The Ozark part of it
was that FULBRIGHT didn't actually make up
his mind to do so until he was on the Senate
floor and McCarthy insisted on a roll-call
vote.
"That put the clincher on it," Jack Ying-
ling remembers. "Fumenexx was damned
if he was going to be on record as voting for
it."
The professorial part was that he promptly
rose to speak against the "swinish blight" of
anti-intellectualism?and from time to time
thereafter dropped quotations from the
Bible and Jonathan Swift into the CON-
GRESSIONAL RECORD DE gibes at McCarthy's
loutishness and smear tactics. FULBRIGHT
considered McCarthy to be "like an animal."
McCarthy kept up a noisy stream of abuse
against "Senator Half-Bright''; but FUL-
BRIGHT waited him out, standing up as the
only one willing to be counted, until other
senators gradually joined him in. sufficient
number to pass the censure motion that
toppled McCarthy. ("This idea that every-
thing is done by an 'inner group,'" an old
congressional hand scoffs. "What they do,
they're forced to do by people like FUL-
BRIGHT.") The senator has been a whipping
boy for the right wing ever since; and
whenever he stirs up another ruckus over
superpatriotism, as he did in 1961 with a
memorandum to Secretary of Defense Mc-
Namara concerning military sponsorship of
civilian seminars in anti-Communism, the
letters pour in.
But for all its intellectual flair, his clash
with McCarthy really lacked the majestically
banked thunder of his loftier disagreements
with presidents of the United States, which
have almost become a habit with him. So
far, he has crossed every Chief Executive of
the last two decades at least once: Truman
over RFC scandals, Eisenhower over Dulles'
Middle East policies, and Kennedy over the
Bay of Pigs invasion.
Indeed, FULBRIGHT may have been slow in
getting around to crossing Johnson, and he
has been criticized for that. If he was so
opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam,
why did he act as floor manager in August,
1964, for the Bay of Tonkin resolution, which
Johnson has used ever since as a color of
congressional authority to take "all neces-
sary steps" to repeal aggression?
"I was derelict there," FULBRIGHT admits,
another result of his tardy realization of the
true situation in Southeast Asia. "It Would
probably have been healthy to have gone into
conference and had some discussion. But
Goldwater had just been nominated. You
know how the lines were drawn."
FULBR/GHT was for L.B.J. "publicly and
privately"?much closer to Johnson than he
had ever been to any previous President.
Truman and Fotraucirr are friends now, but
that was hardly the case when FULBRIGHT
was investigating influence peddling in the
RFC. Kennedy?or the Kennedys, really?
he'd never gotten to know; they struck him as
a cold lot. Stevenson was much more his can-
didate; and then, for reasons of long friend-
ship and some mutual understanding,
Johnson. They used to sit next to each other
In the Senate when Johnson was majority
whip, and Johnson invariably deferred to
Ftiteruonr on foreign policy matters: "See
Bill. He's my Secretary of State." In return,
FULBRIGHT looked upon Johnson as "a politi-
cal genius," backed him for the presidential
nomination in 1960 and campaigned strongly
for him in Arkansas against insurgent Gold-
waterism two years ago.
But they are really antipodal human be-
ings, and even back in their days together in
the Senate there was a fatal indication of
what would eventually happen in FUL-
BRIGHT'S realization that "Johnson just wants
to pass bills?he doesn't care what's in them"
and in Johnson's impatience with Fut-
BRIGHT'S inability at Foreign Relations Com-
mittee meetings to "for settle it"
in time to get home for supper.
A split was bound to come between the
man interested in substance and the man of
politics. The issue turned out to be FUL-
BRIGHT'S dissent over U.S. intervention in the
Dominican Republic: "I was reluctant to do
it. I'd had preferred that an opposition
member do it. But they're all for him. My
final consideration was, here's all of _Latin
America wondering about us. Somebody
ought to give the other point of view."
FULBRIGHT tried to couch his speech of last
September as a criticism of bad aclfte given
the President, but it still made Johnson
furious. Afterward, besides delivering a
series of petty social snubs, Johnson lessened
any meaningful communication with Fut,-
Sanitized - Approved For Release :CIA-ROPi5-00149Rdo
AP P ROME9gARInSfricaft5RDADA5ACal 49 R0 0 0 2 0 OVV39;219
HT On foreign policY down to a point
ere he conferred in whispers with Dean
tiSt. during the entire time that FULBRIGHT
tide his last effort to propound his views
Vietnam at a White House meeting of the
ilgreasional leadership.
,have to defend my position whether I
Ite doing it or not," FULRRIGHT said just
,liefore beginning the public hearings on
Vietnam late in January. But he has man-
aged to accomplish something more than
Aighificant than that. He has used the
preasure within Congress for an open air-
ing of the whole range of 11.8. foreign pol-
icy?pressure that has come particularly
kora younger members of both houses--to
pull the Foreign Relations Committee to-
gether again after several frustrating years
of. chronic absenteeism and foundering
=rale.
"We were always so plagued by the for-
eign aid bill," he explains. "That cursed
',thing took up three quarters of our time,
No member really liked it. They were bored.
'With it. /t about destroyed the spirit of the
CoMinittee."
? But from the beginning the policy hear-
ings revived everybody's spirits, including
Ferzsarorres?at one particularly low point,
he had, thought of resigning from his chair-
Manship?in part because he allowed the
Vietnam hearings to develop in a much freer
style than is normally his custom.
In the attempt to debate Vietnam and
'Understand our China policy, FULBRIGHT
threw a heavy burden upon other senators
during their allotted 10 minutes of ques-
tioning. Much to his delight, most of them
carne forward with informed contributions.
"I've never seen them enter into it so
deftly," FULBRIGHT says of his colleagues. "I
was surprised by the intelligence of some of
their questions. They were extraordinarily
good.', The whole exercise brought the For-
eign Relations Committee out of its intel-
lectual doldrums to serve once more as the
Classic American forum for probing?and,
indeed, doubting?presidential certainties
about foreign policy, whether they are Wil-
SOn's Fourteen Points or Johnson's.
This is a considerable accomplishment for
FuLcaroirr?and much in line with his de-
sire to substitute "new realities" for "old
myths" which he believes Americans learned
too Well during their Cold War Childhood--
but it has not been without its political
hardships. Despite his penchant for privacy,
-he is not immune to the deliberate coldness
With which he is being treated by the White
House, where his intransigence is being met
with a policy of containment and isolation.
Also, there has been some speculation as to
'how well that cloud his constituents have
him on would hold up back home, what with
Faubus, his eye on 1968, trying to fan it
clown with outbursts against FULBRIGHT
hainpering the war effort.
But Arkansans, for some reason, seem to
be equally proud of both Faubus and Foi-
e:11/MT these days, and nobody back home
wants to see a confrontation that would lose
Arkansas either one or the other. FULBRIGHT
can pretty much depend upon their many
mutual backers doing everything over the
next couple of years to keep them well apart,
despite Faubus' obvious wish to close with
? him in mortal combat.
Beside, it's nearly impossible to bring BILL
?Poiaarcrin to care much about that kind of
danger anyhow. "Maybe you can say I've
been here long enough not to give a goddam,"
he says, almost apologizing for his persever-
ance in the hearings. But the matter goes
much deeper than that. Carl Marcy, staff di-
rector of the Foreign Relations Committee,
can tell if he's off base in any suggestion he
offers if FULBRIGHT snaps back at him: "But
you're giving me political advice!" The Sen-
tor doein't want it. Often, when told sums-
isn't good politics, he'll reply, "Wait
o or three years. /t will be."
"His is the approach of reason," a long-
time associate concludes, "and if it doesn't
appeal to his reaSon, it doesn't appeal to him
at all."
But that does not mean that FULBRIGHT'S
reason is a cold, purely cerebral kind of in-
strument. It is actually just the opposite:
a bit old-fashioned, the kind of reason as-
sociated with Edmund Burke's great 18th
Century political appeals for liberty within
tradition and limited human circumstance.
"I do have a habit of liking old things," FUL-
BRIGHT smiles. "Old cars, old shoes, old
wives." He's had the same Mercedes for 10
years and won't paint it because then he'd
have to worry about scratching the paint.
One pair of shoes from London he wore
for SO years, and "I means," says one Ar-
kansan who greatly admired them, "they
were all cracks." And Betty, the senator
says, is part of that feeling of security he's
always had, so that "It never bothered me
that I might be defeated." Reason, he feels,
is the force by which such little instances of
human feeling are kept politically alive,
wherever possible, in a dangerously grace-
less world. "He finds it increasingly difficult
to understand these grandiose abstractions
about society," one staff man observes.
"He'll often oppose some particular ap-
proach to a Problem simply because 'No-
body says anything about people being In-
volved.'"
He is very much people himself, right
down to his foibles. Ever since his father's
early death, his .own mortality has worried
him, and at 61 he follows a strict regimen
that includes constitutionals before break-
fast and bloodletting games of golf. ("Sink-
ing that putt," says his wife, "is a pas-
sionate thing with: him.") Lots of times he
doesn't think anybody near and dear to
him has a grain of sense, and he lectures
them at length and accordingly. He can be
as tight as a burr with money. "I'lL tell
you something," one Arkansas millionaire
says, "if both his legs were cut off at the
knee and you offered him yours for a nickel,
he wouldn't have: no use for 'em." And he
has his petty moments?even during public
hearings when his dislike of generals some-
times escapes his taut courtesy. Yet, with
all these personal quirks, he retains a re-
markable simplicity?"the kind of simplic-
ity," as one staff man puts it, "that is beyond
sophistication."
A story is told of Fulbright's trip to Naples
in 1962 to participate in some ceremonies of
acclaim for his student-exchange program,
during a time when the U.S.S. Forrestal hap-
pened to be gaudily and mightily in port.
The aircraft carrier seemed to attract any
number of Junketing congressmen that
spring?mostly those concerned with mili-
tary appropriations?and FULBRIGHT hap-
pened to run into a party of them in a
Neapolitan square one day. They tried to
drag him along to visit this vast tonnage of
floating American glory, but he insisted his
own business lay down a different street?at
the binational center where American "Fill-
brights" gather with Italian students to carry
on the important business of simply hearing
each other out, much the way he himself
once did at Oxford. Finally, after he'd po-
litely put off the congressmen and turned
back in the direction of the cultural center,
he shook his head and said to one of his
staff, "Those fellas just don't know where
? the real power is."
To come out with a statement like that,
FULBRIGHT had to put a lot of what normally
passes for sophistication far behind him.
But he is more than willing to do so. Indeed'
he anxiously searches for ways in which"
real power" can be brought to bear u
problems that so far have not been sol d
by such mighty exhibits as the U.S.S. r-
restal. He wants people to begin to "t nk
the 'unthinkable,'" to search among wh he
terms realistic, if unsettling, alternati s--
Sanitized - Approved For Release : CIA-RD
and not solely among soothing myths?"to
find some rational way other than war to
settle problems."
"I don't for a moment think that we'll get
rid of all wars," he cautions. "We'll have
to accept the fact that there are going to
be local wars and then try to be very dis-
criminating about them." Even that, how-
ever, will take more patience than he is at
all sure?following the Tocqueville's ancient
doubts about a democracy's handling of for-
eign policy?Americans can summon up.
"FULBRIGHT has a pretty modest conception
of what you can, do," says another aide, "but
he will take great satisfaction in a modest
achievement." And he does indeed take
great satisfaction in the modest achieve-
ments of the past few months, during which
he feels committee witnesses have helped
Americans become a lot more "discriminat-
ing" about "a local war" in Southeast Asia.
The question, then, naturally arises
whether FULBRIGHT should be satisfied with
this modest achievement. Should he per-
haps attempt to become more than a
thoughtful critic: a forceful critic and, for
once, go after support for his position in-
stead of waiting, as he always has, for in-
terested parties to come to him?
That would go against his whole nature.
It is hard to imagine him at the head of
anything so formal-sounding as a Loyal Op-
position, even if its objectives were the em-
bodiment of his own thinking. His impress,
on the contrary, continues to depend upon
his utter independence, which allows him
to raise a voice that carries great influence,
if little?or no--power in the deliberations
of the Senate.
"It's sort of like the inventor and the
manufacturer," an aide says. FULBRIGHT
helped invent the McCarthy censure, for in-
stance, but he was only minimally involved
in its eventual manufacture. "It's the ma-
chinery that runs the Senate," FULBRIGHT
insists, and The wants never to be a part of
a machine. In fact, there is an inherent
repulsion within him against the whole
modern mechanization of human affairs, such
as to lead him to protest against something .
as big as a moon shot or as minor as the
replacement of the commodious old wicker
cars in the Senate subway by a clanking
train.
"A man has to act within the possibilities
of his own personality," says a close aide,
"and FULBRIGHT is a private man. He could
do more to solicit support. But he doesn't,
partly because he thinks it's bad taste to
bother people. If they like what he says,
they'll say so." But this same aide admits
that he himself is worried sometimes by
the senator's political quietude and has
pressed him on occasion about the possible
disappointment he may give his loyal ad-
herents everywhere in the world. Should
he not possibly face up to the inevitable
obligations of his clear private thinking: to
leadership?' "When you talk to him about
that, he squirms," the aide says. But he
notices one small sign of concession: "I don't
really get the idea he wants me to stop
talking."
The PRF:SIDING OFFICER "(Mr. FELL
in the chair) . The Chair recognizes the
Senator from Florida.
CCREDITATION OF THE U.S. NAVAL
ACADEMY
Mr. HOLLAND. Mr. President, some
weeks ago I was appointed by the Vice
President as a member of this year's
Board of Visitors to the U.S. Naval
Academy at Annapolis. In addition to
distinguished members of the Board
from the House of Representatives and
from academic and other groups, I had
75-00149R000200900039-2