FULBRIGHT THE WEDDING OF ARKANSAS AND THE WORLD

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP75-00149R000200930116-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 8
• Document Creation Date: November 17, 2016
• Document Release Date: April 5, 1999
• Sequence Number: 116
• Publication Date: May 14, 1962
• Content Type: NSPR

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FULBRIGH
The Wedding of Arkansas and the World
by Sidney Xyman
Until the deadline for filing on May 2, there was a
chance that the warm rain of Texas oil money in its
seasonal drift toward Arkansas would draw somebody
out of the mud to battle J. William Fulbright for the
Democratic Senatorial nomination this year. Several
local creatures - combining the worst features of the
Birchers, delerious segregationists, bleak fundamental-
ists, and Poor Richard's Almanac economists - did in
fact announce that they were considering a race against
Fulibright. But only one finally put his name on the
books as a candidate. He is Winston Chandler, a dissi-
dent segregationist member of the Pulaski County
Rural School Board, and a man who makes a living
by hauling trailers. Fulbright will certainly squash him
like a bug.
,Arkansas politics have few of the institutional
features found in the politics of Northern states, and
especially those lying East of the Mississippi River.
There is no "structured" party hierarchy. As in some
other Southern states where the Democrats are all that
count, politics is highly personal. The individual poli-
tician forms himself into a party pro tem and seeks
to build around his own person the kind of support he
needs to win the Democratic nomination. Whether he
succeeds or fails depends in large degree on the value
local opinion assigns to his personal "style." (In
Arkansas, for example, if a politician speaks from a
written text, he arouses the suspicion that somebody
not visible is doing the talking through his lips.)
The central problem of the Arkansas politician with
a statewide constituency is defined for him by two
facts: One is the need to diversify and improve agricul-
ture, while speeding industrialization. The other is the
"race problem."
In February of 1957, when the school desegregation
crisis broke on the streets outside Central High School
in Little Rock, Fulbright was in Europe. He was stunned
by everything about the event. Not that he was an
"integrationist." Far from it. He had always followed
the lead of Senator Russell of Georgia, and had always
SIDNEY HYMAN, a contributing editor of The New
RepuIfc, is the author of The American President.
His forthcoming book will be titled,. Eisenhower -
Promise and Performance.
voted the Southern viewpoint on civil rights issues. He
was among the Southern Senators who signed the
Southern Manifesto protesting the Supreme Court's
school desegregation decision. He seemed genuinely
convinced that locally generated forces were producing
a controlled revolution in race relations, and that the
Court's decision, in the absence of any agreed upon
plan of procedure, would do far more harm locally
than good. On the eve of his departure for Europe, he
was told that the Little Rock School Board and other
local authorities had prepared the psychological climate
which would permit token integration of Central High
School in the fall. Neither then nor at any previous
time did Fulbright have the slightest hint that Governor
Faubus would intervene to tear apart the delicate fibres
which had been woven to support local assent in the
token integration being scheduled. Faubus, in Arkansas
terms, was a "liberal" who owed his office to his polit-
ical patron, Sid McGrath, himself one of the most
progressive Governors in Arkansas history.
From his observation point in Europe, Fulbright saw
how the affair in Little Rock made for garish headlines
in the European press. He was sickened by the ex-
travaganza of violence being reported and by Faubus's
seemingly run-away intention of giving encouragement
to the very violence he said he meant to control. Ful-
bright had often spoken about the importance of na-
tional style and character as a determinant of America's
capacity to win and hold the loyalty of free men. Now,
everything he stood for was brought into serious ques-
tion by Little Rock. By the time he returned to the
United States, the moves and countermoves which
brought federal troops (under Gen. Edwin A. Walker)
to Little Rock had so inflamed local opinion that he
felt nothing he could say publicly would do any good.
He told a friend that he knew he had to fight Faubus,
but it couldn't be done from Washington; it couldn't 'be
done by public speeches; it had to be done at home -
and quietly.
Bill Fulbright is not by nature a timid man. Nor
would retirement from politics be the end of everything
for him. He has from time to time been approached by
representatives of major universities, Columbia in-
cluded, with offers of a Presidency or Chancellorship.
In a pinch he could always return to his native city of
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THE NEW REPUBLIC
Fayetteville to take over the direction of diversified
family interests that include the local newspaper. In
any case, his upbringing as the scion of the "first fam-
ily" of Fayetteville has given him the coolness of the
aristocrat confronting the mob -a quality he showed
best when the hysteria of McCarthyism was at its
height. He was then among the handful of Senators
who had the courage to defy Senator McCarthy to his
face. Apart from his role in pressing the McCarthy
censure vote to a successful conclusion, on an earlier
occasion when the Senate had a chance to cripple
McCarthy by denying him funds with which to op-
erate, 88 Senators including all the liberals on the scene
played it safe by voting to continue his funds; Ful-
bright cast the only vote to cut there off.
Nonetheless, his public silence at the time of the
school desegregation crisis at Little Rock brought him
bitter criticism. His liberal friends accused him of cow-
ardice and of being wedded to office; inflamed segrega-
tionists in Arkansas damned him as an enemy alien
for having failed to acclaim what Faubus had done.
On the liberal side, the criticism continued to run
its course despite what had happened to Brooks Hayes.
Hayes was a progressive-minded Congressman who
had faithfully served his Little Rock constituency for a
number of years and was known to Arkansas and the
whole South as a lay leader of the Baptist Church. He
had tried to put a cooling hand to feverish foreheads,
to mediate an agreement between Faubus and President
Eisenhower. For his moderation, Hayes lost his seat in
the House in 1.958 to the tricky write-in candidacy of
Dale Alford, a Stone Age man in all things, beginning
with segregation and extending from there to economic
matters and world affairs. Fulbright's critics in the
liberal camp were not of a mind to draw the moral of
the Brooks Hayes story.
Fulbright versus Faubus
On the other side, the inflamed segregationists were
not satisfied when Fulbright filed a legal brief of his
own with the Supreme Court asking for a. cooling off
period before any further attempt was made to inte-
grate Central High School. By channeling the resistance
to integration back into a legal framework, he appeared
bent on frustrating those who were calling for a stand
to arms and for resistance by direct physical action.
These same segregationists were further aroused when
they learned that Fulbright, in unpublicized low-key
talks around Arkansas to the leaders of agriculture and
business, reaffirmed his personal belief in segregation
as a current need and reality, but went on to ask a
practical question: Did the manner of Faubus' resistance
to school desegregation in fact attain the object for
which it was framed? He pointed to the way other
Southern states like North Carolina had satisfied the
federal courts with a formula for token integration,
and with virtually no public disturbance.
Despite all the compromises Fulbright made to keep
himself in right with local opinion on race relations,
his political future was overcast by the mounting
prospect that Governor Faubus would challenge his
Senate seat and more likely than not win it. If that
prospect ultimately vanished, one reason is a certain
fatigue in Arkansas with the whole question of school
desegregation. (In his most recent trips around the
state, Fulbright was never once confronted with a
question of where he stood on the matter of school
desegregation.) But another reason why the prospect of
his defeat vanished lay in the way Fulbright had identi-
fied himself as a servant of the urgently felt need to
raise the standard of living in Arkansas as a whole.
He had associated himself with the Federal Water
Shed Program that leads to flood control dams, small
in themselves, but important to communities as a
source of electric power. He associated himself with
the Federal Water Lands Bill which by helping to pre-
serve the breeding grounds for ducks, has given the
Arkansas duck hunting industry a powerful boost. He
used his standing with various foreign embassies in
Washington to find markets for the "broilers" of the
Arkansas poultry industry. He sponsored legislation
for the creation of experimental fish farms. He per-
suaded the federal government to establish two experi-
mental forestry stations on the lands it owns in
Arkansas; the improved quality of timber has bene-
fitted not only the whole forestry industry but also its
satellites like the paper industry. He supported federal
measures to stimulate the export of Arkansas crops
with the result that Arkansas agriculture is in a healthy
condition for the first time in years. In cotton, the
"carryover" of i4 million bales in -1958 has been re-
duced to a "normal" six to seven million bales. There
is no substantial carryover of soy beans, a crop sold
largely to Japan on a cash basis outside the framework
of any US Government export program. Nor is there
any substantial carryover for :rice, thanks in great
measure to Fulbright's part in helping (with his former
administrative assistant John Erickson) to negotiate a
long-term agreement for the export to India of one
million tons of rice.
Nor could Faubus turn to his personal account any
Fulbright tactical blunder in the disputed matter of
public versus private power. Fulbright covered both
flanks in that fight. Though his friends deny that he has
"looked after the interests of the Arkansas Power and
Light Company," it is difficult to see why they should
be so vehement. Of course he has. He endorsed the
Dixon-Yates contract on the ground that as an agree-
ment, it was "not too bad a deal" for the federal gov-
20
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MAY 14,
joined Hickenlooper. The decision has paid off. In a
number of critical matters where Hickenlooper's sup-
port has been indispensable to the Administration, he
has braved an attack from the Radical Right in his
own party and has swung enough Republican votes to
decide the case in the Administration's favor.
"Fulbright has never once lost his temper in the last
year," says a junior Committee member who keeps a
ernment, and on the privately understood ground that
it would mean a huge new power plant for Arkansas.
That is called "permissible politics"- a means by which
captives of constituencies remain leaders of constitu-
encies. His vote did not differ in any way from the vote
of the saintliest of Senators for their own special kind
of local interest. In any case, there was the offsetting
fact that Fulbright led the fight which thwarted an
attempt in the Senate to raise interest rates on loans to
cooperatives formed under the Rural Electrification Ad-
ministration. This did not sit well with the Arkansas
Power and Light Company. But as he had served
Arkansas Power where their paramount interests were
involved, he foreclosed their right to mount a punitive
expedition against him because he proceeded to serve
the interests of the REA cooperatives.
The Foreign Agenda
The one change in Fulbright that has been noticeable
of late has nothing to do with Arkansas, for it involves
his personal relations with other members of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. When he first assumed
the Chairmanship back in -1959, there was scarcely a
meeting that was free of personal acrimony. (On one
occasion, Fulbright shattered the gavel in his hand
while pounding the table to quiet a committee room
tumult.) Senator Wiley, a former Republican Chair-
man of the Committee, resented the presence of any
man sitting in the chair he once occupied. Senator
Long had taken it in his mind to make war on C. Doug-
las Dillon, the then Undersecretary of State, and this
brought him into conflict with Fulbright, Dillon's close
personal friend. With virtually the entire leadership
of the Senate being members of the Committee - and
this included three known candidates for the Demo-
cratic Presidential nomination, Kennedy, Humphrey
and Symington, feelings ran high.
All this is a thing of the past. Russell Long has be-
gun to smile again. Presidential aspirants who may be
on the Committee know there is no point in trying
to bend their Committee position to the -1968 War of
Succession. And on top of all these blessings there is
the fact that while Senator Wiley is still the ranking
Republican from the standpoint of seniority, the power
of effective command among the Republicans has
passed to Senator Hickenlooper, a Committee member
and a newly-elected Chairman of the Senate Repub-
lican Policy Committee.
As between the two men, Hickenlooper and Ful-
bright, there is an entente cordiale which began early
in the Kennedy Administration when Hickenlooper
submitted a number of amendments to tighten the
Administration's loosely drawn bill creating the Peace
Corps. Fulbright could have beaten them. Instead he
record of such matters. "He will never be reconciled
fully to human nonsense. But he is more understanding
and more forgiving of human crochets than ever before.
In most matters, he could now lead the Committee
wherever he wanted to go - which is saying something,
considering that its membership represents the greatest
collection of prima donnas this side of the Metropolitan
Opera House."
Fulbright is unlike any of his five predecessors as
Chairman. The first of the five, Sen. Tom Connally of
Texas, was a prewar relic - comical, imperious, with no
coherent grasp of the world born on V-J day. His main
energies were spent in defending his personal prestige
and prerogatives.
Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, Connally's successor in the
two year period of -1947-49, had been on the wrong side
of virtually every foreign policy issue before and even
during the war. The reputation for sagacity he later
came to enjoy was partly due to the Democratic Ad-
ministration which propagandized Vandenberg's con-
version to internationalism as an example to foot-
dragging Republican
against them.
isolationists, and as a shield
Senator Wiley, who held the Chairmanship between
-1953-55, was caught in a cross-pull between a desire to
be helpful to a President of his own party, and the hos-
tility directed by the junior Senator from Wisconsin,
Joseph McCarthy, toward every facet of Eisenhower
diplomacy. Harrassed from the rear in Wisconsin, and
with no distinctive moral and intellectual force, Wiley's
contribution to American foreign policy was largely
confined to prayer meetings.
In -1955 the Chairmanship passed to Walter George,
a leader of the Southern conservatives and a power-
house in the Senate in his former capacity as Chairman
of the Senate Finance Committee. Sitting at the head
of the Foreign Relations Committee, he had a tendency
to look over his shoulder at the gathering threat to
his Senate seat posed by Georgia's Governor Herman
Talmadge. And he had a parallel tendency to look to-
ward President Eisenhower in the hope, perhaps, that
their mutual Georgia friends could do something to
check that threat.
By the time Sen. Theodore Green became the Chair-
man, he was well into his eighties and showed it. He
would doze off in the middle of testimony, then awake
with a start to ask a witness the same question he had
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THE NEW REPUBLIC
just put to him before dozing off. Even when he stayed
awake, his hearing was so poor that his reactions to
things he imagined were being said caused his devoted
friends to suffer. Until Lyndon Johnson managed in a
most delicate and humane way to bring about Green's
retirement from the Chairmanship, the ex officio Chair-
man was the Committee's professional staff.
To succeed Green, Fulbright had to resign his own
Chairmanship of the Senate Banking and Currency
Committee. Yet this went unnoticed in most editorial
comment of the time; the whole of Fulbright's career
seemed so closely identified with the course of Ameri-
can foreign policy that it was hard to realize that he
had served as a member of any Committee except
Foreign Relations.
For example, the 55-word "Fulbright Resolution of
1943" started the chain reaction by which Congress
reversed its post World War I isolationism and com-
mitted itself to US membership in a world organiza-
tion that was to become the United Nations.
Thereafter, as a freshman Senator, he came up with
the idea of using funds from the sale of surplus US war
property abroad to support a student exchange pro-
gram that came to be known as the :Fulbright Scholar-
ships. And when that source of funds dried up, Ful-
bright year in and year out led the struggle to extract
from Congress the modest appropriations that kept the
program alive. At the time of the Marshall Plan, he
repeatedly urged that the US use economic assistance
as a lever to bring about the economic and political
integration of European nations.
His is an unusual record of prescience - and of in-
dependence. Fulbright had been among the earliest
advocates of rebuilding US conventional forces as an
alternative to a reliance on nuclear "massive retalia-
tion." Long ago, he was urging a shift in emphasis
from military to economic assistance to underdeveloped
nations. He has wanted to put financing of economic
assistance on a long-term basis to allow for the rational
planning of developmental projects. He saw the connec-
tion between the rate of US economic growth and our
capacity to act effectively and simultaneously on the
home and foreign sectors. He has spoken often of ex-
ploring all possibilities for a settlement of Cold War
issues through negotiation instead of bluster. When
the House and much of the Senate in the name of bi-
partisanship was stampeded into uncritically support-
ing the Eisenhower Administration, Fulbright was
among the few who demurred: who warned against
the consequences of sending arms to Pakistan; who ex-
posed the fatuousness of the Eisenhower Doctrine;
who resisted the panic that found expression in the
Lebanon landings; and who repeatedly called the Ad-
ministration to account for the erratic turns of policy
in the management of American interests in the Middle
East, the Far East, and above all, in its relations with
our NATO allies.
By background, then, Fulbright was unique
personal history he brought to his Committee
in the
Chair-
manship. He was also unique in venturing, soon after
he assumed the chairmanship, to redefine the line be-
tween the power of the Executive and the Senate.
Unlike most of his predecessors, Fulbright is convinced
that the Senate is not structurally equipped to play
any major role in the day-to-day management of
foreign affairs. When it tries to do that, it multiplies
disarray at home and confusion abroad. The manage-
ment function, he feels, is by its very nature Executive
in character. The Senate therefore must not only place
itself under a self-denying ordinance when it comes to
the mechanics of diplomacy, but must help arm the
Executive with competent means and authority to bar-
gain, to maneuver, and to seize any fugitive opportu-
nity cast up by the shifting tides of world events.
But by keeping its distance from the Executive, the
Senate can be an effective instrument of public educa-
tion; it can define and clarify the zones of the feasible,
the areas of the negotiable, thereby assuring that the
Executive, when it decides to act, has the fullest support
of public opinion.
When the Kennedy Administration came to power,
there were those who predicted a troubled relationship
between the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and the new President. For one thing - so
the theorizing went - Fulbright had good reason for
harboring a grudge. He had seemed a logical choice as
Secretary of State if experience, talent, and a proven
record of sound judgment were to decide the matter.
He was reported to be a front running possibility in
Kennedy's own mind, only to be passed over in favor
of Dean Rusk. Since Rusk came from "segregationist"
Georgia, Fulbright would gag on the argument that the
incoming President could not afford to face the world
with a Secretary from Arkansas. For another thing - so
the theorizing continued - Kennedy, as a Senator, was
the lowest ranking member on the Foreign Relations
Committee under Fulbright's Chairmanship; and in the
structure of Congressional power, the distance between
the lowest member and the Chairman of a major com-
mittee is roughly equal to the distance between the
earth and the sun.
It was a plausible theory, but it was wrong. Fulbright
actively discouraged his friends who offered to press
his merits on the President-elect. His only other move
came when he learned, to his surprise', that there was
something substantial behind the press reports that he
stood very high on Mr. Kennedy's list. He then got in
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MAY 14, 1962
/touich with Senator Russell - who he knew was about
to call on the President-elect for a general review of
political matters - and asked Russell to convey a mes-
sage: If the President-elect was actually weighing the
idea of having Fulbright as Secretary of State, then Ful-
bright wished to rule himself out of further considera-
tion on the ground that he felt temperamentally better
suited to his work as Chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee.
With this message on the way, Fulbright left Wash-
ington and returned to Arkansas. He was swinging
back toward his Little Rock office and had reached a
point some eight miles out of the city when he received
word the President-elect had been trying to reach him.
When contact was established, Fulbright learned of
Kennedy's intention to appoint Dean Rusk, but along
with this came an invitation, which Fulbright accepted,
to join the President-elect for a talk in Palm Beach.
The meeting, cordial in personal tone, was devoted
mainly to a discussion of foreign problems the Presi-
dent-elect would soon inherit.
No one other than President Kennedy himself knows
the full story of how he came to decide on Dean Rusk,
but there are enough shreds of evidence to suggest
some considerations in Kennedy's mind.
Take Chester Bowles. Even if Bowles' personal tal-
ents for diplomacy had no equal, he could not expect
an appointment as Secretary of State in the Kennedy
Administration. Nor did he look for such an appoint-
ment. He knew that Governor Ribicoff, a Connecticut
man like himself, had a first claim on a Cabinet seat in
reward for indispensable services performed on Ken-
nedy's behalf in the drive for the ig6o Democratic
Presidential nomination. The realistic limit to Bowles'
wishes was an appointment to the second or third
ranking post in the Department.
Averill Harriman was widely experienced. Yet an
incoming Administration, with a hairline election vic-
tory behind it, might not wish to risk a "rerun" of
all the battles of the past, by thrusting into the first
position on the Cabinet a man like Harriman who had
been so prominently identified with those past battles.
(The White House these days, however, sounds with a
different tune. Harriman's performance on behalf of
the President in Far Eastern matters particularly, led a
White House Special Assistant close to Mr. Kennedy
to say: "Don't tell me anymore that age and experience
don't count. I wish we had a hundred Harrimans.")
'Where Adlai Stevenson was concerned, the case ap-
pears to have been much more complex; and Fulbright
figured in it somewhat. All the other likely possibilities
at one time or another expressed the view that Steven-
son had the strongest claim to the post. The opinion
evidently was shared by Mr. Kennedy - up to the West
Virginia primary and a bit afterward.
The story goes that when it seemed that Kennedy
would be knocked out of the fight for the Presidential
nomination, he had gone to Stevenson with an offer
of his own delegate votes if Stevenson was going to bid
for a third nomination. But he wanted to know what
Stevenson actually meant to do. The story continues
that after Kennedy won the West Virginia primary, he
again returned to Stevenson, with the argument that
the most helpful thing he could do would be to make
it plain that he was not a candidate for a third nomina-
tion, and that this would clear the air. On neither occa-
sion did Stevenson speak in what Kennedy considered
to be an unequivocal way. Kennedy's resentment on
this account - reinforced by the last minute confused
drive to get the nomination for Stevenson - is said to
have decided the matter.
Nonetheless, after the Kennedy victory Stevenson
appeared to feel that by experience and by the record
of valiant service on behalf of the Democratic Party, he
had won the right to the appointment. And when he
gathered that this was not to be, he is reported to have
said to Kennedy, "If it is Fulbright as Secretary of
State, I'll take it" - meaning he would accept that Ken-
nedy decision without protest - "but I won't take it if
it's anyone else." He took it, nonetheless.
Respect Tempered with Dissent
No matter how the Rusk appointment came about,
once it was made, Fulbright, who shared Kennedy's
concept of a strongresidential role in the conduct of
foreign policy, never questioned the decision. And in
the months that followed his own relations with Mr.
Kennedy went forward in a spirit of mutual respect,
though he dill nqt always agree with the President. A
cas" a in yoint occurred early this year when the Senate
was to vote on the confirmation of John McCone as the
director. Fuulbri ht decided to vote against
new CIA
the a g}x ment, and in preparation for doing so
~tecj a,brief statement he meant to read in the Sen-
ate.-His stand was based on the assumption that a CIA
Director ranks next in importance to the President in
the-conduct of foreign policy - since the Director has
his hand on the main switch controlling the flow of
facts that enter into Presidential judgments. He would
have to oppose the appointment, he said, since among
other things he didn't know enough about McCone's
attitude toward oreign policy to know whether he was
a preventive war man.
When the draft statement was ready, Fulbright
showed the text to the enateyForeign Relations Coin-
mittee's staff director, Carl Marcy, and asked if he
could see in it anything tiat night hurt the Committee
itself. "No," said Marcy, "and what's more, I agree
with what you say in the statement. But somebody
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could be hurt by it - namely you...." Fulbright subse-
quently read the statement on the floor of the Senate.
He had shown comparable independence months
earlier in the "Cuban Affair."
During the few remaining weeks that were left to the
Eisenhower Administration, Fulbright had been reading
news accounts of camps in which Cuban refugees from
the Castro regime were undergoing military training.
Beyond these, he had no confidential information. Nor
was he ever told anything by any member of the new
Administration. Nonetheless, by the spring of ig61,
the rumors were flying thick and fast that the Cuban
refugees, supported by the United States, would pres-
ently attempt an invasion.
Toward the end of March, Fulbright received a tele-
phone call from President Kennedy that was wholly
social and personal. In the course of the conversation,
the President learned that Fulbright and his wife were
to leave on March 30 to spend Easter with a relation
who lived in Del Ray, Florida. Since Mr. Kennedy
planned on leaving for Palm Beach the same day, he
invited Fulbright to come along.
It occurred to Fulbright that the..,t:rip would give him
a chance to speak to the President about the invasion
stories. So he called in Pat Holt, a staff member of the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and proceeded to
outline the reasons why the L1S, .should.haye,:na. part in
such an invasion, if the rumors about it were true. The
reworked version of the memorandum, dated March
29, ig61, was in Fulbright's pocket when he boarded
the`Presidential plane the next day.
In flight, Fulbright produced the memorandum for
the President to read. The line of argument - though
the text has yet to be released-cart be reconstructed
with some, degree of accuracy as follows:
The problem in Latin America was not with govern-
ments. It was with people, particularly with workers,
peasants and students. If so, the argument that Castro
must go in order to keep his influence from spreading
further among these groups failed to take into account
the fact that Castro's influence had already gone far
beyond the personal appeal of Castro the individual. It
would persist as a doctrine of radical social reform
with anti-Yanqui overtones long after Fidel Castro.
Furthermore, on the provisional assumption that an
attempt would be made by Cuban refugees to over-
throw him, and on the further provisional assumption
that the attempt succeeded, it was worth asking wheth-
er the successor government would be equal to the task
facing it. The evidence about the leaders of the Demo-
cratic Revolutionary Front who presumably would con-
stitute that government pointed to a. discouraging con-
clusion. As an uncomfortable coalition of dissident
interests, it had no men in it who could provide vigor-
ous, progressive government. If they came to power,
and failed on the social and political front, the US
would be blamed; if they were partly successful, the.
US would be blamed, not only in Cuba but elsewhere,
for their shortcomings.
Finally, the political question to one side, what
should the US do if the Cuban exiles failed? Should the
US let the enterprise fail, in the probably futile hope
of concealing the US role in it? Should it respond open-
ly with whatever assistance might be necessary to in-
sure the success of the invasion? Overt assistance
would undo the work of 30 years in trying to live down
earlier US interventions in Latin American affairs. Even
covert support of a Castro overthrow would be in vio-
lation of the spirit, and probably the letter as well, of
domestic legislation and of treaties to which the US
was a party. Besides, covert support would be of a piece
with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United
States was constantly denouncing the Soviet Union.
And the point would not be lost on the world.
Provided that the Soviet Union used Cuba only as a
political and not as a military base, the Castro regime
should be viewed as a thorn in our flesh, not a dagger
in our heart. If so, the real question was whether Cas-
tro could in fact succeed in providing a better life for
the Cuban people; and whether he could do a better
job in this respect in Cuba than. the US and its friends
could do elsewhere in Latin America. It would be a fatal
confession of failure in ourselves and. our values if we
decreed that Castro must go because he might succeed.
What the US had to do immediately, Fulbright sug-
gested, was to address itself to the sadly neglected
political orientation of its economic aid program. Inso-
far as they had political content at all, these programs
had usually been keyed to support a given government
in power, and too often this had been a traditional,
oligarchical government on its way out.
We must sometime stop supporting governments
which paid lip service to social reforms, but which did
not really have it in their hearts. We must perforce deal
with these governments, but if they could not be cor-
rected in their ways, they were going to be overthrown.
We must make it clear to them that the time for con-
version was growing short; that if they were converted
to the cause of genuine social reform, we would help
them; but that if they were not, we did not propose to
be overthrown with them.
So much for the main lines of the memorandum.
When President Kennedy finished reading it, there
was some general talk about its contents, and that was
that. Only not quite. Days later, at four o'clock in the
afternoon, the homebound`` residential plane was taxi-
ing to a stop on its Washington runway when the
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MAY 14, -1962
es dent, turned to Fulbright and remarked that there
was going to be a meeting about the Cuban business at
5:30 in the State Department and tE 91,;wQullike
Fulbright to be present and repeat his arguments.
Atthe meeting, AIlulles 'tor the CIA' poke as
though the Cuban invasion hadalready ~een agreed to.
The generals pronounced the project militarily feasible.
And. so it went down the line with all voices expressing
particular kinds of support - or indifference - until it
came ?Fulbxigl t' . turn. He was the only man in the room
who, didn't owe President Kennedy anything, or didn't
depend on his sufferance. He was op ,osed, ,and when
~nwrFirth^. 45
he was through ugh speaking there. gsFeac silence.
After Cuban fiasco, Fulbright was present at a
meeting in the White House to-t6 ris1'6er how the mess
could be cleaned up. -'He` argued for the line of action
express'e'd"in'the latter portions of his March 29 memo-
randum - a line which seemed later on to find an echo
in President Kennedy's speeches to Latin American
diplomats. As the meeting broke up, the President
turned to the Senator and said within earshot of other
persons present: "You are the only person in this room
who has a right to say, 'I told you so'."
Scapegoat for the Right
Fulbright has not hesitated to forward ideas to the
White House. Last year, he submitted a memorandum
argwi g against any military involvement in taos"An-
other communication, whi'ch' had a bearing on the Ber-
lin crisis, provided the President with precise informa-
tion. about the status of the Vatican City and how it
was created. In another, he promote!a"the idea that the
Dominican government could be made the gem of the
Cari6iean =this, by encouraging the new government
to take over all the Trujillo family holdings and operate
them as a trust for the Dominican people under a quasi-
governmental agency like the TVA or the Port of New
York Authority.
Meanwhile, Fulbright, who had struggled for years
to get foreign aid put on a long-term financing basis,
achieved a legislative breakthrough when he managed
the Senate fight for the Administration's aid bill of last
year. He carried the bill through the Foreign Relations
Committee in substantially the form he wanted. He was
only slightly less successful with the Senate as a whole.
The difficulty was with the House. Nonetheless, enough
margin was left in the Senate version of the bill when
the Conference Committee got through with it, so that
a precedent to build on was established for use in this
year's fight.
All this to no one's very great surprise, attracted
the fire of the Radical Right. And it was in the course
of meeting that fire that Fulbright provided the Con-
gress, the Administration, and the nation with a vision
of where America stood and what was expected of it.
He arose in the Senate on June 29, -196-1, to voice "Some
Reflections Upon Recent Events and Continuing Prob-
lems." Certain people, he said, felt that the lesson to
be drawn from Laos was that the US should be pre-
pared to commit its military strength to the active de-
fense of its policies anywhere outside the Communist
empire. The real lesson, however, was that "nothing
would please the Communist leaders more than to draw
the US into costly commitments of its resources to
peripheral struggles." Nor, as in the case of Cuba,
would we gain anything if we tried to beat the Com-
munists at their own game.
To do this, said Fulbright, would be to miss the point
of the struggle. Ours is not a system to be imposed by
force after the Communist manner. It is a permissive
system; its values "imply our adherence not only to
liberty and individual freedom, but also to interna-
tional peace, law and order, and constructive social
purpose." We seek only to "help others remain inde-
pendent and safe from foreign domination." It is to our
credit that the world judges the US and the Soviet
Union according to a double standard, demanding of
us a higher order of conduct.
The line of reasoning did not end with this speech.
In amplifying his theme not long after, he observed
that in a world piled high with explosive thermonuclear
weapons, the danger of a head-on collision between the
US and Russia could be avoided only on two condi-
tions. First: we must make crystal clear that we possess
both the power and the will to defend our vital inter-
ests; secondly, we must distinguish clearly, in our
minds, between interests that are vital, on which we
can make no concessions, and those that are merely
desirable, on which we can afford to be flexible. "I
firmly believe," he said, "that we have vital interests
for which we would have to go to war if there were no
alternative but surrender. I also believe that thermo-
nuclear war, which, as the Secretary of Defense has
said, could cause the deaths of 50 million Americans,
should not be undertaken in blind frustration or pas-
sion, or in response to provocations that are marginal,
or for any purpose as long as there is a reasonable pos-
sibility of successful negotiations."
If these were fighting words to the wild men on
the Right they were mild compared to what he later
said about "political" Generals.
All last year he had been collecting evidence of
the way military men like General Edwin A. Walker
were using "alerts" and "seminars" to indoctrinate the
civil population on the virtues of blind passion as the
way to solve all problems. Soon he had a mass of mate-
rial in hand - naming names, places, subjects, and
textual content. These he attached to a , ,W', ,xt
dum addressed privately to the Secretary of Defense,
25
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THE, NF.w REPUBLIC
along with recommended changes in. the National Secu-
rity Council Directive of 1958 on the use of military
personnel for propaganda work.
"Perhaps it is far-fetched," wrote Fulbright, "to call
forth the revolt of the French generals as an example
of the ultimate danger" in our right-wing radicalism.
"Nevertheless, military officers, French and American,
have some common characteristics rising from their
profession and there are numerous military 'fingers on
the trigger' throughout the world." The real need is for
a deeper understanding of what the struggle is all
about. "There is no reason to believe that military per-
sonnel generally can contribute to this need, beyond
their specific, technical competence to explain their own
role. On the contrary, there are many reasons, and
some evidence, for believing that an effort by the mili-
tary, beyond this limitation, involves considerable
danger."
Fulbright therefore recommended that the National
Security Council Directive of 1958, authorizing mili-
tary personnel to reinforce the cold war effort by their
own propaganda activities, should be reconsidered
from the standpoint of "a basic error-that military
personnel have the necessarily broad background
which enable them to relate the various aspects of the
cold war effort one to the other." He proposed a re-
examination of the organization, mission, and opera-
tion of the National War College; a similar re-examina-
tion of the relationship between the Foreign Policy Re-
search Institute, the Richardson Foundation, the Na-
tional War College and the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and
long-range studies that could develop a program for
educating promising military officers more broadly.
Then, when the news of his memorandum's existence
led to a Senate row where Fulbright produced the whole
text, he went before the National War College on Au-
gust 21 to speak about "Public Policy and Military Re-
sponsibility." It was not his purpose, he said, "to
silence military officers who choose to express their
own views in public and who are subject to the disci-
pline of their superiors and their own sense of duty
and propriety." His purpose was to check the improper
action of officers of the armed services "who permitted
their prestige and official status to be exploited by per-
sons with extreme views on highly controversial politi-
cal issues."
"In most democratic societies," said Fulbright, "there
are differences in spirit and mood between the profes-
sional soldier and the politician or statesman. The poli-
tician must move tentatively in an atmosphere in which
goals and means often become mixed. Only in the most
general terms does he have predefined objectives, and
excessive precision will only make movement difficult.
... In military arrangements flexibility is a necessary
evil and ambiguity may easily cost lives; in politics
flexibility is the first rule and ambiguity an essential
instrument. In considerations such as these lie the wis-
dom and justification for civilian supremacy and mili-
tary professionalism."
Senators Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond
were aghast. They accused him of advocating "inaction
on all major cold war fronts," trying to make the
"policy of nonintervention undler any circumstances a
national policy," timidly shying away from "total vic-
tory," foolishly paying attention to "an ephemeral
something called world opinion," and making "a clan-
destine assault on the fundamental foundations of our
republic" by seeking to "muzzle" military officers cri-
tical of the Administration's foreign and domestic poli-
cies." The shouts were re-echoed in Arkansas.
But as Fulbright had drawn on his strength in Arkansas
to say what he felt in Washington; he drew on his
strength in Washington to say what he felt the people
of his state had a right to hear about how their inter-
ests were bound up with positions he had taken on
international questions.
"It seems to me," he told the Arkansas Chamber of
Commerce, "that it is the extremists who are 'soft' - not
on Communism, but 'soft' in judgment and 'soft' in
their prescriptions for what we must do to meet the
Communist challenge. Their oversimplifications and
their baseless generalizations reflect the 'softness' of
those who cannot bear to face the burdens of a
continuing struggle against a powerful and resource-
ful enemy. . . . These extremists call themselves
'conservative.' In my judgment their views are not
conservative, they are simply unrealistic. The true con-
servative is one who wishes to conserve the historic
traditional values of our society. He recognizes that the
world does not stand still and that, because it does not,
we must at times modify and reform traditional prac-
tices through orderly constitutional processes of
change, in order to adapt them to new conditions..
Social and economic progress is thus seen to be the
indispensable means of preserving traditional values in
a changing world."
When he had finished one of his recent electioneer-
ing tours through the Southeastern part of the state,
talking in this vein, the Pine Bluff Commercial had an
editorial judgment to pass: "Not at least since Adlai
Stevenson in 1952 has anybody gone :o the voters with
so few apparent reservations, so little condescension to
the popular taste in political issues and so strong an
addiction to the realities of American policy, foreign
and domestic." And, said the editorial, the most re-
markable part about it all is - his audiences "were lis-
tening and being convinced."
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