Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April/May 1995, Pages 49, 89-91
U.S. Obituaries on Senate Leader J. William Fulbright Omit His Mideast Views
By Richard H. Curtiss
Virtually every daily newspaper in the United States has carried a lengthy obituary on former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright, who died Feb. 9. Missing from every account, however, even in "newspapers of record," which devoted a half page or more to the life of this remarkable Arkansas Democrat, was any mention of his strongly felt and often voiced Middle East views, which were a major factor in his 1974 electoral defeat at the height of his power.
The reason was not that he was critical of the role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in propping up the shah of Iran for 26 years after he was nearly deposed in 1953, or the senator's views of what he saw as excessive U.S. arms sales and transfers to Middle East countries. It was his outspoken views of an expansionist Israel and its all-powerful American lobby that were totally missing not only from his obituaries, but also from most mainstream press coverage of this eminent American leader during the final 20 years of his life.
"So completely have many of our principal officeholders fallen under Israeli influence that they not only deny today the legitimacy of Palestinian national aspirations, but debate who more passionately opposes a Palestinian state," wrote Senator Fulbright in his 1989 book, The Price of Empire. "The lobby can just about tell the president what to do when it comes to Israel."
Merely holding these sentiments did not make Senator Fulbright unusual in Congress. It was his willingness to voice them publicly that made him almost unique. And, although those opinions on the Middle East were not quoted in the mainstream U.S. media after he left office, the national Jewish weekly press seemed never to tire of depicting him as an Israel-hater. For example, although challenged to disavow criticism of unconditional U.S. government aid to Israel in the monthly Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, on whose unpaid advisory board the senator served, he never did so. Nor in interviews and informal conversations with the writer, who edits the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs,, did the senator ever mention this harassment by Zionist journalists. The writer knows of it solely from reading in the Jewish weeklies accounts of the conversations between their reporters and the senator.
Such unassuming and uncomplaining conduct was typical of the man who, as much as any other member of Congress, helped shape U.S. foreign policy after World War II. Upon learning of Senator Fulbright's death, President Bill Clinton told White House reporters, "He was a very close friend of mine and if it hadn't been for him, I wouldn't be here today." Two years earlier, at an April 9, 1993 White House party to commemorate Senator Fulbright's 88th birthday, Clinton joked that whenever his venerable Arkansas mentor joined a group of Washington politicians, "he doubled the intelligence quotient in the room."
After Senator Fulbright's departure from the Senate in 1974, he joined the Washington, DC law firm of Hogan and Hartson. Among his clients were the United Arab Emirates and the European and Japanese National Ship Owners Association. First-time visitors to his legal office always came away with two indelible impressions. One was that this highly educated former University of Arkansas president never lost the plain-spoken country charm with which he put visitors at ease.
The second impression was that, although he had been both confidant and gadfly to Democratic Presidents Harry Truman, Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the photos and mementos on his walls focused on only one facet of his extraordinary career—the Fulbright program.
Although he had written six widely quoted books, and is personally identified with a number of national initiatives, Senator Fulbright was proudest of the program he originated during his second year in the Senate and which to date has brought some 125,000 foreign visitors to the United States to teach or study from a few months to an academic year or more, and sent nearly 100,000 Americans overseas on similar missions. A British academic once described the Fulbright program as the "largest and most significant movement of scholars across the face of the earth since the fall of Constantinople in 1453."
The Fulbright program began, the senator never tired of relating with paternal pride, with an unfunded piece of legislation he slipped through without debate during his first term in the Senate only "two weeks after we dropped the bomb at Hiroshima in 1945." The bill was signed into law in 1946 and the first scholarship recipients went overseas in 1948, funded by war reparations and foreign loan repayments to the United States. By the time of his death the U.S. had invested some $1.2 billion in the program which was, as the senator often pointed out, "still less than the cost of one nuclear submarine."
Thirty-five of the countries sending or receiving scholars under the Fulbright program now contribute to its cost. Germany pays more than 75 percent of the expenses of U.S.-German Fulbright exchanges, and Spain pays close to 90 percent of the costs of its Fulbright exchange program.
Among the more than 200,000 "Fulbrighters" who have returned to their own countries from exchange visits to the U.S. are both U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and U.N. Undersecretary-General Yasushi Akashi, President Fernando H. Cardoso of Brazil, Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson of Sweden and Director Geir Lundestad of Norway's Nobel Institute. Among Americans who participated in extended Fulbright visits overseas were composer Aaron Copland, dancer Katherine Dunham, and Nobel Prize winners Hans Bethe, Milton Friedman, Joshua Lederberg, Franco Modigliani and Charles Townes.
There is no way of estimating how many millions of students have taken courses from U.S. professors teaching in their countries on Fulbright grants, or how many American students have been profoundly affected by their contacts with foreign "Fulbrighters" teaching or visiting in the United States. What guided Senator Fulbright in establishing the program was the lesson from his own broadening experience as a Rhodes scholar in England that "you can't go to school in a foreign country without gaining a certain identity and sympathy for it. If you get acquainted with other people, if you realize that they have families and children just like you do, you wouldn't be inclined to go to war with them."
Senator Fulbright attributed his own remarkable career in part to the impact of a Rhodes scholarship on a small-town boy from Middle America. James William Fulbright was born in 1905 on a farm in Sumner, Missouri. When he was one year old, his father, Jay Fulbright, shocked his fellow farmers by purchasing a small-town bank and later a newspaper in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Senator Fulbright attributed his own inquiring mind to his mother who, although she "came from a town of no more than two or three hundred people, was appalled by incuriosity" and "ended up running the newspaper and writing a column for it."
Fulbright entered the University of Arkansas at age 16, became a football and tennis star and was elected president of his senior class before graduating at age 19. "However," he later said, "it wasn't until I went to Oxford at 20 that I'd been east of the Mississippi...I was transformed by the experience." He took a B.A. and an M.A. during three years at Oxford University, and then spent an additional year in Austria and Switzerland learning German and French. He then took a law degree from George Washington University in Washington, DC, where he met Elizabeth Williams of Philadelphia, PA, whom he married in 1932.
After working in the Department of Justice and teaching law at George Washington University, Fulbright returned to his home state to assist in family businesses and to teach law at the University of Arkansas. In 1939, when the university's president was killed in an automobile accident, Fulbright was appointed at age 34 to succeed him. Two years later a new state governor who had been criticized in the Fulbright family newspaper refused to renew Fulbright's appointment as university president, and this indirectly launched his political career. In 1942 he ran against a protégé of the governor for a vacant seat in the House of Representatives, and won. In 1944, when the governor himself ran for the Senate, Fulbright entered the race against him and won again.
It was Fulbright who finally called McCarthy's bluff in the Senate.
A few days after freshman Senator Fulbright slipped through the legislation that made available for future generations the kind of overseas scholarships that had so changed his life, he was reprimanded by a senior senator from Tennessee.
"Young man," the elderly senator said, "that bill that went through here the other day is a great shame. It's a terrible thing to be sending our young boys and girls abroad to be exposed to those foreign 'isms.'"
Said Fulbright later. "It was exactly thinking like this that I hoped the Fulbright Scholarship program would counteract. Most of us in Congress knew a lot more about our states than anything else...If I hadn't had the Rhodes, I probably wouldn't have paid the rest of the world any notice at all."
During his second senatorial term, Fulbright again demonstrated his political courage. He was the first senator to criticize the smear tactics of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy. The Wisconsin Republican, using the new medium of television, had shocked the nation with charges that "communists" had gained control of Hollywood and the media and were taking over the State Department, the Pentagon and other U.S. government institutions. Anyone who criticized his sweeping charges or asked for specific details was branded by Senator McCarthy as "un-American," It was Fulbright who finally called McCarthy's bluff in the Senate, and helped launch the national backlash that eventually made the term "McCarthyism" a synonym for gutter politics.
In 1959, Senator Fulbright began his 15-year tenure as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, the longest in history. He already had criticized Secretary of State John Foster Dulles' withdrawal of financing for Egypt's Aswan Dam, an action that culminated in the 1956 Suez invasion that pitted U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Egypt against Israel, France and Britain. In 1961, Fulbright advised President Kennedy against the invasion of Cuba that turned into the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and in 1965 Fulbright broke with President Johnson over the latter's intervention in the Dominican Republic.
It was during 1963 hearings into the influence of foreign lobbies on Congress, however, that Fulbright allowed himself to be drawn more deeply into Middle Eastern affairs, and perhaps planted the seeds for his ultimate electoral defeat 11 years later.
Senator Fulbright told the writer that he launched the hearings in the wake of reports that lobbyists hired by a Caribbean country had offered members of Congress bribes to increase the country's quota for sugar imports into the United States. He was surprised to find little evidence of successful foreign lobbying for sugar legislation, but a lot of evidence of lobbyists successfully influencing U.S. legislation on behalf of Israel.
"I wasn't conscious of what dangerous territory I was in," Senator Fulbright said. "I didn't know they were subverting the Congress."
The senator's next lesson in Washington realities came when Washington journalists who had praised the liberal senator from conservative Arkansas suddenly lost interest in his activities after his 1963 showdown with the Israel lobby.
A year later, Senator Fulbright became concerned with U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Told by President Lyndon Johnson that North Vietnam had attacked two U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, he allowed his name to be attached as Senate sponsor to a resolution giving the president authority to take military action against the North Vietnamese. Johnson assured him that the resolution would frighten the Vietnamese into backing away from a military confrontation.
However, the resolution had the opposite effect, and Fulbright concluded that what was happening in Vietnam was "a civil war—one that we really had no business getting involved with." Subsequently he described his association with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution as a great mistake, and he became a persistent and outspoken critic of further U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.
It was during this period, in 1966 and 1967, that a young undergraduate at Georgetown University began working in Senator Fulbright's Washington office. One of Bill Clinton's tasks was to check Vietnam casualty lists for the names of Arkansas residents, so that the senator could write condolence letters to their families. By the time Clinton left Senator Fulbright's staff to accept a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, just as had the senator 42 years earlier, Clinton was opposed to U.S. involvement in Vietnam and spent some of his time in England on anti-war activities.
By 1974, Senator Fulbright's opposition to the Vietnam War had made him a controversial figure in the Democratic party. Not wanting his party to lose its senatorial seat, he consulted at length with Democratic leaders throughout the state, offering to step aside if they felt another Democrat was better qualified.
Only after all had offered their support did he file for re-election. However, to his surprise, just before the filing deadline, a new Arkansas governor, Dale Bumpers, also filed for the Democratic senatorial primary and launched an extremely well-funded campaign.
"Had I known he planned to file, I wouldn't have stood for re-election," Senator Fulbright subsequently told the writer. Although he declined to confirm or deny the connection himself, there is little doubt that Bumpers' campaign funding was helped by some who opposed Fulbright's positions during his investigation of foreign lobbies in 1963 and even earlier when, in the 1950s, he had befriended Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and liberal Zionist leader Nahum Goldman and his peace activist son, Guido Goldman, in hopes of encouraging Arab-Israeli peace talks.
Despite political pressures during the campaign, however, Fulbright refused to recant, saying in 1974: "Israel, I am convinced, can and should survive as a peaceful, prosperous society—but within the essential borders of 1967...That much we owe them, but no more. We do not owe them our support of their continued occupation of Arab lands...The Palestinian people have as much right to a homeland as do the Jewish people."
Senator Fulbright was defeated in 1974, but stayed on in Washington. His wife of 53 years, Elizabeth, died in 1985 while he was working on his sixth book, The Price of Empire. They had two daughters, Elizabeth and Roberta, and, at the time of his death, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
In 1988, Senator Fulbright suffered the first of three strokes. In 1991 he married Harriet Mayor, who had been director of the Fulbright Association, a non-profit alumni group. As his health declined, increasingly she represented him at a series of events sponsored by some of the 45 Fulbright alumni associations in various parts of the world.
In 1993, in addition to hosting an 88th birthday party for Senator Fulbright, who by then was confined to a wheelchair after suffering his second stroke, President Clinton also had the pleasant duty of acknowledging, on behalf of the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, a $20 million endowment from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. It was the second gift from the Saudi monarch to honor Senator Fulbright. Clinton, starting in 1989 when he was governor of Arkansas, had lobbied with his former classmate at Georgetown University, Saudi Prince Turki Bin Faisal, and with Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, for a $3.5 million donation to the Middle East studies program at his and Senator Fulbright's home state university. King Fahd made that first donation in the summer of 1992, before Clinton was elected president.
Although it has become part of the folklore surrounding Clinton to attribute his resolve to become president of the United States to his boyhood meeting with President John F. Kennedy at a White House reception for high school student representatives from the 50 states, friends had long believed that the association with Senator Fulbright had a more profound and lasting effect on Clinton's political philosophy, as his remarks upon the senator's death confirmed.
At a 1993 event honoring the senator, the newly elected Clinton awarded his former mentor the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.
"The American political system produced this remarkable man, and my state did, and I'm real proud of it," Clinton said at the ceremony. "He stood up to Joe McCarthy...and made us believe education would lift us up and lift this country up."
Then, taking a cue from the senator's own direct and forceful eloquence, Clinton concluded: "It doesn't take long to live a life. He made the best of his, and he helped us to have a better chance to make the best of ours."
Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
