Fulbright: Thirty Years of Sagacity

...To dissent is to be as American as Thoreau, and will cause foreigners to respect us...

...executive should ensure that law and democracy prevail...

...Over the last generation, he summarized, we have tried in every way to help humanity and the world...

...The factionalism that had always been a significant part of native life became more extreme under the stress of social breakdown, and the whites found it convenient to cultivate these factional divisions in order to obtain what they wanted —sometimes land but also roads through Indian territory and the right to establishschools and mission stations...

...For those who shared this pristine vision of human nature any means were employable...

...Bumpers crushed Fulbright 65 to 34 percent at the polls, not because he challenged Fulbright on vital issues, but because he could sport an affable smile...

...Fulbright respected his own idealism...

...The cold war is over, Fulbright announced...

...his very name shone Voltaire-like for the cause of pure reason and humanity, and a prestigious fellowship for international cooperation bore his name...

...Needless to say, both were extreme moralists, although Fulbright, unlike Wilson, was extremely moralistic about nothing in particular—and this differentiates their approach to foreign policy...

...Although in the forties he had urged leniency toward the Soviets, Fulbright had become such a determined cold warrior by Eisenhower's first term that he criticized the "stagnation" in our foreign policy which was seriously jeopardizing national security...

...With Kennedy's accession to the Presidency, Fulbright hit upon the answer—we simply remove all formal Senate influence...

...but unless Congress reasserted its powers, consitutional democracy in the United States would be destroyed...

...and one third of the population lives in municipal housing...

...Fulbright's internationalism had been eclipsed for more than a decade by cold-war rhetoric and paeans to executive power...

...that wars are never "a clash between good and evil" so much as "simply a clash between conflicting interests...

...He proposed that the United States adopt the British system, where a new regime is constituted whenever the majority shifts in Parliament...

...Of course, yet another question arises: if democracy is under attack, doesn't the act of defending it, i.e., militarism, automatically destroy it...

...With the heat on the President in 1947, Fulbright defended Truman's authority: "Under our system of government, the President has a particular responsibility in our foreign relations...

...Our spirit had gone soft...

...He explained why he favored limiting President Nixon's maneuverability in foreign policy by restrictive legislation...

...Late in his career, Fulbright even asked whether our failure to answer these questions—our lack of belief—was not in fact the deepest problem of all...

...Sovereignty, the chief obstacle to peace, must of course be eliminated —anything less will doom humanity to deadlier and costlier wars...

...And what we need isn't unity...

...But they often found that there was more than one group of leaders...

...So-called pragmatists, who like to think of politics as the art of the possible, are usually unaware that what at any time is deemed "politically possible" is itself a product of the prevailing climate of ideas...

...Moreover, the process continueswith the return of the native American as a symbol of the supposed viciousness of civilization and the identification of the Indian as the first ecologist whose supposedly judicious treatment of the continent should stand as an indictment of civilization's prodigal waste of its natural resources...

...The source of an effective foreign policy under our system is presidential power . . . . As Commander in Chief of the armed forces, the President has full responsibility, which cannot be shared, for military decisions in a world in which the difference between safety and cataclysm can be a matter of hours or minutes...

...Well, there will be no conflict, of course, since no man ever really wanted conflict in the first place...

...At first he accused Eisenhower of lack of leadership, but then balked at the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1958, which would authorize the President to use American armed forces as he feels necessary to protect Middle Eastern nations threatened by communism...

...Since unilateral actions breed rivalry and jealousy among nations, Fulbright favored internationalizing everything from U.S...

...This last point was expressed again several months later (August 1961) in an address to the National War College...

...He has access to information which, in the nature of things, we cannot have, and he is in constant touch with members of the State Department, who are directly charged with conducting our affairs with foreign nations...

...at other times, we must eschew force itself as a violator of peace...

...Fulbright, on the other hand, looked first to the interests of the world and only secondarily to the United States...

...men everywhere want fellowship and the respect of their fellow men...

...The Senate as well as the "people" must be compelled to agree...

...Something finally spoiled the words of Senator Fulbright, Rhodes Scholar, as they made their way to the ears of his native South...

...What will the world be like when the internationalist ethos prevails...

...If proper allowance is made for the time lagbetween the expression of an idea and its universal acceptance, the truth of this becomes immediately apparent...

...But, in the end, Fulbright felt that he had been betrayed by both President Johnson and President Nixon...

...People talk of "our free National Health Service," oblivious of the fact that it is financed by taxes which hit just about everybody...

...A creative foreign policy...

...It was filled with dreadful predictions, and a bitter sense that the world is so much more sordid than it need be...

...Clearly the Executive Branch must have a free hand in finding an acceptable solution to the Berlin question...

...Fulbright was silent here, for though he delighted in the manufacture of laws, he nonetheless distrusted the values which law must embody...

...He stood not for internationalism but for parochial self-interest, an aspect of human nature which Fulbright found as incomprehensible as it was insurmountable...

...Then it is the first person's duty to exercise his great tolerance and marvel at the inexhaustible variety of mankind...

...He shared in the uphill fight of the UN idealists after World War H, triumphed in the interventionist Kennedy Administration, and by the end of our Vietnam involvement had transformed enlightened respect for alien cultures into something near frenzied adoration...

...Fulbright differentiated these two cases by keen application of a noteworthy principle: that the president can assume any policy making power only when it is the right thing that he do so...

...In the late fifties, he suggested that Americans meet this challenge by a massive public education program...

...Senators should dissent...

...Soon after the Vietnam War he was convinced that law and democracy are value-bound, just one good way among many of doing things...

...During the Senate debate he conceded that the resolution would authorize "whatever the Commander in Chief feels is necessary," including the landing of large armies in Vietnam...

...the Russians have reappraised their adventurous policies and have tacitly agreed to accept the United States' strategic superiority...

...But each time we have failed through the overuse or abuse of power...

...The Senate was still of some importance, but only insofar as it could "explain and rationalize the burden which the people bear . . . help them to the degree of understanding which will compel their agreement...

...Though Congress may be slow and inefficient, it posed no threat to the liberties of the American people, acting as their true voice...

...The Arrogance of Power (published in 1966) proclaimed by its title Fulbright's dawning awareness of the real problem...

...Late in his career, Fulbright complained that "the values of life which were clear to the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers have become dim and fussy in outline...

...The ability of a nation to focus its powers depends upon the people," and only a single, charismatic leader can give the people a "zest for action...

...foreign aid (removing its demeaning implications for underdeveloped countries) to giving our nuclear secrets to the rest of the world (secrets make others suspicious...

...That the Conservatives have not only been unable to prevent Britain's twentieth-century drift to collectivism but have actually encouraged it at times (particularly during the 1930s), is a remarkable tribute to the power of ideas in molding societies and nations...

...But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil...

...Ironically this very acquiescence in the white man's identification of the tribe with the native polity was used by whites to force evacuation of the southern tribes in the 1830s...

...Expertise, Not Emotion Nothing worried Fulbright so much as the growing technological and political complexity of foreign policy and the seeming inability of the public and the Senate to reach informed judgments...

...for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest...

...Too many people in our nation," he wrote, "don't believe anything with conviction...

...In his most quotable passage, he wrote that " . . . the sovereign nation itself is the most pervasive of the old myths that blind us to the realities of our time...

...Consequently, after the 1946 elections swept in a Republican Congress, Fulbright presented his first theory regarding the relationship of the Congress to the Presidency...

...at the national level we must adopt a nonpartisan foreign policy which could be debated rationally without divisive party politics...

...A Man of Ideas Years passed before Fulbright realized to what extent ruthless power and Byzantine politicking had corrupted the American spirit...

...When debate arose over Truman's right to send troops abroad in 1951, Fulbright argued: "If in the exercise of his best judgment the defense of this country requires the sending of troops to Europe, he [the President] has the power and duty to do so .. . . It would be dangerous for our future welfare to change the underlying principle simply because a strong minority or even a majority of Congress may lack confidence in the wisdom of the Executive in some particular instance such as the present one...

...Fulbright warned that America had become a presidential dictatorship—at least in foreign policy...

...Government after government cheerfully plunges into the quicksand of statutory control on wages and prices, and ministers stump up and down the country delivering patronizing sermons about "backing Britain" and the necessity of curbing "sectional greed...

...His first years were spent helping to give birth to the United Nations, an enterprise which in later years failed miserably in meeting his high expectation...

...After the outbreak of world war, he ridiculed "appeasement idiocy and isolationist nonsense...

...Perhaps it is best that we serve internationalism by relinquishing our effort and removing our awful presence from the globe...

...The most dangerous threat to presidential authority was the system of checks and balances which "hobbled the President by too niggardly a grant of power...

...Fulbright, Humanist Looking back a few years, Fulbright praised Johnson's congressional support of Eisenhower: "It seems clear to me that in foreign affairs a Senate cannot invite or force large events or substitute its judgment of things for that of the President, without seriously jeopardizing the ability of the nation to act consistently, and also without confusing the image and purpose of this country in the eyes of others...

...What we need isn't experts, he declared...

...On the other hand, he wondered whether we were ever justified in defending democracy abroad, in destroying indigenous political traditions...

...Not, indeed immediately, but after a certain interval...

...Fulbright was, almost exclusively, a man of ideas...

...THIS MONTH, Senator J. William Fulbright packs his bags and returns to Arkansas, and with his political demise, the "internationalist" position on foreign affairs has lost its longest-lasting spokesman...

...is not necessarily one which aims for immediate approval...

...The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (1964) carried Fulbright's complete sponsorship...

...Though our constitutional machinery might have been well-suited to a remote agrarian republic in the eighteenth century, he wrote, America's pre-eminent political and military power demonstrate its hopeless inadequacies...

...Soon after the Second World War, he believed very earnestly that law and democracy were sacred the world over, that "the evil and insidious materialism of the Communists is a greater danger to us than their . guns," and that a strong U.S...

...Isn't it possible for us to want to create our world with the same fanaticism as the Germans want theirs...

...Closer to home and to his colleagues, precisely because of his great humanity, Fulbright's demeanor was thought to be chilly and aloof...

...Fulbright's argument was formidable...

...At the beginning of his career, he resembled Wilson in the substance of his ideals and the rhetoric he used to advocate them...

...what we need is a rekindling of the sacred American tradition of dissent...

...This consensus, in a time of overriding danger, must of necessity consist in unified support of our elected leaders and especially the President of the United States, the Commander in Chief of our armed forces . . . ." Or, as Fulbright insisted in 1963, "We must, and should, trust whatever President is in the White House...

...Fulbright (as we know from his literature) was well aware of the similarities between Woodrow Wilson and himself...

...The result...

...Government spends half the Gross National Product and accounts for almost half of total investment...

...Then, with Kennedy's Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty, the old ideas enjoyed a rebirth...

...Thus, our duty in this world is to "break through the ideological passion and national animosities that fill men's minds.with destructive zeal and blind them to what Aldous Huxley called the simple human preferences for life and peace...

...The elementary economic notion that all resources are scarce and must therefore as far as possible be rationed between competing uses by the price mechanism, is but feebly grasped...

...Fulbright also began here his long retreat—though executed with remarkable enthusiasm—back toa more "traditional" position on Senate duties...

...He will long be remembered for believing anything with conviction...

...Both came from the South, both were proud of their academic distinctions, and both advocated a world order based on what Hans Morgenthau has termed "moral utopianism...

...He believed that the imposition of international law binding on all peoples would somehow coincide with a fundamental change in human relationships...

...Policy decisions ought to be guided by expertise, not emotion, said Fulbright...

...How could we ever have a nonpartisan foreign policy...

...It was a boldly innovative scheme, but it met with little reaction, except a few words from Truman about that "overeducated Oxford s.o.b...

...More significantly still, the very currency of political debate in Britain is loaded with pro-collectivist connotations...

...Fulbright wondered whether we could ever be justified in not defending democracy abroad, in not helping other people join the community of free nations...

...At times, Fulbright would say, it is necessary that we hunt down the violators of peace the world over with all the force we can muster...

...Fulbright concluded that the Bricker Amendment, which would limit the treaty-making powers of the President, would "effectively throttle the President's conduct of foreign relations...

...For several years to come, Fulbright clung doggedly to his trust in the Presidency...

...What if trouble arises, say, when one person objects to another's "personal growth...

...Phrases like the "Welfare State" and "the public services" are used in such a way as to suggest that anything which is a service is necessarily altruistic and as such must be provided by government...

...He opposed the Bay of Pigs invasion, and though he kept his opinion on this matter private, his Old Myths and New Realities (published in 1964) made it clear that he was shifting toward a broader, international understanding of the world's problems...

...a quarter of the total working population is employed by public bodies...

...After all, he cautioned, all values are relative and "there is no greater human vanity than the assumption that one's values have universal validity...

...The natives' acceptance of the white man's conception culminated in the formal establishment of an Indian state by the Cherokees in 1827...

...Americans would be placed at the mercy of naked executive power if they granted the President this virtual blank check...

...Men everywhere," answered Fulbright, "want to be free from hunger and disease, from insecurity and fear...

...The Axis powers fought World War II because they believed they could win by employing the old policy of "one-by-one" (later known as the "domino theory...

...What laws and what sort of societal order will all this require...

...Abroad, no U.S...

...Their policies were neither creative nor enlightened...

...The lasting disappointment of Fulbright's career was the manner in which two consecutive Presidents perversely confused their national executive power with the "old myth" of "national sovereignty...

...Fulbright was there from the beginning...

...And who weakened our national morale with the internecine McCarthy hearings...

...There are some signs that the Indians might discover the significance of the white man's tendency to use them for purposes of collective expiation of guilt, though it must be said that the discovery is only likely to increase their anger and to add one more way in which they have been victimized by the white man...

...Students should dissent...

...There is utter consistency, however, in his insistence on the vision, the idea, the expectation of ever-arising "new realities" which are perceived only by those few who are pure in mind ("expert") or pure at heart ("moral...

...Here Fulbright (treading knowingly, no doubt, in the footsteps of Ruskin) contrasted the good "humanistic" strain of our national character against the bad "puritan" strain—and then decided that he is one of the few who represent the former...

...He took care that all his decisions were deduced from impeccable first causes...

...Most obnoxious of all, terms like "excess profits," "social justice," and "fairness" are bandied about with little thought given to the inherently subjective valuations they reflect...

...Indeed he found specific actions and events rather distasteful (it relieved him to think that only particular nations, not the world as a whole, can be held responsible for everything that actually occurs...

...What do men really want...

...He pointed out that the world had grown so interdependent that conflicts in any part of the world necessarily involved the rest...

...Fulbright generously avoided this pitfall...

...Political affairs, he declared, can be reduced to the relationships between men, and it is axiomatic that men, in their natural state, will choose love instead of hate and peace instead of war...

...Weren't they all Senators...

...Madfhen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back...

...J. Woodrow Fulbright Ultimately, in Fulbright's career, what was said remains far more important than what was done, and Fulbright talked incessantly about the United States' preparation for a dawning international order and world government...

...Government agents went to those they supposed to be the tribal leaders when they wanted land...

...But of course this is what Fulbright, humanist and internationalist, always wanted to happen...

...the chance of personal growth and development...

...He had wished that the wisdom he pronounced as Committee chairman, as lecturer, and as paperback writer could be sweeter to the voting public...

...Urging that the United States wage a "creative-aggressive war" rather than merely a defensive war, Fulbright exclaimed, "If we deny the Nazis their kind of world, isn't it our obligation to the world to create a better one...

...He, Fulbright, had supported their authority, but they, in their turn, had squandered it...

...A year later, Fulbright affirmed the President's privileges during the Berlin crisis...

...This partly explains why Wilson could send troops to Mexico or Nicaragua while Fulbright was offended by our intervention in the Dominican Republic crisis...

...The Senate "has the responsibility to review the conduct of foreign policy by the President and his advisors, to render advice whether it is solicited or not, and to grant or withhold consent to major acts of foreign policy...

...He advised President Johnson that "An effective foreign policy is one which concerns itself more with innovation abroad than conciliation at home...

...American business in Latin America was qualitatively different from German or British business...

...He suggested that perhaps a Senator should talk things over with the home crowd and push their whims, rather than his own, in Washington, D.C...

...Ordinary citizens and Congressmen are absorbed in local issues—and their partisan politics and amateurism can endanger policy...

...The Crippled Giant (1972) was a vindictive, humorless book...

...Statistics, however, only tell part of the story...

...Wilsonian idealism held that what was good for the United States would best serve the interests of the world...

...This was an emerging "new reality" which Fulbright first described in 1961...

...But it wasn't sweet, at least when Arkansas voters finally realized what their junior Senator was up to...

...Only the President, and those expert enough to serve him, can provide the necessary guidance...

...The price of survival requires that we abandon some of our "democratic luxuries" of the past...

...Senator was better known...

...what we need is a moral and decent citizenry which can guide its leaders...

...I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas...

...Fulbright attacked the abandonment of the Senate's "advice and consent," an abandonment which corrupted our constitutional system of checks and balances...

...Fulbright condemned extremist dissenters because "now, as in the past, the success of our national policies must be rooted in the basic unity and consensus of the American people...

...They did not follow his advice...

...Happily, the animosity between Truman and Fulbright was soon forgotten...

...BRITAIN HAS BEEN RULED by Conservative governments during roughly three quarters of the last forty years, yet puzzlingly enough, she begins more and more to resemble the prototype Socialist State...

...But like any good philosopher, Fulbright learned to doubt...

...A measure of the white man's success in victimizing the American Indian is that the tribe is now the basis of native social order and that the concept of Indianness is more and more accepted among the native populace...

...Creative Aggression Fulbright was elected to the House in 1942 and to the Senate in 1944...

...Furthermore, the Senate should engage in molding long-term policy, while the Senate Foreign Relations Committee performs the especially important task of linking diverse opinions with the policy makers in Washington...

...Last June he was challenged for his seventh term by Dale Bumpers, the small-town lawyer from Charleston, Arkansas who beat Winthrop Rockefeller for the governorship in 1972...

...As Keynes put it in a famous passage in The General Theory: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist...

...Because, he argued, a deadlock between these two branches would jeopardize the consistency of our foreign policy, President Truman should resign and appoint a Republican Secretary of State...

...Fulbright was more broad-minded...

...After all, he asked, who was responsible for crushing Wilson's League of Nations Resolution...

...Both men extolled the virtues of "democracy," but to Wilson democracy was a patented item with tangible attributes —including certain political freedoms, a certain kind of elective machinery, and so forth...

...This he deeply regretted, of course...

...We cannot say, he told us, that North Vietnam is any less democratic than our own nation, because we don't really know how Vietnamese democracy works, nor do we understand its violent and despotic and bloody history...

...Indeed, looking back over his career, we can find scarcely any consistency in Fulbright's means of formulating policy, his means of executing policy, or his attitudes toward any one nation...

...In 1947, for instance, the disillusioned Fulbright declared in debate that attempting to act through the UN was like not acting at all...

...By the end of his career, his imagination and sophistication had taken him further than Wilson had ever dared, and his extreme moralism had turned back upon itself...

...fifteen industries are nationalized at least in part...

...With such sentiments still lingering, Fulbright was removed from public office last year...

...To him, democracy was a mysterious and many-sided gem whose inner meaning we will never comprehend...

...and that values themsel/es—"the political implications" here are "enormous," Fulbright believed —are not acquired "as the result of an independent intellectual process, but largely as the result of an accident of birth...