William Fulbright (1905-1995) - 17 February 1995

A man died this past week who meant a great deal, not only to this country, but in strict fact to 130 countries and over 200,000 of their natives. The name is Fulbright, William Fulbright and his death is not to be mourned. He'd lived for 89 years and given the best of himself to his own country and to yours, wherever you are.

For 30 years he was a United States Senator from Arkansas, what we now think of as Clinton country. Indeed, young Clinton, as an apple-cheeked late teenager with a Prince Valiant hairdo, served on the senator's staff for a year, almost 30 years ago. For half his time in the senate, Fulbright was the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as such, was a powerful force for getting the Senate to join the United Nations. It had turned down the League of Nations, remember. He became a continuing pain in the neck to President Johnson, as more and more, month after month, he deplored the American involvement in Vietnam. And at the end, when South Vietnam surrendered and Fulbright's political career was over, he concluded it was an immoral war. Dean Acheson, a former Secretary of State and for a long time a very hawkish supporter of the war added, it was not only immoral, it was a mistake.

But so far I've been talking about a name without a face. You are to imagine then, a trim, rather short but muscular figure, balding over several decades, broad features, but handsomely balanced, a generous mouth, given to sudden switches from broad grin to a mock scowl and twinkling, mischievous eyes: the eyes of a born politician. And at all times, a beguiling, warm, almost resonant southern baritone, equally well constructed for righteous indignation and persuasive charm.

His record in the Senate will go into the history books, though I shouldn't dismiss it without paying him the compliment of mentioning that he was the only senator to vote against any more financing of the communist-hunting committee of the dread Senator McCarthy. Also I ought to say briefly, why he failed – by as long as it takes to look something up in a file – to become Secretary of State. I remember in the sunny, heady December days of 1960, when John Kennedy had just been elected president by a hair's breadth over Richard Nixon, and was down in Palm Beach at his father's mansion, revelling in the sun and the ocean zephyrs and the early exercises of power, which include picking a cabinet. One day the smiling, vigorous, Senator Fulbright came down to Palm Beach, ready to be shown off as the incoming Secretary of State. He never appeared.

Sometime late that morning, somebody in the Kennedy crew suddenly remembered Senator Fulbright as one of the Southern Senators who'd signed a so-called Southern Manifesto, which protested the Supreme Court's six year old ruling ending the segregation of the races. It was enough for John Kennedy to realise he couldn't possibly appoint a segregationist Secretary of State. Kennedy wondered who had blundered. Senator Fulbright stepped out with good grace. In a way this lamentable but, at the time, understandable Southern prejudice, came to be triumphantly mocked by Senator Fulbright's main achievement in life - the invention of the Fulbright scholarships and the launching on the world of a quarter of a million students from every continent, of every race, religion and colour.

How that came about is the nub of his story. First though, I must give you a preliminary glimpse of the political savvy of a young Bill Fulbright that made this congressional sleight of hand possible. Some time – it must have been in the '50s – I decided to follow one United States Senator for a few days, stomping around in the back country of his state in the year he was running for re-election.

Senators, as you know, are elected for a term of six years and it was one of the complaints held against the sitting Senator Fulbright of Arkansas that he never bothered to go home to electioneer until the spring of his sixth year. I picked Mr Fulbright to follow because he was in trouble on three counts. First, as I say, that he neglected his constituents for five years. Second that he gave all his time to foreign policy. And third, that he'd grown too big for his boots, that he was, as President Truman once saucily put it, an over-educated Oxford S.O.B.. Luckily that awful crack was not yet in circulation in Arkansas when I went down there to do a stint of hedge-hopping on a small plane with the Senator, and see how he was doing with the home folks.

But many locals I found were grumbling the same Truman tune. The simple case of this comical slander was that the young Bill Fulbright had won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford and people who didn't like him said therefore, he'd picked up an Oxford accent. Now to anyone outside Arkansas, that would be like saying that Ronald Reagan, after holding half a dozen meetings with Mrs Thatcher, had started to talk exactly like her. The three charges against Fulbright all coincided in the damning remark of an old farmer. "Trouble with Bill Fulbright," he said. "He's gone international."

Two of the small towns we went into were holding protest meetings disguised as caucuses. Oh, I think I'd better say that I went in disguise. To have him seen travelling in the company of an Englishman would have only confirmed their worst fears. I broke away from him when we landed at small airports, I mooched into town in a rather shabby old seersucker suit. I kept my mouth shut and sidled into the caucuses as probably some visiting delegate from a remote, impoverished county. Our first stop was in a town called Hope, which advertised itself as the watermelon capital of Arkansas, if not of the world. Next place was De Queen, which was quite sure it was the chicken capital of the entire South. The assembled farmers in both places made it plain, first that they were the victims of falling prices for their commodity and second, that if Fulbright didn't do something radical, they'd send him back to his home town in November.

At both meetings the Senator was transformed from the elegant, courtly Southerner that I'd known. He took off his jacket, he bedraggled his tie and he put on one of the most moving performances I have ever seen from a southern politician, not excluding the master tearjerker, Lyndon B Johnson. Mr Fulbright listened humbly, he shook his head, he wiped a tear, he then held forth in his best Arkansas country traveller accent that he was going back to Washington, and giving his heart and mind exclusively to the salvation of chickens and watermelons. When he left, all was forgiven. As he waved goodbye, they moved to touch him, as he might be Mahatma Gandhi.

He was triumphantly re-elected.

Now let's go back to his green days, his first term in the Senate, late summer of 1945. The Second World War just over and the Congress was turning back to the home front and its needs. It would be two years before they came to appreciate the scale of the devastation of Europe and moved to repair it through the inspired generosity of the Marshall Plan.

One of the first orders of business about post-war Europe was what to do with the wealth of Army materials: trucks, food, blankets, jeeps, telephones, vast deposits, all over Europe of American services and supplies. The Europeans were bankrupt and couldn't pay for them. What to do. A bill was proposed to sell them off to the Europeans who would pay by letters of credit, promissory notes, barter exchange and so forth, and the act was about to go sailing through the Senate along with a harmless amendment or two – some pork concession to this senator and that – before it was sent on to the house.

All ready, the gavel raised. There was a freshman Senator – they are not expected to shoot their faces off in public in the first year – and this man, name of Fulbright, had been biding his time. He was not going to risk proposing an amendment to be debated but he waited to make use of a custom, so casual, that it's often not brought up: a calendar call, a routine question. Calendar call anyone for some matter that won't even require a vote. Up spake the guileless, humble new senator from Arkansas. Might it not be good idea to use one or two of the I.O.U.s to pay for all this Army debris, to subsidise a few American students wanting to study abroad?

By Jiminy, great idea. It was passed without debate by unanimous resolution. A worthy cause, proposed by, who is that fella? Nice do-gooder from Arkansas, It now went to the House, where it might not seem so harmless. One congressman grumbled, this is no time to be sending our fine American boys back to Europe. They might become infected with some of those isms. There was another Mid-West congressman, similarly suspicious, and then something struck him. He shouted: "But my God, it's not going to cost us a cent." It was passed at once as an Amendment to the Surplus Property Act 1945, and the thing took off with six young Americans going to China. Today less than a third of all Fulbright scholars are American. As I say, just touching a quarter of a million students from 130 countries, Senator Fulbright went international in the biggest way. So how did the scholarships play down in Arkansas? In De Queen, the chicken capital of the South, when they heard that Senator Fulbright had bought and was driving a Mercedes. "Well of course," he said. "It's only tactful. West Germany is the leading importer of Arkansas chickens".

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