The Disinvited Guest

By custom and courtesy, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sits at the President's table whenever the White House entertains a visiting head of state. Nonetheless, William Fulbright has been a conspicuous absentee from Lyndon Johnson's last three dinners for foreign dignitaries. Though Fulbright returned to the U.S. Dec. 13 from a less-than-triumphant trip Down Under (TIME, Dec. 13), the Arkansas Democrat was not even sent an R.S.V.P. to the White House banquets for Pakistan's President Mohammed Ayub Khan, Britain's Prime Minister Harold Wilson or West Germany's Chancellor Ludwig Erhard.

Dismissing press reports that he is "feuding" with Johnson, Fulbright insists: "I couldn't stand to go to all those banquets." In fact, Fulbright is off Johnson's guest list because the President resents the Senator's criticism of Administration foreign policy. Fulbright has not only castigated the U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic as "a grievous mistake" but of late has also publicly criticized the deepening American involvement in Viet Nam.

Neither Johnson nor his former Senate colleague is about to engage in a public vendetta. As the President observed privately last week, Woodrow Wilson only aggravated his foreign-policy problems by denouncing antagonistic Senators as a "small band of willful men." In fact, there is far stronger popular support for Johnson's foreign policy than there ever was for Wilson's--whatever Bill Fulbright may think of it.

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