The Professor of Restraint

"He is not listened to on the floor of Congress," Walter Lippmann once said, "until he has been heard around the world." During his 30 years in the Senate --15 as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee--William Fulbright has usually caught the ear of the world and finally his colleagues with his prescience, persistence and grasp of great issues. Often he has been nearly alone in his views and often, it turned out, he has been right.

Fulbright criticized every President from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon for being too doctrinaire or too heavy-handed in his use of American power abroad. The Senator was one of the few to warn John Kennedy against trying to topple Fidel Castro by landing rebels at the Bay of Pigs, and he opposed the armed intervention by Lyndon Johnson into the confused affairs of the Dominican Republic in 1965.

But Fulbright's longest and fiercest fight was against the Viet Nam War ("an endless, futile war ... debilitating and indecent"), which he saw as an exercise in stark imperialism. He began badly, agreeing in 1964 to sponsor the Tonkin Gulf resolution at the request of Johnson, an old friend. Ostensibly designed to allow U.S. forces to hit back when attacked, the resolution was interpreted by Johnson as justifying full-scale land combat--the very last thing that Fulbright had in mind. Later he admitted: "I was derelict there."

Fulbright fought the escalation of the war by calling Administration officials before his committee. Then, while the TV cameras and the nation watched, Fulbright would question his man unmercifully with his soft but resonant Southern voice. When Defense Secretary Melvin Laird testified in 1969 that the Nixon Administration was planning to modernize the Vietnamese army and thus reduce U.S. involvement in the war, Fulbright scoffed: "I have heard this before. It is an old broken record ... You've got to do something radical to change this war or we're going down the drain."

"Fulbright gave respectability to the dissent," says Senator Frank Church, a committee member. Just as Fulbright's hearings clearly helped get the U.S. out of Viet Nam, his pleas over the years for realism and compromise contributed to the foundations of detente and Nixon's visits to Moscow and Peking.

Fulbright's preoccupation with problems abroad overshadowed his record on domestic affairs, which was generally progressive, although the liberals never forgave him for voting against civil rights legislation. He had no other choice, Fulbright would shrug. Coming from a Southern state, it was a matter of survival. In 1954, Fulbright did show real political courage by voting alone in the Senate against funding Senator Joseph McCarthy's Red-chasing sprees. Fulbright called McCarthy "an animal" for his excesses; in return, he was dubbed "Senator Halfbright."

Ironically, although his earlier stands have been vindicated, Fulbright has lost influence in the Senate during the past three or four years. He no longer has the same combative energy, and he has often failed to do his homework. On key issues ranging from arms limitation to trading with the Russians, Fulbright has been defeated on the floor by hard-liners led by Senator Henry M. ("Scoop")Jackson.

Fulbright was a country boy who made it to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar,* and some of his colleagues regard him as an aloof and self-righteous man who never got over the experience. (President Truman once called him "that overeducated Oxford s.o.b.") As time went by, Fulbright grew to prefer the company of the rich and the powerful. He became a confidant of Henry Kissinger and the friend and counselor to Presidents and Kings. In the process, he lost touch with Arkansas, and last week the people of his state let him go.

Fulbright's successor as Foreign Relations Chairman will probably be Alabama's Senator John J. Sparkman, who usually follows the Administration's foreign policy. The committee's hearings will likely be much quieter in the days ahead than when Bill Fulbright was peering over his half-rimmed glasses and trying, in his own stubborn, professorial way, to tell the squirming representatives of a succession of American Presidents how the United States should conduct its foreign policy.

* In 1946, Senator Fulbright sponsored a highly successful international exchange program for students and scholars. The fellowships, appropriately, are known as "Fulbrights."

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