THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 21, 1995 TAG: 9502210012
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
President Clinton spoke the eulogy last Friday for Sen. J. William Fulbright, the most admirable public servant his home state of Arkansas has produced.
Fulbright's life is a reminder, in a cramped and querulous time, of the optimism, courage and openness that this country has, at its best, represented. A Rhodes scholar, law professor, and college president, Fulbright came to the Senate in 1944, at a time when America faced the choice between world leadership or retreat into isolationism.
He was instrumental in forwarding the creation of the United Nations and conceived the scholarships that bear his name. Thanks to them, tens of thousands of foreign students have studied in this country and tens of thousands of Americans have been educated abroad. That legacy will continue into the future, testament to his belief in the power of learning to bridge cultural differences.
Fulbright will always be identified with the Vietnam War. As the powerful and respected chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, his support of Lyndon Johnson's policies in Southeast Asia was crucial. He gave reluctant assent to the Tonkin Gulf resolution that permitted a wider war in Vietnam, but soon came to feel he'd been misled.
He was one of the first to break with Johnson over the war. Though a committed internationalist, Fulbright thought America was misusing its power. Courageously acting on his beliefs earned him his president's wrath. Ever after, Johnson referred to him as Senator Halfbright.
But many who believed our policy in Vietnam to be misguided were grateful to a man of Fulbright's stature for giving voice to doubts that proved prescient. In his 1966 book, The Arrogance of Power, Fulbright warned the government he served against hubris, the belief that it could impose its will globally. He predicted bitter disillusionment.
Many thought Fulbright wrong, and some damned him as ``a pinup boy for Hanoi,'' but he felt he had a duty to dissent from government actions that he believed to be pragmatically misguided and morally unjustifiable. If not those entrusted with power, who?
Fulbright deserves to be remembered for helping Americans to learn more about the world and the world more about America, and for putting principle ahead of politics in trying to change his country's course when he thought it was going astray. To paraphrase Hamlet's eulogy of his father: He was a man, take him for all in all, we shall not look upon his like again. by CNB