Resources on the Life of Senator Fulbright
The Fulbright Association has assembled selected resources and readings for our alumni and friends interested in learning more about the life and political career of Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995).
J. William Fulbright: The Man, the Mission, & the Message
Video documentary, 2006
This sixty-minute video documentary, directed and produced by W. Drew Perkins, is based on archival material, historical footage, and interviews with Senator Fulbright and his former associates and coworkers in the early 1990s as well as his contemporaries, including Senators David Pryor (D-Arkansas), George McGovern (D-South Dakota), and President Bill Clinton, who worked on Fulbright’s staff for two years in the mid-1960s while he was a student at Georgetown. The Fulbright Center, a non-profit established by Senator Fulbright’s widow Harriet Mayor Fulbright but no longer in existence, facilitated the production of this video in 2006.
FULBRIGHT AND THE PRESS I: LIFE MAGAZINE, “THE ROOTS OF THE ARKANSAS QUESTIONER,” MAY 13, 1966
Life was the most widely read weekly illustrated magazine in the United States in the 1960s. This full-length feature article on Fulbright – referenced on the cover as “Fulbright: Enigma of the Man” – provides a well-illustrated introduction to Fulbright’s biography and commentary that reflects the public perception of Fulbright at the peak of his national prominence and focuses on three disparate facets of Fulbright’s political persona: his accomplishments as a liberal internationalist and educator, his reputation as a critic of presidential administrations and a dissenter, and his record on civil rights. It is a good example of how Fulbright was perceived by the press and by the general public in the 1960s.
J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT, “FULBRIGHT ON THE PRESS” IN JOURNALISM REVIEW, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1975
One year after he left the Senate, Fulbright published an (underexposed) opinion piece in Journalism Review criticizing what he considered to be the moralizing excesses of the post-Watergate press and challenging the frequently advanced journalistic assumptions that his personality and political conduct were either inconsistent or “paradoxical.”
CHARLES KING, “THE FULBRIGHT PARADOX: RACE AND THE ROAD TO A NEW AMERICAN INTERNATIONALISM” IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS, VOL. 100, NO. 4, JULY/AUGUST 2021
In this article, Charles King looks back to contrast “Fulbright’s vision” as an internationalist and educator with “his myopia” on civil rights and looks ahead seeking to resolve the “Fulbright paradox.” King notes that Fulbright’s attitudes on race and civil rights were not a personal idiosyncrasy or individual moral flaw but a reflection of a long-standing tradition in American statecraft that placed a partition between the principles of foreign and domestic policy, which since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson has facilitated the coexistence of the advocacy for liberal internationalism in foreign affairs with the toleration of discrimination and other forms of illiberalism in domestic affairs. King’s vision for a road to a new American internationalism is based on overcoming the partition in foreign and domestic politics that was at the core of the “Fulbright paradox.”
FULBRIGHT AND THE PRESS II: DANIEL YERGIN’S RETROSPECT FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES ON FULBRIGHT AT THE END OF FULBRIGHT’S CAREER IN 1974
After Fulbright lost his bid for re-election to the Senate in 1974, Daniel Yergin published an insightful and critical retrospect on Fulbright at the end of his thirty-year tenure in the Senate in the New York Times (November 24, 1974)– “Fulbright’s last frustration”—and referred to him as “blemished, not necessarily a hero, but a man of perception and courage, a historic figure, a statesman. ”Therein he also contrasted Fulbright’s liberalism and internationalism with how he positioned himself on the question of race and his voting record on civil rights:
NEAL ALLEN, “THE POWER OF THE ONE-PARTY SOUGHT IN NATIONAL POLITICS: SEGREGATION IN THE CAREER OF J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT,” 2019
In this article, Neal Allen provides an overview of how Fulbright’s voting record as an orthodox Southern Democrat on civil rights consolidated his position in the Senate, thus counterintuitively securing his position as a liberal internationalist. It is one of thirteen articles in The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Policy, Power, and Ideology, the most recent comprehensive evaluation of Fulbright based on an international conference held at the University of Arkansas in 2016, edited by Alessandro Brogi, Giles Scott-Smith, and David J. Snyder (University of Kentucky Press: Lexington, 2019).
FULBRIGHT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS
In 2020-2021 the University of Arkansas engaged in a comprehensive evaluation of the legacy and presence of J. William Fulbright – one of the institution’s most prominent alumni – on its flagship campus in Fayetteville, in response to demands made via social media and online platforms by Black students and faculty under the auspices of the hashtag #BlackatUArk and in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the end of May 2020. The following link provides an overview of the key stations in the institutional efforts the University of Arkansas has made to date to better contextualize Fulbright’s divergent legacies; an outline of Fulbright’s political biography and voting record on civil rights; a list of relevant secondary literature on Fulbright; and digital and archival resources from the University of Arkansas Libraries Special Collections, including the Fulbright Papers.
Memory, Commemoration, Crisis: Fulbright, Arkansas, and the Seventy-Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fulbright Program, 1946-2021
Author: Lonnie R. Johnson – published in two parts in Hungarian Review, 4/2021 (December), Part I, and 1/2022 (March), Part II
This two-part article analyses how a disparate variety of factors – ranging from the global war on terror over MAGA and BLM to the Covid pandemic – impacted on the memory of Senator Fulbright and commemoration of the Fulbright Program in the seventy-fifth anniversary year of its establishment. Part I provides an overview of a controversial debate at the University of Arkansas regarding Fulbright’s “presence” on campus and a critical analysis of Fulbright’s legacies. Part II addresses the State Department’s recent revision of the traditional narrative history of the Fulbright Program, including the omission of historical references to the importance of Senator Fulbright’s initial agency in establishing the program.