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.

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.”

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.”

After Fulbright lost his bid for re-election to the Senate in 1974, Daniel Yergin published an insightful and criticalretrospect 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:

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).

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 on-line 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.