(6 of 9)
On all this, Fulbright based some specific suggestions that he feels the Administration has since more or less followed. Among them: increased trade with Communist countries, a conciliatory attitude toward Panama, and relaxation about Castro, whom the U.S., argued Fulbright, was only building up through its hostility ("We have flattered a noisy but minor demagogue by treating him as if he were a Napoleonic menace"). In his pronouncements on Cuba, Fulbright can claim credit for having raised a lonely voice against plans for the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, which Jack Kennedy later acknowledged by saying: "You are the only person who has a right to say, 'I told you so!' " Today Fulbright feels, perhaps too optimistically, that Castro's influence in Latin America is withering.
The Link. As the current foreign-policy debate progresses, it may seem odd that liberals—so strongly interventionist before World War II and so strongly internationalist after World War II—talk about American "self-interest" in a manner that in some quarters now means "isolationism." Yet this is only a reversion to form. With the exception of the 1930s, when distaste for the Nazis and sympathy for the Soviet Union made interventionists of the liberals, they have usually been against heavy foreign commitments.
Fulbright has always been an internationalist, and yet he had every chance to become the opposite. His journey from the Ozarks to the international scene, his education in foreign affairs tells a great deal about what, in his Miami speech last week, Fulbright hailed as the key link between U.S. domestic politics and foreign relations.
Fulbright, now 59, grew up in the small (pop. then about 5,000) town of Fayetteville in the Arkansas Ozarks, rode a horse three miles to school, milked the family's lone cow each day. His parents were wealthy. His stern, business-minded father Jay owned or held major interests in the town newspaper, a lumber company, a bank, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, a railroad, an ice company, and a hotel. Fulbright's mother led most of the town's civic activities, wrote a daily newspaper column on any topic that popped into her head.
Ozarks to Oxford. He entered the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville at 16, because his father had given him a grim choice of how to spend his summers: work in the Coke plant or go to summer school. He chose school, earned strings of A's, also starred as a halfback with the university's Razorbacks.
Fulbright's awareness of the world beyond Arkansas came only when he shifted from the Ozarks to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. At Oxford's Pembroke College, he took a master's degree in political science and history, toured the Continent, later got a law degree (ranking second in a class of 135) at George Washington University.
While teaching law part-time at the University of Arkansas, he impressed the board of trustees, some of whom were personal friends. When the university's longtime president died in an automobile accident in 1939, the trustees picked Fulbright, only 34, to succeed him. But two years later, when his redoubtable mother attacked Governor Homer Adkins in her column, the board, dominated by the Governor, swiftly fired Fulbright.