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Conversion of the Heart. Critics contend that Fulbright's reputation for intellectual honesty can be questioned on one glaring basis: his public position against civil rights legislation and court-ordered school integration. Although he has been perhaps the least belligerent Southern Senator on such topics, Fulbright voted against civil rights bills in 1957 and 1964, raised no objection when Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus defied federal orders to integrate Little Rock public schools in 1957. Fulbright also filed a brief with the Supreme Court in 1958 urging delay in the integration of Arkansas schools. "I would suggest," he wrote, "that the problem of school integration is more likely to yield to the slow conversion of the human heart than to remedies of a more urgent nature"—a sentiment that almost exactly echoes his hopes for the slow conversion of Communism.
The only member of the Arkansas congressional delegation who spoke out against Faubus was Congressman Brooks Hays, who was defeated in the next election by an arch-segregationist. "What could I have done to control the Governor?" asks Fulbright. "What did Brooks Hays accomplish? Hays was lauded as a statesman—but he isn't a statesman any longer. I'm in politics. This is the sentiment of my state. I would not like to retire from politics with the feeling that I had betrayed them."
In late 1960, rumors spread that Jack Kennedy was seriously considering Fulbright for his Secretary of State, and Negro groups began to protest. Many people thought Fulbright's stance on race had knocked him out of consideration. But Fulbright had sent word to Kennedy that he did not feel he possessed the temperament for the job.
Book-Reading Gadfly. Fulbright sees himself as a gadfly. He has never been a member of the Senate's select establishment. As Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson once noted Fulbright's reluctance to join others for a sundown, back-room Scotch and scoffed: "Why, he'd rather sit in his office, reading books." His national reputation is based mainly on his neatly turned, tightly reasoned Senate speeches. He works them over laboriously, then rapidly mumbles through them in a near whisper across the Senate's mostly vacant desks. "The Senate as a forum to speak to other Senators is the most discouraging place in the world," he says. "I feel like a fool mouthing words to an empty chamber." Next day, however, because of his eminent position, his words often get front-page newspaper play and are attentively read the world over.
Fulbright has developed a certain serenity, an almost 18th century trust in reason and argument that delights his admirers and irritates his critics. He hates abstractions, including ideologies that are worshiped beyond and above "the wishes of individual man." He wants to build "bridges" to Communism and warns his countrymen that in an imperfect world, "the best is the enemy of the good"—meaning that the U.S. must settle for imperfect solutions to problems that will not disappear in this or the next generation.