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Overview
J. William Fulbright is the second most successful Oxford-educated politician to come from Arkansas. Author of the Fulbright-Connally resolution, which committed the United States to participating in the United Nations, and creator of the exchange program that bears his name, Fulbright was the longest-serving and most powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Both an intellectual and an internationalist, Fulbright had great influence over the course of American foreign relations in the 1960s and 1970s.Synopsis
A full-scale biography, including the civil rights movement and the major international events of the Cold War.
Publishers Weekly
James William Fulbright (1905-1995), Arkansas senator from 1945 to 1975, emerges as a deeply contradictory figure in this engrossing, fairminded biography: an internationalist and opponent of McCarthyism and American involvement in the Vietnam War, he was also a staunch segregationist. The son of a hardheaded, Progressive-era businessman and a mother who, as a crusading journalist and reformer, took on the Arkansas political establishment, Fulbright developed a faith in rationality, progress and social engineering. He championed the United Nations, created the international academic exchange program that bears his name, advocated a land-for-peace deal as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and did battle with ``true believers'' as he called McCarthyite anti-communists and white supremacists. Powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1959-1974), he eventually became a chief critic of the liberal internationalist cause he had espoused from the 1940s through LBJ's reign, arguing that it had allied itself with American imperialism and a wasteful military-industrial complex. Woods, a University of Arkansas history professor, interviewed Fulbright extensively, as well as Robert McNamara, George McGovern and others, for this revealing unauthorized biography. Photos. (July)