Former Sen. J. William Fulbright, whose stirring criticism of the "arrogance of power" in the Vietnam War made him a hero to activists half his age and anathema to the White House, died Thursday. He was 89.
Fulbright's widow, Harriet, said the former senator died peacefully at 1:15 a.m. while she and her parents were at his side. Fulbright had been at home the past three weeks after being hospitalized previously for other strokes.Fulbright's 30-year Senate career also spurred the creation of the international scholarship program that bears his name.
As he often rubbed President Lyndon Johnson the wrong way with his stances, so had he irritated President Harry Truman, who called him "overeducated," and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who branded him "Senator Halfbright." Others called him "the Arkansas Egghead," not always with disrespect.
"Everybody assumes that just because a fellow comes from Arkansas, he can't read or write," he once quipped. "But that's where they are wrong."
It was lines like these, from his "The Arrogance of Power," that so riled supporters of the Vietnam War: "Gradually but unmistakably America is showing signs of that arrogance of power which has afflicted, weakened and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past. In so doing we are not living up to our capacity and promise as a civilized example for the world. The measure of our falling short is the measure of the patriot's duty of dissent."
That book, an outgrowth of a series of lectures Fulbright delivered at Johns Hopkins University, was published in 1966, as the Vietnam War was building toward its height. Fulbright was then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"We're talking about one of the most significant figures in modern American history, certainly, and someone who is known around the world," said Hoyt Purvis, director of the Fulbright Institute at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Purvis was Fulbright's press secretary.
Harriet Fulbright said a funeral service would be held at the National Cathedral in Washington and that another service would be held at the University of Arkansas. The dates and times have not been set, she said.
Fulbright's legislative career closed in 1974 when he lost the Democratic nomination to the Senate to Dale Bumpers, who was Arkansas' governor and who went on to capture the Senate seat.
After his congressional service, Fulbright, a lawyer, became a lobbyist, representing a number of foreign interests, several of them from Arab countries, from an office in Washington, D.C.
Fulbright's interest in international affairs showed early. After he was elected to the U.S. House in 1942, he crafted a 55-word resolution during his freshman term stating U.S. support for an international peacekeeping organization. The resolution was a forerunner of the United Nations, established in 1945.
In 1946, he sponsored the international program to exchange students and scholars that continues under his name. More than 100,000 people from abroad have studied in the United States and more than 65,000 U.S. students and professors have studied overseas under the program.
Another Fulbright claim to fame: One of the young aides who served on his staff in the 1960s was fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton, then a student at Georgetown University.
In May 1993, President Clinton awarded Fulbright a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor a president can bestow. "The American political system produced this remarkable man, and my state did and I'm real proud of it," Clinton said.
James William Fulbright was born April 9, 1905, in Sumner, Mo. He grew up in Fayetteville, Ark., where his father, Jay, was a banker, farmer and businessman, and his mother, Roberta, wrote a column in the newspaper the family owned.
He attended the University of Arkansas, then studied at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and obtained a law degree. He became a law professor at Arkansas and, in 1939, was appointed university president.
But he didn't last long. In 1941, Gov. Homer Adkins, angry over something Fulbright's mother had written about him, got the university board to ask Fulbright to resign. Typically intransigent, Fulbright said, "Why should I resign? If I'm to be fired, why leave people in doubt?" He was fired.
The next year, he won a U.S. House term, and in 1944, he won the first of five Senate terms, besting Adkins in a runoff after one of the most vicious primary campaigns in state history.