Word: fulbright
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...knocked Fulbright out of the Senate is a handsome, affable six-footer with a smile that makes voters grin back. Son of a Charleston merchant, Bumpers was always ambitious, but until 1970 he had achieved, besides a country law practice, only a seat on the local school board and the post of town attorney. The latter job came easily; he was Charleston's only lawyer...
...accomplishments, and Fulbright's long and controversial record (see box), Bumpers refused to argue specific issues with the Senator during the campaign. "We're not issue-oriented," Bumpers explained. "You develop too many issues and you get locked into positions." Instead, Bumpers relied mainly upon his personal appeal, which was as folksy as Fulbright's was cerebral. Bumpers assiduously cultivated his image as the candidate of the common man, the same fellow who had gone on camp-outs with the Boy Scouts, served on the school board and, with his mellifluous baritone, led the Methodist Church choir...
...listened to on the floor of Congress," Walter Lippmann once said, "until he has been heard around the world." During his 30 years in the Senate -15 as chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee-William Fulbright has usually caught the ear of the world and finally his colleagues with his prescience, persistence and grasp of great issues. Often he has been nearly alone in his views and often, it turned out, he has been right...
...Fulbright criticized every President from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon for being too doctrinaire or too heavy-handed in his use of American power abroad. The Senator was one of the few to warn John Kennedy against trying to topple Fidel Castro by landing rebels at the Bay of Pigs, and he opposed the armed intervention by Lyndon Johnson into the confused affairs of the Dominican Republic...
...Fulbright's longest and fiercest fight was against the Viet Nam War ("an endless, futile war ... debilitating and indecent"), which he saw as an exercise in stark imperialism. He began badly, agreeing in 1964 to sponsor the Tonkin Gulf resolution at the request of Johnson, an old friend. Ostensibly designed to allow U.S. forces to hit back when attacked, the resolution was interpreted by Johnson as justifying full-scale land combat-the very last thing that Fulbright had in mind. Later he admitted: "I was derelict there...