Amiable Confusion

The Democrats left their first full-dress Senate attack on the Eisenhower Administration to Arkansas' J. (for James) William Fulbright, 53, the white knight of Democratic liberals--so white, in fact, that he is politically a segregationist with a record of opposition to last session's civil rights bill and of obdurate silence on Little Rock and his own state's governor, Orval Faubus. With such a background, Rhodes Scholar Fulbright chose an odd subject: education, and the federal education assistance bill before the Senate.

His main political points: 1) President Eisenhower is, like President Buchanan, "a tired and amiable man with tired policies [who spreads] the contagion of his own confusion"; 2) the Administration has "dulled" the nation as to the U.S.S.R.'s strengths and the U.S.'s weaknesses with "sugarcoated half-truths"; and 3) the U.S. has developed a way of life in which truck drivers, bricklayers and factory workers are often better paid than professors, in which "an Elvis Presley makes more than the President."

The U.S., Arkansan Fulbright cried, is "fat and immobile," apparently forgetting Little Rock's sinewy revolt against the desegregation order of the Supreme Court. And although he did not doubt that the U.S. would meet the challenges of missiles and satellites, he thought that the real solution lay in "a true revival of learning . . . We should reform our basic ideas about elementary and secondary education. We must emphasize the rigorous training of the intellect rather than the gentle cultivation of the personality, which has been so popular in recent years . . . Courses in life adjustment and coed cooking will not do the job."

Next day the Washington Post and Times Herald hailed him: "An inspiring plea ... It is hard to disagree with Mr. Folbright." Added Adlai E. Stevenson: "I made the same point in two campaigns." But the New York Times was not bemused: "The speech went as far back as Sparta and Athens to illustrate some of its points, but perhaps the most remarkable point was that a Senator from Arkansas could speak so long and so eloquently . . . without once mentioning or discussing Little Rock."

Wrote Oregon's Democratic Senator Richard Lewis Neuberger, in a newsletter to his constituents this week: he was sorry that he could not present some rosebush slips to the President on behalf of the Portland Rose Festival, but the ceremony might tax the President's "definitely limited" strength. Mourned Neuberger: "We have a President who is not a well man."

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