"The Time Has Come"

At 91 the oldest man ever to serve in the U.S. Congress, Rhode Island's Democratic Senator Theodore Francis Green had known for months that the chairmanship of the prestigious Foreign Relations Committee was too much for him. Last December Green underwent surgery for cataracts; his eyesight has not really returned. Last fortnight he returned from a Foreign Relations Committee hearing, complained that he had been unable to hear the testimony; his staff discovered that he simply had not had his hearing aid turned up far enough. Last week Green's home-town Providence Journal sorrowfully made an editorial suggestion: "The time has come to say frankly that Senator Green can perform a final and unique service by stepping down as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations." Even as the suggestion was advanced, Teddy Green was in the process of drafting his letter of resignation.

Green's successor: Arkansas' Democratic Senator William Fulbright, 53, who was born in Missouri, went to Oxford with a Rhodes scholarship, served for two years as president of the University of Arkansas, was elected to the House in 1942 and to the Senate in 1944, was one of the 96 signers of the Southern manifesto attacking the 1954 Supreme Court decision on segregated schools. A longtime critic of Eisenhower Administration foreign policy, Bill Fulbright nonetheless wasted no time in getting in touch with State Secretary John Foster Dulles, promised his cooperation.

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