Portrait of the Chairman

FOREIGN RELATIONS

Chairman William Fulbright of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee confided to a friend last week that he had not talked privately with President Johnson since last October. Said the Senator: "I regret that he has no more interest in my views than he has." Fulbright maintains that his decision last month to hold extensive public hearings on Viet Nam reflected no "personal animosity toward the President" but was aimed only at resolving "a much more serious, much more dangerous" conflict than the Administration will acknowledge. In recent weeks he has unmistakably emerged as the leader of congressional opposition to the Administration's policy in Viet Nam.

"For God's sake," says Fulbright, "this is becoming a major war! I assume that this is still a democracy, that the Senate has a role to play in foreign affairs. The hearings are a part of that role." He adds: "The easy way is to go along, to keep quiet. It's not very pleas ant always getting shot at."

Last week it was Fulbright's turn to shoot. Most top Administration officials were either in Honolulu or Saigon, and thus, in his committee's third week of sessions devoted primarily to the war, Fulbright had to make do with Retired General James Gavin and ex-Diplomat George Kennan, neither of whom has served in any official capacity for sev eral years. Both eagerly echoed Ful bright's apprehensions about Viet Nam.

Blind Spot. Bland persistence is the hallmark of the Arkansas Democrat, who was once denounced by Harry Truman as "that overeducated Oxford s.o.b." But though onetime Rhodes Scholar Fulbright, 60, has long been described as an enigma, the trait that has made him a Senate storm center for two decades is not hard to define.

Put simply, it is an emotional and intel lectual reluctance to believe that Communism is a monolithic doctrine of belligerence based on a fanatical dream of world domination.

The blind spot has been manifested repeatedly throughout Fulbright's career. In his first Senate speech in 1945, he termed fear of Communism a "powerful prejudice," declared that "the Russian experiment in socialism is scarcely more radical under modern conditions than the Declaration of Independence was in the days of George III." In his 1964 "Old Myths and New Realities" speech, delivered to a nearly empty Senate chamber, Fulbright urged a more pliant policy toward Red China. As for U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, the Senator condemned Washington's "exaggerated estimates of Communist influence."

A Notable Silence. Despite all his pleas for tolerance of repressive regimes abroad, Fulbright has never voted for a federal civil rights bill and has remained notably silent on the Negro's drive for full citizenship. His public indifference to the race issue has not hurt him in Arkansas, which still tends toward white supremacy. Moreover, most Arkansans seem genuinely proud of Fulbright's prominence and, they assume, power.

If anything, his stock has risen as a result of his feud with Lyndon Johnson, whose civil rights policies are not popular in Arkansas. Said a Little Rock businessman last week: "Bill has laid the gauntlet down and said, 'I'm going to say what I think.' A great body of people around here will defend him for that, even if they feel he's wrong." Adds James Powell, editorial-page editor of the Arkansas Gazette: "Fulbright got a lot of sympathetic reaction to Lyndon's blackballing him socially. That makes a lot of people mad as hell --it makes me mad as hell!"

There is no sign that Fulbright's stand on Viet Nam has hurt him with the home folks. But there is fairly general agreement that should the war emergency deepen, he might be in trouble. Governor Orval Faubus, who is mellowing a bit on the race issue and is being mentioned as a possible challenger for Fulbright's seat in 1968, recently sounded off against the Senator's critical attitude on the Viet Nam issue. Charged Faubus: "There's no question but that it encourages the enemy. They will distort it to show weakness in our position."

"Quitniks." Fulbright's tactics have certainly encouraged the G.O.P. Says Pennsylvania's Senator Hugh Scott in a speech planned for a Lincoln Day luncheon this week: "Today a tiny proportion of Americans counsel a 'quit-nik' policy. These quitniks have found their voice in a bloc of members of the Democratic Party. At this rate, President Johnson may have to sue his own party for nonsupport.

"To these people, I quote the words that I heard exactly three years ago. They went like this: 'Our national strategy, formed upon a bipartisan basis, was to hold the frontiers of freedom by our own main strength until the depleted nations of Europe and Japan could find their feet and begin to share responsibility for the common defense of freedom. Irresponsible partisanship on matters of national interest is not only bad policy: it is bad politics.'" Concluded Scott: "Those are the words of the man who was then and is now the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee."

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