Fulbright: A Biography

James William Fulbright (1905-1995), Arkansas senator from 1945 to 1975, emerges as a deeply contradictory figure in this engrossing, fairminded biography: an internationalist and opponent of McCarthyism and American involvement in the Vietnam War, he was also a staunch segregationist. The son of a hardheaded, Progressive-era businessman and a mother who, as a crusading journalist and reformer, took on the Arkansas political establishment, Fulbright developed a faith in rationality, progress and social engineering. He championed the United Nations, created the international academic exchange program that bears his name, advocated a land-for-peace deal as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and did battle with ``true believers'' as he called McCarthyite anti-communists and white supremacists. Powerful chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1959-1974), he eventually became a chief critic of the liberal internationalist cause he had espoused from the 1940s through LBJ's reign, arguing that it had allied itself with American imperialism and a wasteful military-industrial complex. Woods, a University of Arkansas history professor, interviewed Fulbright extensively, as well as Robert McNamara, George McGovern and others, for this revealing unauthorized biography. Photos. (July)