William Fulbright and the Vietnam War: The Dissent of a Political Realist

Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright, longtime chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is remembered as perhaps the most thoughtful, scholarly and eloquent congressional critic of U.S. policy in Vietnam. Reminding us that Fulbright initially supported the use of American troops in Southeast Asia, Berman traces the deterioration of the senator's confidence in President Johnson's Vietnam policy, his skepticism about President Nixon's ""Vietnamization'' of the war, his eventual emergence as a central figure in the struggle to end the bombing in Cambodia and his role in the passage of a war powers resolution. Although the study provides a full account of Fulbright's opposition to the war, public and private, it is concerned in an overall sense with the senator's search for a more constructive American role in world affairs, ``one which placed greater emphasis on political and diplomatic means and less on military force to uphold world order.'' Berman teaches history at the University of Toronto. (March)