Fulbright: A Biography

Description

J. William Fulbright was the second most successful Oxford-educated politician to come from Arkansas. Author of the Fulbright-Connally resolution that committed the United States to participating in the U.N., and creator of the exchange program that bears his name, Fulbright was the longest serving chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This volume describes the family dynamic, educational process, and environments--Arkansas, Oxford, Washington, D.C.--which produced this remarkable man. It delves into his complex attitude toward race and details Fulbright's role in the civil rights movement. The narrative includes the major international events of the Cold War era--the Suez Crisis, the U-2 incident, the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, Vietnam, the ABM controversies, the Arab-Israeli conflict--and Fulbright's role in them. Woods explains Fulbright's shift from a champion of executive power in foreign affairs to a defender of congressional prerogatives.

"...the exhaustive research, clear prose, and mature scholarship make this book the definitive account of Fulbright's life." H-Net Book Review "...Woods's excellent biography provides a detailed account of Fulbright's life and political career. Gracefully written and well researched, Woods's study is sympathetic to Fulbright but independent in its judgements." American Historical Review "...a superb life-and-times biography of one of America's leading senators of the twentieth-century, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas...Wood's study is likely to remain virtually definitive for many years to come." Georgia Historical Quarterly "An engrossing biography..." Foreign Affiars "...Woods wisely resists the temptation to make the crooked lines straight. ...Wood's biography--which, like Fulbright's career, is long but never dull..." The New Republic "Because Fulbright has been one of the most important and controversial figures in 20th-century American politics, and certainly, foreign policy, this biography has long been needed. Woods has given us a most significant account, for he has a sure grasp of the larger foreign and domestic issues, the sources (especially the Fulbright papers), and Arkansas politics with which Fulbright had a love/hate relationship and where his mother was a forces as a newspaper editor. And the book is as readable as it and its subject are important." Walter LaFeber, Cornell University "J. William Fulbright was one of the most diversely intelligent legislators of his time. He had a wonderful will to urge what was right, reverse himself on the rare occasion when he was wrong, and to annoy deeply the more rigid of the world's stuffed shirts. This fine book tells it all, and to one's true delight." John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard University "Chapter after chapter, I found myself wishing that Fulbright had been listened to, that his voice had carried farther--on Vietnam, the Middle East, overcommitment abroad, militarism, Soviet-American detente, the imperial presidency. What a different history--certainly less destructive and more progressive from that contained in this fair-minded book--we would have had if the advice of the outspoken senator from Arkansas had been heeded." Thomas Paterson, author of Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution and Professor of History, University of Connecticut "The book is through--almost every page has an interesting bit of information." Arkansas Democratic Gazette "Randall Woods, a distinguished diplomatic historian at the University of Arkansas, has written a thoughtful and thorough biography of one of America's most outspoken United States Senators...Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Woods' meticul;ous study is likely to join William Berman's William Fulbright and the Vietnam War (1988) in becomming on eof the standard accounts of Fulbright and postwar American foreign policy." Robert K. Brigham, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society