Fulbright
A Biography

A full-scale biography, including the civil rights movement and the major international events of the Cold War.

Randall Bennett Woods (Author)

9780521482622, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 June 1995

734 pages, 15 b/w illus.
23.6 x 16.2 x 4.5 cm, 1.15 kg

"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

J. William Fulbright is the author of the Fulbright-Connally resolution which committed the United States to participating in the UN. Creator of the exchange programme that bears his name, Fulbright was the longest-serving and most powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This volume describes the family dynamic, educational process and environments - Arkansas, Oxford, Washington, DC - 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.

Preface
1. Of poets, Prussians and plutocrats
2. Oxford
3. First family of Fayetteville
4. A political education
5. Taking the stage
6. The conscience of a conservative internationalist
7. European federation and trickle-down integration
8. 'Washington's cleanup man'
9. The enemy within
10. The junior senator from Arkansas
11. Massive retaliation, Suez, and the struggle for an alternative foreign policy
12. Little Rock and foreign aid
13. A changing of the guard
14. Camelot and Cuba
15. 'Freedom's Judas-goat'
16. A creative tension
17. Of myths and realities
18. Avoiding Armageddon
19. Escalation
20. Texas hyperbole
21. The hearings
22. The politics of dissent
23. Widening the credibility gap
24. The war in Washington
25. 'The price of empire'
26. Denouement
27. The politics of a Dixie dove
28. Nixon and Kissinger
29. Of arms and men
30. Struggle for the vital center
31. Sparta or Athens?
32. Cambodia
33. A foreign affairs alternative
34. Privileges and immunities
35. Divided minds
36. The invisible wars
37. Dancing with Henry
38. Broken fences
39. Life after office
40. Conclusion
Index.

Subject Areas: Biography: historical, political & military [BGH]