Fulbright at the Crossroads

The hunt is on for the scalp of William Fulbright. Senator Dodd has attacked him. Senator Long has attacked him. Senator Lausche has attacked him. Senator Russell has attacked him. The House has voted a resolution which indirectly censures his critique of military intervention in the Dominican Republic. And, according to Joseph Kraft's column in Monday's Globe, a piqued Administration is doing nothing to shield the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee from right-wing flak: "On the contrary, the Administration is itself holding the anti-communist issue in reverse as a rod to dissident members of its majority."

Senator Fulbright is being carefully isolated, and he may soon suffer a fate that not too many years ago befell a man who resembles him in many ways, Adlai Stevenson. No man of prominence in America represents the Stevenson tradition more faithfully than Senator Fulbright. He speaks out infrequently, and when he does, it appears to pain him greatly. He chooses his phrases carefully, balancing and moderating his assertions as would a conscientious logician. A politician in name only, he seems more the lonely statesman, agonizing over his place in history.

Like Stevenson, Fulbright clearly abhors the role of crusader. He fears the consequences of discord in a time of crisis. Now all about him the big guns of the Senate are firing, determined to demonstrate just how noisy and distasteful such discord can be. They realize just how dangerous--to them--a man like Fulbright might be.

In the last month, the Senator has made a major Congressional address and written a searingly critical article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Now he stands at the crossroads. He can continue to speak and, by his very eloquence and persistance, force the Administration and its policy-makers to recognize the spirit and intelligence he represents. Or, like Stevenson before him, this man--who forsaw the cataclysm of the Bay of Pigs, who forsaw the neutralism of Tito, who now for-sees more Santo Domingos--can fall silent and allow the Consensus to engulf and encyst him.

On Fulbright's answer hangs far more than the career of one man. As Louis Hartz perceives, in his Liberal Tradition in America, the answer will be of sweeping significance:

Will the insight of a Willkie or a Stevenson offset the end of insight a McCarthy inspires?...this is the largest challenge the American liberal world has faced, and the payment for meeting it effectively is more than mere survival in an age of world turmoil. It holds out the hope of an inward enrichment of culture and perspective, a "coming of age,"...which in its own right is well worth fighting for.