Volume 7, Number 11 · December 29, 1966
Fulbright of Arkansas: I
By I.F. Stone
Senator Fulbright: Portrait of a Public Philosopher
by Tristram Coffin
Dutton, 378 pp., $6.95
The first biography of Senator Fulbright is panegyric almost to the point of caricature. Within the first few pages, Tris Coffin calls him 'a modern Prometheus…a public philosopher…an investigator to rank with Pecora and Walsh…a social critic of the American scene to compare with de Tocqueville and Mark Twain.' This is advertising copy, not serious writing. It is difficult to appraise Fulbright justly because he does not fit the easy stereotypes of American politics. He is not a rebel, a dissenter, a crusader, or a fighting liberal. He is not a liberal at all. In Britain this young heir of Fayetteville, Arkansas's First Family would have been easily placed. There he would have been recognized at once as a well-educated young country squire of minor but inherited and ample wealth, with a taste not so much for politics as for public life. There he would naturally have joined the Conservative party, and soon found himself on its rebel wing among those who wanted a more thoughtful foreign policy. He would also have been allied with those Tories who have a feeling for social reform as long as it is neither too sweeping nor too hasty. This is the landed civilized gentleman type, not unknown even today in New England and the South but foreign to the American egalitarian tradition. We are willing to extend equal treatment in politics even to Rockefellers—after all they are only trying to make a bigger bang with a bigger buck—but the country gentleman is as alien to our tastes as hereditary monarchy. (We prefer elected Caesars.) In England Fulbright might conveniently be described as an American Anthony Eden. Here the average American would be puzzled by the comparison. None of us finds it easy to place J. William Fulbright in our rather rough-and-ready political categories.
Review, 3553 words
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