But Fulbright made an even larger contribution – one that is rarely recognized, in part because the consequences of it have not always been favorable. When Fulbright came to the Senate in 1945 (after serving as president of the University of Arkansas), the United States had just won World War II. Confidence in the American government was at an all-time high. If a government official said something, the assumption was that it was true. The press was largely compliant. This structure existed through the 1950s and into the early 1960s. Fringe elements might complain, but the center of the American establishment presented a united front in the cold war.
Fulbright changed that. He introduced into the postwar American elite the idea that the U.S. government was capable of arrogance, profound error and outright lying. ““The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam,’’ he once said, ““is not to trust government statements. I had no idea then that you could not trust [the] government.’’ Fulbright learned this lesson through bitter experience. During the Kennedy administration he expressed doubts about Vietnam policy. Then, in 1964, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he helped President Lyndon Johnson win approval for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed LBJ to wage war without the approval of Congress. Later Fulbright learned that the incident in the gulf – which he and the country had been told was an assault on American ships by the North Vietnamese – was in fact something of a provocation, covered in lies. By 1966, he was the war’s most important critic.
Fulbright seemed a paradox: the urbane Arkansan. (Until he lost in 1974 to Dale Bumpers in the Democratic primary, this brought great pride to the state.) As a sophisticated student of history, he saw public affairs in terms of larger ebbs and flows. He was right on Joseph McCarthy (denouncing him early), embarrassingly wrong on civil rights (the major blemish on his record) and prescient on world affairs. ““Greece, Rome, Spain, England, Germany and others lost their preeminence because of a failure to recognize their limitations, or, as I call it, the arrogance of power [the title of his book],’’ Fulbright wrote Johnson. ““My hope is that this country, presently the greatest and most powerful in the world, may learn by the mistakes of its predecessors.''
What Fulbright might not have grasped is that learning this lesson, while helping to prevent another big war in the years since, has deeply eroded public faith in its institutions. Now, instead of blindly assuming that U.S. policy is good and the government is telling the truth, Americans often blindly believe that government can do nothing right and is filled with liars. Fulbright did not want that. He hoped to see the end of arrogance, not confidence.
