Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee J. William Fulbright on Senator John F. Kennedy

United States Senator from Arkansas J. William Fulbright (D) became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1949, and served as chairman from 1959 to 1974 he was the longest-serving chair in that committee's history. He was the only senator to vote against an appropriation for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1954, which was chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy in turn, repeatedly called him "Senator Halfbright." Fulbright signed The Southern Manifesto opposing the Supreme Court's historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. He subsequently joined with the Dixiecrats in filibustering the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as voting against the 1965 Voting Rights Act. However, during the Nixon administration Fulbright voted for a civil rights bill and led the charge against confirming Nixon's conservative Supreme Court nominees Clement Haynsworth and Harold Carswell. Fulbright raised serious objections to President John F. Kennedy about the impending Bay of Pigs Invasion in April 1961, and also to President Lyndon B. Johnson on the 1965 Dominican Civil War in Santo Domingo. On 30 July 1961, two weeks before the erection of the Berlin Wall, Fulbright said in a television interview, "I don't understand why the East Germans don't just close their border, because I think they have the right to close it." It has been suggested that President Kennedy asked Fulbright to make this statement as a way of signaling to Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that the building of a wall would be viewed by the United States as an acceptable way of defusing the Berlin Crisis. Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1963, Fulbright claimed five million tax-deductible dollars from philanthropic Americans was sent to Israel and then recycled back to the U.S. for distribution to organizations seeking to influence public opinion in favor of Israel. This statement led to friction with organized pro-Israeli groups in the U.S. Perhaps his most notable case of dissent was his public condemnation of foreign and domestic policies, in particular, his concern that right-wing radicalism, as espoused by the John Birch Society and wealthy oil-man H.L. Hunt, had infected the United States military. He was, in turn, denounced by conservative Senators J. Strom Thurmond and Barry M. Goldwater. Goldwater and Texas Senator John Tower announced that they were going to Arkansas to campaign against Fulbright, but Arkansas voters reelected him.