As a “budding historian on subject” – his self-designation – Matt makes many sweeping, dramatic, and revisionist claims about the history of public diplomacy and about Senator Fulbright, and he wants to unmask Fulbright as politician, who has been responsible for undermining national security since 1953 – or at least 1972. His task in the future will be to document how Fulbright “continues to undermine national security.”
Frankly, I am personally perplexed by Armstrong’s claim that the “actual lasting legacy” of Senator Fulbright is “the kneecapping of U.S. global engagement.” This appears to be based on Matt’s assumption that the scholarly and legal analysis of the Smith-Mundt Act to date is more or less flawed across the board; that the “accepted history” is “wrong”; that the implications of Fulbright’s 1972 amendment were epoch-making; and that they have had a negative and lasting effect for the past fifty years.
I want to preface a few observations by noting that I find many of Matt’s previous posts more convincing. For example, in his “R Changes Coming?” post on his Substack from January 30, 2023, he identified a lack of PD leadership, a lack of PD funding, and a lack of Congressional interest in PD since 1999 as problems, and he pointed out that the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs had been vacant almost half of the time since it was established in 1999.
It is not clear to me how Fulbright is related to these shortcomings, but I am not a specialist in public diplomacy or in the history of U.S. public diplomacy like Matt. However, I have done some work on the history of the Fulbright Program, and I would like to suggest that it would be helpful for the readers of Matt’s Substack to have a bit more information to Fulbright’s skepticism regarding governmental information programs. This is a long story that goes back to the “first cold war” in the 1950s.
Stacy Cone has written an informative article on Fulbright’s engagement in the antipropaganda movement – “Pulling the Plug on America’s Propaganda: Sen. J.W. Fulbright’s Leadership of the Antipropaganda Movement, 1943-74,” Journalism History 30, no. 4 (2005): 166–76 – that contextualizes Fulbright well. He “had long been the most proactive propaganda critic in Congress, but he was far from being the only one and further still from being the first.”
Matt uses what he calls a “snippet” of an exchange between Senator Fulbright and Frank Stanton, the Chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information, from a hearing in 1967 as an example of “Fulbright’s position” instead of citing substantially more important works that contextualize Fulbright’s concerns regarding the manner in which presidential administrations and U.S. government were informing (and misinforming) the U.S. public in the 1960s.
Fulbright documented his reasons for what Matt called Fulbright’s “distrust and dislike of the executive branches public statements” in three books: Old Myths and New Realities and Other Commentaries (1964); The Arrogance of Power (1966), which had the distinction of being a best-seller; and The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (1970) . Fulbright was of the opinion that American anticommunism was misguiding policy in Latin America, Southeast Asia, unnecessarily exacerbating the East-West conflict, and fueling the arms race, thus increasing the risk of a nuclear war, the avoidance of which was consistently his highest political priority.
Matt traces Fulbright’s allegedly malignant influence back to the Senate subcommittee hearings on “overseas information programs” chaired by Fulbright in 1952 and Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-Iowa) in 1953: twenty-five days of hearings with over 1,500 pages of testimony on film, broadcasting, press work, libraries, and exchanges. It is worth noting that Alexander Smith (R-New Jersey) and Karl Mundt (R-Iowa) served on this special subcommittee, too.
One of the most important outcomes of these hearings – from the perspective of the integrity of exchange programs – was the consensual Congressional opinion that bilateral cultural and educational exchange programs based on the idea of dialogue – or “mutual understanding” – should be institutionally segregated from policy-driven, unilateral “information programs” – especially film, radio broadcasting, and print media – with their objectives of informing, shaping, influencing, or manipulating foreign public opinion.
This insight was based on the assumption that educational exchange and propaganda/information programs were fundamentally different enterprises and the the organizational segregation of the former from the latter enhanced the credibility and impact of exchanges. Hence, the management of exchanges was “retained” in the State Department’s International Education Service (IES), the forerunner of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), when USIA was chartered in 1953 (and only belatedly incorporated into the USIA portfolio after 1978, when the Fulbright Program was rebranded the USIA Fulbright Program).
The 1953 testimony of Walter Johnson, the Chair of the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships, is particularly instructive in this context. Johnson commented on the unique nature of the Board of Foreign Scholarships and its role in the governance of the program, the structure and importance of binational commissions, and the reliance of the program on Smith-Mundt funding. He also argued that “[I]t is most unfortunate that the exchange program and the information program are in the same division of the Department of State. The long-range foreign-policy objectives of international understanding through educational exchange are different psychologically from the short-range objectives of day-today foreign policy persuasion as carried out by the mass media.”
Matt’s task will be to document how the position of Fulbright – and Smith and Mundt in 1953 – can serve as pre-history for Fulbright’s 1972 amendment and then to document how Fulbright’s noxious influence has been a driving force in the “knee-capping of US global engagement” in the course of the fifty years since then.
I am at a bit of a loss to comment on Matt’s aside about Fulbright’s alleged “elitism.” Fulbright’s concern about democracy as a “dangerous experiment” was based on the fragility of democracy, not its principle inadequacies. The focus of the Fulbright Program on graduate students as a primary target group and scholars as a secondary one was based on the insight that the impacts of the exchange experience would be greatest for these academic cohorts (as opposed to primary and secondary school students and teachers) and reinforced by the U.S. government’s initial experience of organizing exchanges with Latin America in the 1940s.
Fulbright’s own Rhodes experience also informed his original conception of the program. As a graduate of a land-grant institution in the South and a Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright was concerned about an equitable national distribution of awards from the very start, and he advanced the idea of a representative national geographical distribution of Fulbright awards from the very start. The mantra of the Fulbright Program from the start has been annual, open, national, merit-based competition.
Matt references Fulbright’s “atrocious record on civil rights” –I have used the term “deplorable” – and cites Randal Woods’ Fulbright’s 1995 biography of Fulbright in a footnote: “That J. William Fulbright was a racist is indisputable.” Woods never convincingly documented this opinion, which was immediately contested by many of Fulbright’s contemporaries, and he toned it down in a Fulbright obituary a few years later with a reference to Fulbright’s patrician upbringing with the qualification that “his racism had much more to do with class than skin color, . . . “
It is important to note in this context that Lee Riley Powell published a fine and lawyerly second full-length biography of Fulbright – J. William Fulbright and His Time – which appeared in 1996 one year after the Woods biography and should be read parallel to Woods’ book. Powell, who critically deals with Fulbright’s civil rights record at great length and contextualizes in Arkansan politics, also takes Woods to task on a number of stylistic and methodological issues by observing, for example, “. . . it is shrill and superficial to not only dismiss Fulbright as a racist, but to claim that his alleged ‘racism’ was ‘indisputable.’”
Finally, the most recent extensive evaluation of Fulbright’s legacies at the University of Arkansas in 2021 came to the conclusion that his voting record against civil rights “reflected the demands of political expediency of the times” that “did not reflect a hardened personal racism toward African Americans” but was “more a reflection of his need to appease a voting constituency that was not ready for social change.”
Three different disparate legacies were part of Fulbright’s public political persona during his lifetime: the international educator, the Southern Democrat, and the dissenter. Stacy Cone would add a fourth legacy: “his postwar leadership of the disorganized, dispersed, but indefeasible antipropaganda movement in America.”
According to Matt’s post, in 1972 Fulbright, the international educator, advocate for disarmament and detente, and tireless advocate for ending the war in Vietnam, “helped militarize US foreign policy by denigrating, handicapping, and relegating non-military methods that were critical then and remain, if not more so, today.” Is this Fulbright’s newest and fifth legacy? The militarist?
As a “budding historian on subject” – his self-designation – Matt makes many sweeping, dramatic, and revisionist claims about the history of public diplomacy and about Senator Fulbright, and he wants to unmask Fulbright as politician, who has been responsible for undermining national security since 1953 – or at least 1972. His task in the future will be to document how Fulbright “continues to undermine national security.”
Frankly, I am personally perplexed by Armstrong’s claim that the “actual lasting legacy” of Senator Fulbright is “the kneecapping of U.S. global engagement.” This appears to be based on Matt’s assumption that the scholarly and legal analysis of the Smith-Mundt Act to date is more or less flawed across the board; that the “accepted history” is “wrong”; that the implications of Fulbright’s 1972 amendment were epoch-making; and that they have had a negative and lasting effect for the past fifty years.
I want to preface a few observations by noting that I find many of Matt’s previous posts more convincing. For example, in his “R Changes Coming?” post on his Substack from January 30, 2023, he identified a lack of PD leadership, a lack of PD funding, and a lack of Congressional interest in PD since 1999 as problems, and he pointed out that the office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs had been vacant almost half of the time since it was established in 1999.
It is not clear to me how Fulbright is related to these shortcomings, but I am not a specialist in public diplomacy or in the history of U.S. public diplomacy like Matt. However, I have done some work on the history of the Fulbright Program, and I would like to suggest that it would be helpful for the readers of Matt’s Substack to have a bit more information to Fulbright’s skepticism regarding governmental information programs. This is a long story that goes back to the “first cold war” in the 1950s.
Stacy Cone has written an informative article on Fulbright’s engagement in the antipropaganda movement – “Pulling the Plug on America’s Propaganda: Sen. J.W. Fulbright’s Leadership of the Antipropaganda Movement, 1943-74,” Journalism History 30, no. 4 (2005): 166–76 – that contextualizes Fulbright well. He “had long been the most proactive propaganda critic in Congress, but he was far from being the only one and further still from being the first.”
Matt uses what he calls a “snippet” of an exchange between Senator Fulbright and Frank Stanton, the Chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Information, from a hearing in 1967 as an example of “Fulbright’s position” instead of citing substantially more important works that contextualize Fulbright’s concerns regarding the manner in which presidential administrations and U.S. government were informing (and misinforming) the U.S. public in the 1960s.
Fulbright documented his reasons for what Matt called Fulbright’s “distrust and dislike of the executive branches public statements” in three books: Old Myths and New Realities and Other Commentaries (1964); The Arrogance of Power (1966), which had the distinction of being a best-seller; and The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (1970) . Fulbright was of the opinion that American anticommunism was misguiding policy in Latin America, Southeast Asia, unnecessarily exacerbating the East-West conflict, and fueling the arms race, thus increasing the risk of a nuclear war, the avoidance of which was consistently his highest political priority.
Matt traces Fulbright’s allegedly malignant influence back to the Senate subcommittee hearings on “overseas information programs” chaired by Fulbright in 1952 and Senator Bourke Hickenlooper (R-Iowa) in 1953: twenty-five days of hearings with over 1,500 pages of testimony on film, broadcasting, press work, libraries, and exchanges. It is worth noting that Alexander Smith (R-New Jersey) and Karl Mundt (R-Iowa) served on this special subcommittee, too.
One of the most important outcomes of these hearings – from the perspective of the integrity of exchange programs – was the consensual Congressional opinion that bilateral cultural and educational exchange programs based on the idea of dialogue – or “mutual understanding” – should be institutionally segregated from policy-driven, unilateral “information programs” – especially film, radio broadcasting, and print media – with their objectives of informing, shaping, influencing, or manipulating foreign public opinion.
This insight was based on the assumption that educational exchange and propaganda/information programs were fundamentally different enterprises and the the organizational segregation of the former from the latter enhanced the credibility and impact of exchanges. Hence, the management of exchanges was “retained” in the State Department’s International Education Service (IES), the forerunner of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), when USIA was chartered in 1953 (and only belatedly incorporated into the USIA portfolio after 1978, when the Fulbright Program was rebranded the USIA Fulbright Program).
The 1953 testimony of Walter Johnson, the Chair of the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships, is particularly instructive in this context. Johnson commented on the unique nature of the Board of Foreign Scholarships and its role in the governance of the program, the structure and importance of binational commissions, and the reliance of the program on Smith-Mundt funding. He also argued that “[I]t is most unfortunate that the exchange program and the information program are in the same division of the Department of State. The long-range foreign-policy objectives of international understanding through educational exchange are different psychologically from the short-range objectives of day-today foreign policy persuasion as carried out by the mass media.”
Matt’s task will be to document how the position of Fulbright – and Smith and Mundt in 1953 – can serve as pre-history for Fulbright’s 1972 amendment and then to document how Fulbright’s noxious influence has been a driving force in the “knee-capping of US global engagement” in the course of the fifty years since then.
I am at a bit of a loss to comment on Matt’s aside about Fulbright’s alleged “elitism.” Fulbright’s concern about democracy as a “dangerous experiment” was based on the fragility of democracy, not its principle inadequacies. The focus of the Fulbright Program on graduate students as a primary target group and scholars as a secondary one was based on the insight that the impacts of the exchange experience would be greatest for these academic cohorts (as opposed to primary and secondary school students and teachers) and reinforced by the U.S. government’s initial experience of organizing exchanges with Latin America in the 1940s.
Fulbright’s own Rhodes experience also informed his original conception of the program. As a graduate of a land-grant institution in the South and a Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright was concerned about an equitable national distribution of awards from the very start, and he advanced the idea of a representative national geographical distribution of Fulbright awards from the very start. The mantra of the Fulbright Program from the start has been annual, open, national, merit-based competition.
Matt references Fulbright’s “atrocious record on civil rights” –I have used the term “deplorable” – and cites Randal Woods’ Fulbright’s 1995 biography of Fulbright in a footnote: “That J. William Fulbright was a racist is indisputable.” Woods never convincingly documented this opinion, which was immediately contested by many of Fulbright’s contemporaries, and he toned it down in a Fulbright obituary a few years later with a reference to Fulbright’s patrician upbringing with the qualification that “his racism had much more to do with class than skin color, . . . “
It is important to note in this context that Lee Riley Powell published a fine and lawyerly second full-length biography of Fulbright – J. William Fulbright and His Time – which appeared in 1996 one year after the Woods biography and should be read parallel to Woods’ book. Powell, who critically deals with Fulbright’s civil rights record at great length and contextualizes in Arkansan politics, also takes Woods to task on a number of stylistic and methodological issues by observing, for example, “. . . it is shrill and superficial to not only dismiss Fulbright as a racist, but to claim that his alleged ‘racism’ was ‘indisputable.’”
Finally, the most recent extensive evaluation of Fulbright’s legacies at the University of Arkansas in 2021 came to the conclusion that his voting record against civil rights “reflected the demands of political expediency of the times” that “did not reflect a hardened personal racism toward African Americans” but was “more a reflection of his need to appease a voting constituency that was not ready for social change.”
Three different disparate legacies were part of Fulbright’s public political persona during his lifetime: the international educator, the Southern Democrat, and the dissenter. Stacy Cone would add a fourth legacy: “his postwar leadership of the disorganized, dispersed, but indefeasible antipropaganda movement in America.”
According to Matt’s post, in 1972 Fulbright, the international educator, advocate for disarmament and detente, and tireless advocate for ending the war in Vietnam, “helped militarize US foreign policy by denigrating, handicapping, and relegating non-military methods that were critical then and remain, if not more so, today.” Is this Fulbright’s newest and fifth legacy? The militarist?
Looking forward to a summary of how we might change the law and who might champion PD on Capitol Hill.