SENATOR FULBRIGHT
James William Fulbright was born in 1905, in the town of Sumner, Missouri. Educated at the
University of Arkansas, he then, as a Rhodes scholar, studied and received another degree
at the University of Oxford. After completing a law degree at George Washington University,
he was admitted to the District of Washington bar, and served for a year as a special
attorney in the United States Department of Justice. He taught at George Washington
University from 1935 to 1936 and then at the University of Arkansas from 1936 to 1939. He
was President of that university from 1939 to 1941.
     A member of the Democratic Party, Fulbright was elected to the United States House of
Representatives in 1942, and to the Senate in 1944. When he rose in the Senate to introduce
his bill in late September 1945, Senator Fulbright displayed the political skill that his
experience as a congressman, university president, law school lecturer and Rhodes scholar
had given him. He had spent four years in Europe, three of them at Oxford, and had a
driving awareness of the basic similarity of European culture and the links between the
United States and the rest of the world. He knew, from his subsequent years at George
Washington University and the University of Arkansas, how political pressures and educational
needs are often at war with each other. His work as a congressman had laid the
foundations of the acceptance of the United Nations in the United States.
     Fulbright brought to the Senate not only a deeply held commitment to the ideals of international
education, but also a profound recognition of the miseries that had been wrought
by the War Reparations after World War I. It was the combination of these two concerns that
led him to introduce the legislation that would use the debts of war to finance the pursuit of
peace and international understanding.