> Sure I remember the Fulbright committee handing LBJ a blank check.
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=4576§ionID=51 Net | Anti War
The Arrogance of Power Fulbright's Book Rings True Today by Jim Lobe; TomPaine.com; November 29, 2003
Two years after the passage by a unanimous House of Representatives and all but two senators of the August 7, 1964, Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and amid continuing escalation of the Vietnam War, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright published The Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 1966) in which he attacked the war's justification, Congress' failure to set limits on it, and the dangerous and delusional impulses which gave rise to it. Fulbright's critique, to which he had already given voice in unprecedented hearings on the war, legitimized the growing anti-war movement in a way that had not been possible before the book's publication and shattered what until then had been an elite consensus that U.S. military intervention in Indochina was necessitated by the Cold War geopolitics.
Despite the Cold War, Fulbright, who died in 1995, perceived already in 1966 that the United States, with unmatched military power, was taking on imperial attitudes similar to those held by previous great empires like Rome and 19th century Great Britain, and that a unilateralist and war-like spirit had infected the nation in ways that it would live to regret. He especially noted how isolated Washington had become from its traditional allies in Europe.
-- Michael Pugliese