[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 154 (Friday, September 29, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14698-S14699]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE FULBRIGHT PROGRAM

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I rise to speak on the importance of 
international exchange programs at this particular point in history. I 
would particularly like to highlight the Fulbright program and its 
enormous contribution to the enrichment of our society. The Fulbright 
program was created in 1946 largely with the efforts of the Senator 
from Arkansas from whom the program derived its name. Since that time 
the program has sent 75,026 United States students to study in foreign 
countries and has brought 127,093 foreigners to study in our country.
  Forty-five years ago they sent me off to the London School of 
Economics where, for the first time, I learned a dictum of Seymour 
Martin Lipsit, who has put it so nicely. He said, ``He who knows only 
one country knows no country.'' If you use the simple analogy of 
eyesight, it is two eyes that provide perspective.
  My experience in London was certainly eye-opening. As a New Deal 
Democrat I was surprised to find how extraordinarily suspicious of the 
United States they were in London. I wrote back to a friend, in a 
letter that Douglas Schoen had preserved in his book:

       I get the impression Americans are not generally aware of 
     just how fundamentally we are being opposed by a small but 
     enormously vital element in British society, or just how much 
     we are being disagreed with by British society in general. I 
     respectfully submit that we had damned sure better get off 
     our intellectual asses but quick.

  A point that was perhaps never fully appreciated. I only wish that 
there were more Fulbright opportunities so that more students might 
have the enlightening experience that I enjoyed.

[[Page S 14699]]

  Perhaps at no time in our history have we needed an increase in 
international exchange programs. We find ourselves in a world that in 
many ways is more complex than when it was dominated by two ideologies. 
International exchange programs are necessary to give our students an 
appreciation of our country and its place in the world.
  The Fulbright program has been administered by an even older 
institution, the Institute for International Education [IIE]. Last year 
I had the honor to address the Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Forum of the 
IIE. I ask unanimous consent that my remarks from this event be printed 
in the Record at this point.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                            Opening Remarks

                  (By Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan)

       Andrew Heiskell Segan by noting the setting we're in, the 
     New York Public Library. I was brought up in this library in 
     a very important way. I was brought up into a understanding 
     of what the United States could provide for people.
       In the 1930s, in the midst of the Depression. I shined 
     shoes, pretty much for a living. But it was a living that was 
     fair enough. I would work between Sixth and Seventh Avenues 
     at the Wurlitzer Building, in a little territorial space of 
     my own. When I had earned $1.10, which was five cents up in 
     the subway, five cents back, and a dollar for the day, I'd 
     come over here as a shoe shine boy, with a black box. I'd 
     take it in the Fifth Avenue entrance and bring it to the 
     check-in desk. It would be accepted, without comment, as if 
     it were an umbrella being presented in the lobby of a Pall 
     Mall club. I'd be given a ticket by a man in a brown cotton 
     jacket. I'd go up in that great room. I was a citizen of the 
     world and of literature. And indeed, for those purposes. I 
     was, I can never repay that debt.
       I'm here to talk about the Fullbright experience and the 
     Institute of International Education. IIE sent me off 44 
     years ago, in 1950, to the London School of Economics. There, 
     for the first time. I learned a dictum of Seymour Martin 
     Lipset, who said, ``He who knows only one country knows no 
     country.''
       If you use the simple analogy of eyesight, it is two eyes 
     that provide perspective. And it was a perspective enormously 
     striking to me at that time--1950, the United States in good 
     condition, untouched by war, and, indeed, enlivened by it. 
     The recovery was extraordinary, and Europe was just climbing 
     out of the ruins. We were victorious allies. I found, though, 
     on arriving at the London School of Economics as a person of 
     liberal disposition, a New Deal democrat, if you like, how 
     extraordinarily suspicious of the United States were most 
     folks there, the academics in particular, and the Left, to be 
     specific.
       And then came the Korean War. I was called back. We 
     mustered in Grosvenor Square, got on a train at Waterloo, and 
     in the late afternoon we were crossing the Netherlands on our 
     way, as it would turn out, to Bremerhaven, which was a 
     submarine base the Nazis had built.
       I had brought along a library habit that had been imbued 
     here, made possible largely through the GI bill and its book 
     allowance. I brought an enormous volume of Hannah Arendt's, 
     The Origins of Totalitarianism. just then published in Great 
     Britain. This was her masterwork. I brought it along, not 
     to read, really, but to be seen reading. So, I got in this 
     compartment, as they then had in European railways--there 
     were six of us--and I opened it up. Here was the first 
     paragraph. ``Two world wars in one generation, separated 
     by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, 
     followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no 
     respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of 
     a third World War between the two remaining world powers. 
     This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles 
     after all hopes have died.''
       I read that. Then I read it out loud to the compartment. No 
     one demurred. Finally, a commander, who had a Navy Cross and 
     was the senior officer present afloat said, ``There must be a 
     bar car on this train somewhere.'' And that was that.
       I began to sense then the power of Marxism as an idea, the 
     inevitability of the clash of civilizations--the 
     totalitarian, the liberal--you could read it either way, and 
     some did. And some looked both ways simultaneously. The first 
     thing I ever published was a letter from London in The 
     Nation, in response to an article by G.D.H. Cole, who 
     suggested that the Korean War was an act of American 
     aggression, intended to invade China and the Soviet Union. I 
     said, ``No, no, no, surely that's not so.'' I got a 
     surprising amount of mail from the British, Londoners, who 
     said that's obviously right, but that's what they all think.
       But having had this experience of the power of Marxism, it 
     became possible for me years later, in different 
     circumstances, to see its decline. Having seen it at the 
     flood tide of its strength, you saw it recede. You couldn't 
     have done that absent the international experience. And it 
     was startling to be in Washington, and see how little this 
     was understood.
       In 1979, Newsweek had an issue on ``what will happen in the 
     1980s,'' and I wrote a small piece that said, ``Well, in the 
     1980s, the Soviet Union will break up. That's obvious.'' And 
     will the world blow up as its constituent parts start using 
     their nuclear weapons one on the other? This issue is not yet 
     resolved. I'm not aware if anyone read the article, but I was 
     then on the Intelligence Committee, and I would make this 
     argument, an argument impenetrable to the intelligence 
     community. They didn't know what you were talking about.
       I was once, for a long period, an observer to the Strategic 
     Arms Reduction Talks, the START talks. I remember asking the 
     negotiators, when we were finished with the mind-numbing 
     details of this treaty between the United States of America 
     and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, what makes you 
     think there will be a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics?
       Well, to them this question was not a question. They had 
     never heard it before and went right by it. When the treaty 
     did arrive at the Committee on Foreign Relations, of which I 
     am a member, it was between the United States of America and 
     four countries, of which I think I'd only heard of two. They 
     were Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan.
       I had the doubtful pleasure of asking the ambassadors who 
     were presenting this to us. ``It says here it's a treaty 
     between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., and then yet it says, no, 
     no, it's these four other countries. How do you know it's 
     with these other four countries?''
       They said, ``We have letters.'' I said, ``Well where did 
     you get them?'' They said, ``We got them in Lisbon.'' It 
     sounded like a World War II Humphrey Bogart movie. Oh. Got 
     them in Lisbon. I see.
       In fact, had we had a better feel for what you could have 
     learned in those years, we might not be in such straitened 
     circumstances as we are today. That failure of understanding 
     of international politics came about because of an insularity 
     about the essential fact, the opposition of ideas, and then a 
     pre-occupation with the minute, mechanical fallout of those 
     ideas.
       This clash of ideas is not over. It now assumes yet another 
     phase. At the beginning of this century, there were two 
     commanding, universal ideas. You could call them liberal, if 
     you like, and Marxist, if you choose. The liberal idea, in 
     the general usage in nineteenth-century England, was that the 
     group identity that was called nationalist, or ethnic, was 
     preindustrial and would simply disappear as it became more 
     and more outdated and irrelevant. The other side, the Marxist 
     view, was that economic processes determine all identity, 
     that the class structure determines all social struggle, and 
     that it would be universal in its nature. The red flag is red 
     because the blood of all men and women is red. And that is 
     the universality of the class struggle.
       Well, both ideas were wrong. Deeply wrong. And we enter 
     into an age subsequent to that, in which not the only, but 
     the most painful, the most immediate source of conflicts is 
     ethnic. It is ethnic conflict as a post-industrial 
     phenomenon--ethnic conflict as a mode of aggregating 
     interests that is far more effective than any other mode seen 
     on earth just now.
       If you look around the world, that is what you mostly 
     encounter. We are two or three generations behind any 
     understanding of it. Just as the American political 
     establishment had no real understanding of Marxism in 1950, 
     it has no real understanding of ethnicity today. We're as 
     unprepared for Bosnia as we were for Leningrad.
       And there's one answer to it, if there's any answer. That 
     is to go abroad and study it, and see it, taste it, touch it, 
     feel it. And there's one institution singularly devoted to 
     just that purpose. And that is the Institute of International 
     Education.
       You were welcoming to me, a gawky and half-formed youth, 
     nearly half a century ago. There will be others like me 
     coming, possibly to your embarrassment. But with any luck, it 
     all works out, and I'm here to thank you and wish you another 
     three-quarters of a century as successful as the last.

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