[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 154 (Friday, November 18, 2005)]
[Senate]
[Pages S13348-S13350]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




         100TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, Dr. Allan Goodman, President of the 
Institute for International Education, recently passed along a speech 
that Senator Dick Lugar gave at Pembroke College in Oxford, England 
commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of J. William 
Fulbright.
  Senator Lugar is one of the finest statesmen in the Senate, and I 
have enjoyed working closely with him on a number of issues. His speech 
at Pembroke College highlights his leadership and insight on U.S. 
foreign policy.
  I ask unanimous consent that his statement be printed in the 
Congressional Record so that all Senators can see these thoughtful 
remarks.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

       The 100th Anniversary of the Birth of J. William Fulbright

       My Lords, Ladies, and Gentlemen, it is an honor to have the 
     opportunity to deliver this address as we commemorate the 
     100th anniversary of Senator J. William Fulbright's birth and 
     celebrate the achievements of a visionary statesman, 
     humanitarian, and son of Pembroke College. It is particularly 
     moving to be here in a place that meant so much to Senator 
     Fulbright and means so much to me.
       Last year, I joined 25 of my classmates for the 50th 
     reunion of the entering Class of 1954 at Pembroke College, 
     and we have continued that reunion through our 
     correspondence. I was the only American in the College in 
     1954, but was elected President of the JCR the following year 
     in a most generous spirit of Trans-Atlantic cooperation. The 
     election provided a spur to my vivid imagination of what 
     might happen in years to come.


                    The Example of Senator Fulbright

       Soon after I arrived at Pembroke, my tutor in politics, 
     Master R.B. McCallum, told me about his tutorial work with 
     Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas. I did not have the 
     pleasure of serving with Senator Fulbright in the Senate. He 
     left office in 1974, two years before I was elected to 
     represent Indiana. But his influence on my career and 
     development was profound and permanent.
       Senator Fulbright and I shared a remarkable number of 
     common experiences, though generally these. occurred decades 
     apart. Both Senator Fulbright and I won Rhodes Scholarships 
     after earning our bachelor's degrees. Both of us chose to 
     study at Pembroke College. Both of us focused much attention 
     on government and economics while at Oxford. And both of us 
     were blessed with the same tutor, R. B. McCallum. Senator 
     Fulbright studied under the Master near the beginning of his 
     career, while I was tutored much later.
       Both of us were elected to the Senate from our home 
     states--Arkansas in his case, and Indiana in mine. Both of 
     these states are in the interior of the United States and 
     neither was typically associated with international interests 
     a half-century ago. But both of us sought a seat on the 
     Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which has oversight of 
     US. foreign policy and diplomacy. Both of us, ascended to the 
     chairmanship of this Committee. Senator Fulbright, in fact, 
     holds he record as the longest serving chairman of the 
     Foreign Relations Committee, a remarkable tenure from 1959 to 
     1974.
       Since the beginning of the United States Senate, there have 
     been only 1884 Senators. Of these, only 48 have served five 
     complete six-year terms. Senator Fulbright is a member of 
     this exclusive club, having served from 1945 through 1974. At 
     the end of next year, I would join this group of Senators who 
     have served at least 30 years in the Senate.
       Like Senator Fulbright, I discovered the extraordinary 
     challenges and opportunities of international education at 
     Pembroke College--my first trip outside of the United States. 
     The parameters of my imagination expanded enormously during 
     this time, as I gained a sense of how large the world was, 
     how many talented people there were, and how many 
     opportunities one could embrace.
       In my first year of residence at Pembroke College, 
     emboldened by Master McCallum's Fulbright stories, I decided 
     to write to Senator Fulbright. He was in the midst of an 
     embattled relationship with Senator Joseph McCarthy of 
     Wisconsin, and he shared with me his thoughts about the 
     McCarthy era in a series of letters as our correspondence 
     expanded. I was deeply moved that he took the time to write 
     to me and even more astonished to learn, years later, that he 
     had kept my letters.
       He was especially generous to me when I became chairman of 
     the Foreign Relations Committee in 1985 for the first time. 
     He wrote: ``It is an unusual coincidence that two Rhodes men 
     from Pembroke should be Chairmen of the Committee. I think 
     Cecil Rhodes would be as pleased as the two Masters of 
     Pembroke would be.'' He continued to offer encouragement 
     during visits that we enjoyed at Senate receptions and 
     reunions. In September 1986, I had the great pleasure to join 
     Senator Fulbright at the University of Arkansas, where he had 
     served as President, for a celebration of the Fulbright 
     Scholarship Program.


                     the fulbright program at work

       Senator Fulbright is known throughout the world for the 
     educational exchange program that bears his name. Each year, 
     approximately 2,600 international students receive 
     scholarships to study in the United States through the 
     Fulbright program. Simultaneously, it provides about 1,200 
     American students the opportunity to study overseas. In 
     addition, 1,000 American scholars and 700 international 
     scholars teach and perform research each year under Fulbright 
     grants. Since Senator Fulbright's legislation passed in 1946, 
     the program has provided more than 290,000 participants the 
     chance to study, teach, and conduct research in a foreign 
     country. As Master McCallum declared in 1963, ``Fulbright is 
     responsible for the greatest movement of scholars across the 
     face of the earth since the fall of Constantinople in 1453.''
       Fulbright students and scholars are selected according to 
     academic achievement and leadership potential. Alumni of the 
     program have received 35 Nobel Prizes, 65 Pulitzer Prizes, 22 
     MacArthur Foundation ``genius'' awards, and 15 U.S. 
     Presidential Medals of Freedom.
       The Fulbright Program's remarkable contributions to the 
     development of the 290,000 participants provide ample 
     justification for the program. But Senator Fulbright expected 
     much more. He always was unabashed in his advocacy of the 
     program as a foreign policy tool. For him, the Fulbright 
     Program was not intended merely to benefit individual 
     scholars, or more generally to advance human knowledge--
     though those goals have been fulfilled beyond his original 
     expectations. The program was meant to expand ties between 
     nations, improve international commerce, encourage 
     cooperative solutions to global problems, and prevent war. In 
     his book, The Price of Empire, he wrote: ``Educational 
     exchange is not merely one of those nice but marginal 
     activities in which we engage in international affairs, but 
     rather, from the standpoint of future world peace and order, 
     probably the most important and potentially rewarding of our 
     foreign policy activities.'' He called the Fulbright 
     Scholarship Program, ``a modest program with an immodest 
     aim--the achievement in international affairs of a regime 
     more civilized, rational, and humane than the empty system of 
     power of the past.''
       For Senator Fulbright, the program also was intended to 
     give participants a chance to develop a sense of global 
     service and responsibility. Alumni of the program are among 
     the most visible leaders in their respective countries. Over 
     the decades, they have explained to their fellow citizens why 
     diplomacy and international cooperation are important. They 
     have been advocates of international engagement within 
     governments, corporations, schools, and communities that do 
     not always recognize the urgency of solving global problems.
       In August of this year, I traveled to Morocco, a key U.S. 
     ally and a lynchpin in the development of democracy and 
     liberalism in the Arab world. I was there following a 
     humanitarian mission to finalize the release of the last 404 
     Moroccan POWs held by the Polisario Front since the Algerian-
     Moroccan conflict over the Western Sahara. While in Morocco, 
     I asked our Embassy in Rabat to set up a meeting with 
     Moroccan opinion leaders to discuss bilateral ties and 
     regional issues. It has been my experience that in most 
     nations, such groups of opinion leaders will contain 
     Fulbright alumni. Sure enough, two of the seven guests had 
     benefited from study in the United States through the 
     Fulbright program--a college President who had done research 
     at Princeton University and a law professor who had done 
     research at George Washington University.
       In my judgment, the impact of the Fulbright program as a 
     foreign policy tool has extended well beyond the 
     accomplishments and understanding of its own participants. It 
     has been the most influential large-scale model for promoting 
     the concept of international education, and it has been the 
     primary validation of the American university system to the 
     rest of the world.
       In the United States, we have critiqued and even lamented 
     some aspects of our public diplomacy since the end of the 
     Cold War. But hosting foreign students has been an 
     unqualified public diplomacy success. In numerous hearings 
     and discussions on public diplomacy, the Foreign Relations 
     Committee has heard reports of the impact of foreign 
     exchanges. Of the 12.8 million students enrolled in higher 
     education in the United States during the last academic year, 
     almost 600,000--some 4.6 percent--were foreign undergraduate 
     and graduate students. My home state of Indiana currently is 
     the temporary home of about 13,500 foreign students. The 
     success of American universities with foreign students 
     would not have been as profound without the stimulation of 
     foreign interest in American higher education provided by 
     the Fulbright program.
       Last year, I traveled to Georgia and met with its new 
     president, Mikhail Saakashvili. President Saakashvili 
     received his law degree from Columbia University, where he 
     studied under the Muskie Fellowship program. In fact, almost 
     every member of his cabinet had attended an American college 
     or university during their academic careers.

[[Page S13349]]

     The result was that the leadership of an important country 
     had a personal understanding of the core elements of American 
     society and governance. Perhaps more importantly, they had an 
     understanding and appreciation of Americans themselves. These 
     individuals were key participants in the ``Rose Revolution'' 
     in Georgia, which is transforming that country.


                  National Pride and National Humility

       Funding a great foreign exchange program is a sign of both 
     national pride and national humility. Implicit in such a 
     program is the audacious view that people from other nations 
     view one's country and educational system as a beacon of 
     knowledge--as a place where thousands of top international 
     scholars would want to study and live. But it is also an 
     admission that a nation does not have all the answers--that 
     our national understanding of the world is incomplete. It is 
     an admission that we are just a part of a much larger world 
     that has intellectual, scientific, and moral wisdom that we 
     need to learn.
       In a speech on the Senate floor in 1966, during the Vietnam 
     War, Senator Fulbright underscored his concern about our 
     national humility by saying: ``Power tends to confuse itself 
     with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to 
     the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor.''
       Senator Fulbright understood that a great nation must 
     continue to invest in its own wisdom and capabilities for 
     human interaction. He understood that no amount of military 
     strength or even skillful decision-making could make up for a 
     lack of alliances, trading partners, diplomatic capabilities, 
     and international respect. Maintaining alliances and 
     friendships between nations is hard work. No matter how close 
     allies become, centrifugal forces generated by basic 
     differences in the size, location, wealth, histories, and 
     political systems of nations tend to pull nations apart. 
     Alliances work over long periods of time only when leaders 
     and citizens continually reinvigorate the union and its 
     purposes.


                 The Building Blocks of Foreign Policy

       Often we need to pause to remember that the practice of 
     foreign policy is not defined by a set of decisions. 
     Unfortunately, reporters, politicians, and even most 
     historians portray foreign policy as a geopolitical chess 
     game or a series of great diplomatic events. This perception 
     is reinforced by books and movies about dramatic moments in 
     diplomatic history, like the Cuban Missile Crisis. These 
     events capture our imagination, because we relive the 
     struggles of leaders during times of great risk as they weigh 
     the potential consequences of their actions. We ask whether 
     Presidents and Prime Ministers were right or wrong in 
     adopting a particular strategy.
       But Senator Fulbright understood that crisis decision-
     making is a very small slice of a nation's foreign policy. He 
     understood that a successful foreign policy depends much more 
     on how well a nation prepares to avoid a crisis.
       When a nation gets to the point of having to make tactical 
     choices in a time of crisis--it almost always is choosing 
     between a bad option and a worse option. Crisis decision-
     making is to foreign policy what a surgeon is to personal 
     health. Whether a body will resist disease depends on good 
     nutrition, consistent exercise, and other healthy 
     preparations much more than the skill of a surgeon employed 
     as a last resort after the body has broken down. The 
     preparation for good health and for a strong foreign policy 
     is the part that we can best control, and it is the part that 
     must receive most of our energies and resources.
       Earlier this week, I presided over a hearing of the Senate 
     Foreign Relations Committee that was concerned with the 
     potential threat from avian influenza. If the H5 N1 virus 
     develops in a way that allows it to be efficiently 
     transmissible between humans, tens of millions of lives 
     worldwide will be at risk. No nation is likely to be spared 
     the effects of such a pandemic. However, nations working 
     together to detect the emergence of new strains and to 
     contain quickly an outbreak could greatly mitigate the risk. 
     In a very real and discernible way, our ability to 
     communicate and work with each other across borders may well 
     determine the fate of millions of people. The effectiveness 
     of our response will depend on the investments we have made 
     in knowledge, relationships, and communications.
       The same can be said for cooperation in the disarmament 
     arena. For fourteen years, I have been engaged in overseeing 
     and expanding the Nunn- Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction 
     program. This is the U.S. effort to help the states of the 
     former Soviet Union safeguard and destroy their vast 
     stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, so 
     that they do not fall into the hands of terrorists. Just as 
     Senator Fulbright counted scholars who benefited from his 
     program, I have made a point of counting the weapons 
     eliminated by the Nunn-Lugar program. Currently, almost 7,000 
     nuclear warheads have been safely dismantled, along with 
     hundreds of missiles and bombers. We are in the process of 
     destroying vast stockpiles of chemical weapons, safeguarding 
     numerous biological weapons facilities, and providing 
     employment to tens of thousands of weapons scientists. Each 
     weapon that is disabled represents a small step toward 
     security.
       Explaining and promoting the Nunn-Lugar program has been 
     complicated by the fact that most of its accomplishments have 
     occurred outside the attention of the media. Although 
     progress is measurable, it does not occur as dramatic events 
     that make good news stories. At Surovatikha, for example, 
     Russian solid fuel SS-18 and SS-19 missiles are being 
     dismantled at a rate of four per month. This facility will 
     grind on for years, until all the designated missiles are 
     destroyed. At Shchuchye, the United States and Russia are 
     building a chemical weapons destruction facility that will 
     become operational in 2007. It will destroy about 4\1/2\ 
     percent of Russia's currently declared chemical weapons 
     stockpile per year. This is a painstaking business conducted 
     far away from our shores outside the light of media interest.
       The destruction of a decaying nuclear warhead, the links 
     between international epidemiologists, and the training of an 
     individual scholar appear to be small matters in the context 
     of global affairs. But these are exactly the kinds of 
     building blocks on which international security and human 
     progress depend.


                      The Source of National Power

       Since September 11, 2001, the United States has been 
     engaged in a debate over how to apply national power and 
     resources most effectively to achieve the maximum degree of 
     security. Recent foreign policy discussions have often 
     focused on whether to make concessions to world opinion or 
     whether to pursue perceived national security interests 
     unencumbered by the need to seek the counsel and support of 
     the international community. But this is a false choice. 
     National security can rarely be separated from the support of 
     the international community, if only because American 
     resources and influence are finite.
       Throughout this process, I have been making the point that 
     we are not placing sufficient weight on the diplomatic and 
     economic tools of national power. Even as we seek to capture 
     key terrorists and destroy terrorist cells, we must be 
     working with many nations to perfect a longer term strategy 
     that reshapes the world in ways that are not conducive to 
     terrorist recruitment and influence.
       To survive and to prosper in this century, the United 
     States must assign U.S. economic and diplomatic capabilities 
     the same strategic priority that we assign to military 
     capabilities. We must commit ourselves to the painstaking 
     work of foreign policy day by day and year by year. We must 
     commit ourselves to a sustained program of repairing and 
     building alliances, expanding trade, fighting disease, 
     pursuing resolutions to regional conflicts, fostering and 
     supporting democracy and development worldwide, controlling 
     weapons of mass destruction, and explaining ourselves to the 
     world.
       Very fortunately, leaders of the United Kingdom have been 
     thinking with us and working with us during these years of 
     worldwide terrorist threats and severe challenges to human 
     values. Earlier this year, I enjoyed a breakfast meeting with 
     Prime Minister Tony Blair at the British Embassy in 
     Washington and later a second visit with him in his offices 
     at 10 Downing Street. We discussed development assistance and 
     debt forgiveness in Africa; democracy building in Iraq and 
     the wider Middle East; terrorist threats to the United 
     States, Great Britain, and many other places; and how to 
     maintain U.S.-UK. solidarity, even in the midst of political 
     partisanship in both the House of Commons and the U.S. 
     Congress. Foreign Minister Jack Straw has been a frequent 
     visitor to my Senate office, and I will enjoy additional 
     visits with British officials in London in the next few days.
       In addition to the vision of William Fulbright, which we 
     celebrate today, I am certain he would join me in 
     celebrating, again, the vision of Cecil Rhodes as he 
     established the Rhodes scholarships, which brought us to 
     Pembroke. In the years of our selection, Senator Fulbright 
     and I were one of 32 young Americans who were given an 
     extraordinary opportunity through the generosity of the 
     Rhodes Trust to come to Oxford University.
       We both chose Pembroke College and were admitted to this 
     College. That opportunity changed the horizons of our lives, 
     our expectations of what we might achieve, and our 
     obligations to assume more risks and to undertake more 
     challenges in the service of others.
       One of my Rhodes Scholar selectors put it very bluntly when 
     he asked, ``Why should we put Rhodes Trust money on you as 
     opposed to any of the thousands of talented young Americans 
     we could choose?
       A host of circumstances finally made it possible for both 
     of us to serve as a U.S. Senator and as Chairman of the 
     Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In my case, I sincerely 
     doubt that I would have enjoyed these opportunities without 
     those remarkably formative two years at Pembroke College. I 
     feel safe in saying that neither Senator Fulbright nor I 
     would have approached international scholarships, 
     international diplomacy, and a passionate quest for world 
     peace with the same inspiration and tenacity without our 
     Rhodes Scholar experiences at Pembroke College, Oxford 
     University.
       As Senator Fulbright explained in a 1945 Senate speech, 
     just before the end of the war in Europe, ``Peace does not 
     consist merely of a solemn declaration or a well-drafted 
     Constitution. The making of peace is a continuing process 
     that must go on from day to day, from year to year, so long 
     as our civilization shall last.''
       The success of such peacemaking will depend on our 
     willingness to prepare for the long-term future as Senator 
     Fulbright did--

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     through enlightened investments in people and relationships. 
     And it will depend upon our devotion to movements exemplified 
     by the Fulbright Program and the Rhodes Trust that reach out 
     to the world with both pride and humility.

                          ____________________