    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [May 5, 1993]
    [Pages 570-572]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Tribute to Senator J. William Fulbright
    May 5, 1993

        Thank you very much. It's good to know that I did get a vote out of
    the press. [Laughter] Roger, I'm delighted to be here, and I'm so glad
    that you're here. I'm glad to be here with Senator and Mrs. Gore.
    Senator Gore, after you spoke and you said you resented the fact that
    Senator Fulbright was 88 and you were a mere 85\1/2\ when you went over
    to him, I heard him say what the crowd did not. Senator Fulbright looked
    at him and said, ``Albert, if you behave yourself, you'll make it,
    too.'' [Laughter]
        I want to say that it is a deeply humbling experience for me as an
    American to be here with all these wonderful people. Many people in this
    audience have made remarkable contributions to our Nation and to the
    world over the last half century or so. And I thank you all, as part of
    the contingent of Arkansans who are here who feel very protective of
    Senator Fulbright and feel that in some ways he is still our own. It's a
    great pleasure and sense of pride for me to look out and see all of you
    here.
        I also want to say a special word of appreciation to Harriet. You
    know, when Senator Fulbright announced that he and Harriet were going to
    be married, all the people from Arkansas started telling cradle robbing
    jokes. [Laughter] And I've got an 88-year-old uncle, and for kicks, he
    goes out once a week and drives two ladies around. One of them is 91,
    and one of them is 92. And I asked my uncle, I said, ``You like these
    older ladies?'' And he said, ``Yes, it seems to me like they're a little
    more settled.'' [Laughter] I'm glad Bill didn't give into the temptation
    for being settled and instead found Harriet.
        You know, somebody ought to put a little levity into this evening.
    Senator Pryor and Con-

    [[Page 571]]

    gressman Thornton are out there, and Jim Blair, who once ran one of
    Senator Fulbright's campaigns. Those of us who grew up in Arkansas, I
    have to say, had this incredible image of Senator Fulbright. First of
    all, if you grew up in our State and you knew anything about politics,
    it was immensely gratifying after it, to see the way people sort of
    dumped on our State back in the forties and fifties and said we were all
    a bunch of back-country hayseeds, and we had a guy in the Senate who
    doubled the IQ of any room he entered. [Laughter] It was pretty
    encouraging. You know, it made us feel pretty good, like we might amount
    to something.
        When Hillary first came to Arkansas she said, ``You know, you all
    beat better people down here than most States elect.'' Unfortunately,
    there were two occasions when that might have applied to me. [Laughter]
    But anyway, Hillary finally developed this theory that the reason all of
    our good people went into politics is that we couldn't make an honest
    living in the depressed economy. And it increased the quality of
    political life.
        I say this to try to give you some texture. You know, a lot of
    people are out here in this audience tonight who worked for Senator
    Fulbright in his campaigns, worked for Senator Pryor, Congressman
    Thornton, and worked for me. And some of us have been so controversial
    that we are, to use the Arkansas colloquialism, we are quite a load to
    carry. [Laughter] And I wish I could take every one of you back tonight
    to Senator Fulbright's 1968 reelection campaign. I mean, I wish you
    could have been there. Now remember, here we are, '68: The country is
    embroiled in the Vietnam war, split right down the middle, except in the
    South where it wasn't down the middle--more people were still for it
    than ``agin'' it. The country was torn up. There had been riots in the
    streets. There was great division over poverty and race. Everybody was
    wound tight as a drum. George Wallace was moving through the South
    faster than Sherman did and carried Arkansas that year. And here we are,
    all of us kids, trying to reelect Fulbright in this environment, right?
        Now, let me give you a flavor. Senator Fulbright had an opponent in
    1968 who decided to make trade an issue. Now, the distinguished Japanese
    Ambassador is here. You know, people write as if we're having bloody
    fights when we have arguments over trade policy. We didn't have
    arguments in '68. This guy got up at a platform and held up a shoe to
    his opponent, and he said, ``This shoe was made in Communist Romania.''
    This is a verbatim account, right? ``Communist Romania,'' he said. ``And
    Bill Fulbright is letting these shoes into your country, throwing our
    good, God-fearing people out of work to let the Communists from Romania
    have the job.'' That's a sample of what we had to deal with. [Laughter]
        So you know, we worked hard on him, and we got him to wear a
    checkered shirt. That picture you saw up there in a checkered shirt,
    that's the only time he ever came home without a necktie. [Laughter] So
    he's wearing this checkered shirt, you know, and we think we finally got
    him where he can sort of at least tolerate all this insanity that was
    going on there. All he had to do was kind of halfway be nice to people,
    and we thought he could get reelected. So, I was driving him around one
    day, and at the middle of all this tension we come to this little
    country town in southwest Arkansas, one road in, same road out. And we
    go into a feed store. And you remember what Lyndon Johnson used to say?
    If you can't look at a person in the eye and tell whether they're for
    you or against you, you've got no business in politics. No one could
    have mistaken the atmosphere in the feed store this day. [Laughter] This
    guy in overalls looked at Senator Fulbright and said, ``I wouldn't vote
    for you if you were the last person on Earth.'' And Senator Fulbright
    sat down on this bale of hay or this--it was a big sack of seed, and he
    said, ``Well, why?'' And I thought, be nice. The television cameras were
    on, you know. He said, ``Because you're letting the Communists in.
    They're everywhere. Today it's Vietnam; tomorrow it will be--they're
    everywhere.'' And he looked around, and he said, ``I didn't see any when
    I came into town.'' He said, ``Where are they, and what do they look
    like? I wouldn't recognize one.'' [Laughter]
        Well, anyway, he got reelected anyway. I say that because, you know,
    in all this highfalutin talk, it's important not to forget that the
    American political system produced this remarkable man. And my State
    did, and I'm real proud of it.
        Senator Fulbright always believed there were some things that he
    should defer to the judgment of his constituents on, and others that he
    was charged with knowing more than they were and that he should do what
    he thought was right. And it did get him into a lot of

    [[Page 572]]

    trouble, but it helped our country get through a lot of rough times.
        In addition to those things which have been mentioned and written
    about, I can't help noting one of the things that drew me to him as a
    young man, and that is that he stood up to Joe McCarthy, something that
    meant a lot to a lot of us. The other thing he always tried to do was to
    get all of us who were around him to look at the other side of an
    argument. I remember when I was a young man working for him in that
    campaign, I was driving him around, and sometimes I'd get so exasperated
    arguing with him because I could never win. We just argued all the time.
    And one day we were in a town, and I drove back out the same way I drove
    in. I was going to take us 100 miles in the wrong direction until he
    corrected me, which meant that the professor was not as absent-minded as
    the student. [Laughter]
        But all during this time, it is impossible for me to fully capture
    for you the impact that he had on young generation after young
    generation in my State, how he made us believe that education could lift
    us up and lift this country up, how he made us believe that our
    obligation was to develop our minds to the maximum of our ability and
    then to use it, wherever it took us. He believed in reason and argument,
    and he believed in the end democracy could only prevail if we knew
    enough and were thoughtful enough to face the truth and try to search it
    out. It's still a pretty good prescription for what we ought to do. He
    also deeply believed that the racial, religious, and ethnic differences
    and the political differences that divided the world so deeply during
    almost all of his public career were vastly less important than the
    common bonds of humanity which could unite us if only we could take our
    blinders off. He was among the first Americans to try to get us to think
    about the people in Russia as people; he was among the first Americans
    to try to get us to see people in the Islamic world as people; among the
    first Americans to try to get us to understand the different and various
    and rich cultures of Asia, which have now produced some of the most
    amazing achievements in all of human history. And that is one of the
    reasons, I think, Mr. Ambassador, that Japan, thankfully, has become the
    most outstanding supporter of the Fulbright scholarship program,
    something for which we are all very grateful.
        I close with this thought. About 4 years ago, Senator Fulbright's
    hometown of Fayetteville, which is the seat of the University of
    Arkansas where Hillary and I used to teach and where we were married,
    threw a big party for him and invited me as the Governor to come up and
    speak. And so I went up there. It was a wonderful day on the square. It
    was a Saturday. And afterwards the farmers market was there, and I
    walked around the square and talked to all the farmers. We shot the bull
    about Bill Fulbright and talked about his career. And then I went up to
    the hotel room where Senator Fulbright, believe it or not, was watching
    a football game. And when I walked in and sat down with him--we watched
    this ball game, and this young man kicked a field goal about 2 minutes
    after we sat down. He looked at me, and he said, ``You know something, I
    can't believe it's been 64 years since I did that.'' I say that to make
    my final point: It doesn't take long to live a life. He made the most of
    his. And I think his enduring legacy to us is trying to help us all to
    have a better chance to make the most of ours. Thank you very much.
        Sit down; we're going to do one more thing. The job I now have, in
    the eyes of my mentor, is probably not quite as good a job as being a
    United States Senator, mostly because I have to take all that criticism.
    But it does give me some prerogatives. In spite of what you may have
    seen or heard in the last several days, there are some things I can do
    without anybody agreeing to it. And tonight, for the first time as
    President of the United States, I intend to do one of them. And I'd like
    to enlist the aid of my distinguished military aide. Major Schorsch,
    would you please read the proclamation.

    Note: The President spoke at 9:49 p.m. at the ANA Hotel. Following the
    President's remarks, Senator Fulbright was awarded the Presidential
    Medal of Freedom.