[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 29, Number 18 (Monday, May 10, 1993)]
[Pages 759-762]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
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,

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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 Congressman 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 with- 

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out 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 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

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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.