Arkansas: Just Plain Bill

As a onetime Rhodes scholar, as the father of an international scholarship program, and as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democrat J. William Fulbright keeps his eyes on the far horizons. But as the junior Senator from Arkansas, he depends on the votes of the folks in the mountains and valleys back home. Last week, a full year before he comes up for reelection, just plain Bill Fulbright was wooing those votes for all he was worth—and presenting himself not only as a global thinker but as a peerless pork-barreler.

“I Had a Small Part.” Crisscrossing Arkansas in a cream-colored Ford station wagon, Fulbright plans to make at least 40 speeches by mid-December, before audiences ranging from the Altrusa Club of Little Rock to the United Church Women of Fort Smith. The reason for his urgency: Fulbright faces his most serious opposition since he defeated Senator Hattie Caraway and Governor Homer Adkins in 1944. Democratic Representative Dale Alford, who went to Washington two years ago as an effective segregationist vote getter, has been redistricted out of his seat and has ambitions for Fulbright’s. Governor Orval Faubus, finishing a record fourth term as Governor, might be tempted by the larger scope of Washington. Both Alford and Faubus would campaign against Fulbright by calling him a one-worlder who has traveled altogether too far from the pea patch. Already, Fulbright is known caustically as “the Senator from Timbuctoo.”

Fighting this label, Fulbright points insistently to the benefits he has won for Arkansas: “You have a new hospital here, and I’m proud to have had a part in it through the Hill-Burton program . . . Your watershed program here is a model, and I want to compliment you on it. You needed it to get these new industrial plants. I’m not saying I did it all but certainly I had a small part . . . When it comes to spending money on the Arkansas River. I plead guilty to being a spender.” He has a pet statistic ready at hand for Arkansans who, like Alford, distrust “Government spending”: “There are those who say we shouldn’t send our money to Washington and get back 50¢ for every dollar. I had some figures checked and I find that in 1960 the State of Arkansas paid $229 million to the Federal Government in taxes. We got back $465 million. It’s kind of an aid program. We’re an undeveloped part of the country. We need it and deserve it.”

“They Come to Lunch.” Fulbright has no apologies to make for his international interests. “No longer,” he says, “can we look upon foreign relations and domestic affairs as different areas of government.” In the small (pop. 2,163) Arkansas River town of Dardanelle, which prospers on poultry raising, Fulbright shrewdly noted that under the Food for Peace program, 500 tons of Arkansas poultry has gone to Pakistan. “That’s not much but it keeps an Arkansas processing plant going for a day or two.” In the cotton towns he heavily underscores the shipment of Arkansas cotton to Japan; in the rice counties of the state he recalls shipments of Arkansas rice to India and Israel under a 1954 agricultural assistance law. Who is responsible for it all? Says Bill Fulbright: “I have never missed an opportunity to discuss this matter with the prime ministers and foreign ministers of these countries. They come to my committee for lunch. It’s an old Washington custom.” And it is an old Arkansas custom to send back to Washington legislators who so fruitfully serve the state.