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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient James W. Fulbright
(April 9, 1905 – February 9, 1995)
James William Fulbright, US Senator, was born in Sumner, Missouri. Fulbright was educated in Arkansas, won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University and studied law at George Washington University. In 1942, he was elected to the House of Representatives, and entered the Senate in 1944.
He sponsored the Fulbright Act of 1946, which established an exchange scholarship system for students and educators between the United States and other countries. He opposed Senator Joseph McCarthy's "witchtrials" in the 1950s; and supported a more liberal foreign policy, especially toward communist China and Cuba. As Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was one of the earliest critics of the war in Vietnam.
He published Old Myths and New Realities in 1965, and The Arrogance of Power in 1967. The Fulbright legislation was established in 1946, slipping through the Senate without any debate. The program was an amendment to legislation that originally allowed participants to pursue academic exchange funded by the sale of surplus war material, reparations and foreign loan repayment to the United States. President Truman signed the Act on August 1, 1946.
The final legislative underpinnings of the Fulbright academic exchange program came with the Mutual Educational and Cultural Exchange Act of 1961, which is also known as the Fulbright-Hays Act (Senator Fulbright introduced it in the Senate and Representative Wayne Hays of Ohio, in the House). This law is still the basic charter for all U.S. Government sponsored educational and cultural exchanges. It consolidated all previous laws on the subject, retaining the principal characteristics of the program as it was developed, and at the same adding some new features to accommodate progress. The stated purpose of the Act summarizes the broad goals of the Fulbright Program, which is,
-----"...to enable the Government of the United States to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States, and the people of other countries by means of educational and cultural exchange; to strengthen the ties which unite us with other nations by demonstrating educational and cultural interests, developments and achievements of the people of the United States and other nations, and the contributions being made toward a peaceful and more fruitful life for people throughout the world; to promote international cooperation for educational and cultural advancement, and thus, to assist in the development of friendly, sympathetic, and peaceful relations between the United States and other countries of the world. "
While hundreds of elementary and high schoolteachers have successfully exchanged classrooms for a year with foreign counterparts, many other foreign Fulbrighters have returned home to become prime ministers, cabinet members, diplomats, newspaper editors, and academicians.
Past and present heads of government who have come to the United States on Fulbright include Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso, Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, Italian Prime Minister Lamberto Dini, and Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou. Some Fulbright alumni, like the United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, have become internationally prominent.
American Fulbrighters have included university presidents Derek Bok and Hanna Gray, economist Milton Friedman, scientist Joshua Lederberg, historian Henry Steele Commager, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, novelists John Updike and Eudora Welty, composer Aaron Copland, actor Stacy Keach, and opera singer Anna Moffo.
In its more than 50 years, the Fulbright Program has enabled nearly a Quarter of a million people from the United States and 140 countries to live and study in foreign nations. More than 120,000 foreign nationals have taught, studied or done research in the United States, and more than 90,000 Americans have gone overseas to do the same. In fact, the Fulbright program has been referred to as "the largest and most significant movement of scholars across the face of the earth since the fall of Constantinople in 1453."
For further information, contact:
The Fulbright Program
Office of Academic Exchange Programs
Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs
U.S. Department of State, SA-44
301 4th Street, S.W., Room 234
Washington, D.C. 20547
Phone: 202/619-4360
Fax: 202/401-5914
Email: academic@pd.state.gov
United States Department of State
http://exchanges.state.gov/education/fulbright/
President Harry Truman signing the Fulbright Act watched by Senator J. William Fulbright (center)
On May 5, 1993, President Bill Clinton presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Senator J. William Fulbright at the Fulbright Association's eighty-eighth birthday tribute. Harriet Mayor Fulbright observes the ceremony.
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Medal History
