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unnecessary war then under way in Southeast Asia. The folly of those who insisted on fighting that war suggested that the United States was rapidly losing any “perspective on what exactly is within the realm of its power and what is beyond it.” Fulbright stressed his unwillingness to question the motives of the war’s architects: No doubt President Johnson and his advisers meant well. “What I do question,” he wrote, “is the ability of the United States . . . to go into a small, alien, undeveloped Asian nation and create stability where there is chaos, the will to fight where there is defeatism, democracy where there is no tradition of it, and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life.”2

Those wielding authority in Washington, he believed, had lost their ability to see the world as it actually existed. Foreign policy had become “a kind of voodoo,” with incantations supplanting reasoned analysis. “Certain drums have to be beaten regularly to ward off evil spirits.” Chief among the incantatory words meant to deflect all serious criticism were appeasement, isolationism, and the ever-present danger of insufficient vigilance. Impatient with complexity or nuance, policy makers found it easier to indulge “the crusading spirit” in places like Vietnam. “Who are the self-appointed emissaries of God who have wrought so much violence in the world?” Fulbright asked.

They are men with doctrines . . . who believe in some cause without doubt and practice their beliefs without scruple, men who cease to be human beings . . . and become instead living, breathing, embodiments of some faith or ideology.3

For Fulbright, ideology and statecraft made for a combustible mix. “I think the world has endured about all it can of the crusades of high-minded men bent on the regeneration of the human race.” Any people setting out “upon self-appointed missions to police the world, to defeat all tyrannies, to make their fellow men rich and happy and free” were less likely to advance the cause of world peace than to wreak “havoc, bringing misery to their intended beneficiaries and destruction upon themselves.”4

Americans needed to rethink what it meant to lead. “Maybe we are not really cut out for the job of spreading the gospel of democracy,” Fulbright suggested. “Maybe it would profit us to concentrate on our own democracy instead of trying to inflict our own particular version of it” on others. “If America has a service to perform in the world,” he continued, “it is in large part the service of her own example. In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries we are not only living off our assets . . . we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying freedom to the fullest.”5

Fulbright denied that he was advocating global disengagement. Instead he was proposing “a redress in the heavy imbalance” that privileged foreign affairs above the nation’s domestic well-being. “An excessive preoccupation with foreign relations over a long period of time,” he warned, “diverts a nation from the sources of its strength, which are in its domestic life. A nation immersed in foreign affairs is expending its capital, human as well as material.” To heedlessly draw down that capital was to invite disaster. Fulbright compared an ambitious foreign policy supported by a deteriorating domestic base to “the light cast by an extinct star,” destined to fade and fail. He judged it “unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades for some principle or ideal while neglecting the needs of its own people.” In the long run, “an effective policy abroad depends upon a healthy society at home.”6

Then there was the matter of force. As Fulbright saw it, crusaders were too quick to reach for the gun. Although military action had “a deceptive appeal,” with advocates of force promising “quick and easy solutions to difficult problems,” the promises inevitably proved false and exacted a painful toll in blood. In Vietnam, Fulbright noted, the crusading burden fell largely on young Americans, few allies showing much willingness