Politics & Power Quote by J. William Fulbright

Fulbright turns a travel grant into an indictment: not of policy minutiae, but of the imagination required to govern an empire at the edge of its knowledge. The line is almost casually phrased ("or say Bangkok") and that looseness is the point. He is arguing that Vietnam wasn’t lost on battlefields first; it was lost in the mental geography of American power, where "these people" remained abstractions and local politics got flattened into Cold War silhouette.

The intent is surgical. Fulbright isn’t merely calling Lyndon Johnson wrong; he’s calling him unqualified in the most damning way a midcentury liberal internationalist could manage: incurious. By invoking a Fulbright scholarship, he weaponizes his own brand - the soft-power ideal that exposure breeds restraint. It’s a rebuke to the Washington habit of treating foreign societies as interchangeable stages for American credibility. The subtext is institutional: if the president can be "completely ignorant", then ignorance isn’t a personal flaw, it’s a system output.

Context does the heavy lifting. Fulbright chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and became one of the most prominent critics of escalation, staging televised hearings that punctured official narratives. His criticism of Johnson also carries an intra-party edge: a Southern Democrat calling out another Southern Democrat for confusing toughness with comprehension. The rhetorical move is moral but not sentimental. "Had any feeling" isn’t about empathy as virtue; it’s about empathy as intelligence - the kind that might have exposed why people resist occupation, why nationalism beats ideology on home turf, and why America’s story about itself was never the only story in the room.