Bill and Ed’s Big Adventure: Cold Warriors, William Fulbright and Right-Wing Propaganda in the US Military, 1961-62

Abstract

This article analyses a notorious episode of the early 1960s when Senator J. William Fulbright, then Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, investigated the anti-communist propaganda activities of right-wing ‘ultras’ in the US military. The episode is used to investigate the phenomenon of ‘cold warriors’, those figures who associated their entire political identity with the ‘fighting’ of the Cold War. One particular figure soon stood out as epitomizing the anti-communist paranoia that so worried Fulbright: Major General Edwin Walker. The contest between Fulbright and Walker (and their supporters in Congress) was not a political side-show, since it soon involved President Kennedy and saw Defense Secretary Robert McNamara testifying before a Senate investigative committee. It also marked a contest between an orthodox anti-Soviet position and the new, uncertain but more flexible world-view to be known as Détente. The Walker case encapsulated the debate and the widening divide in US politics and society between those who saw the Cold War as a do-or-die struggle to the bitter end, and those who were willing to accept the existence of the Soviet Union for the sake of a stable Détente. By drawing on the work of Anders Stephanson, this article explores the broader political ramifications of the Fulbright-Walker contest in the context of the changing dynamics of the Cold War.