Fulbright's Fantasy: How I Spent My Summer Minding The Gap
Everyone has their own war. Like a lot of baby boomers, my war was Vietnam. I can remember sitting in a deadly silent fraternity house while birthdates and draft numbers scrolled by like some sort of life lottery.
Other memories, like people fleeing to Canada, the National Guard Game, the 2-S tango, still stick in my mind. I have vivid memories of the hearings held by the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, in 1966, questioning the wisdom of the war and our interventionalist polices. This was particularly ironic given that Fulbright was one of two Senate sponsors of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution just two years earlier.
Some forty odd years later, like a lot of things that come full circle, I had the opportunity to spend the summer at Kings College London as one of the 280,000 other "Fulbrighter's" who have participated in the program since its inception in 1946.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Arlen’s Substack to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.