Church gained fame during his service in the Senate by the so-called Church Committees, which investigated unconstitutional CIA and FBI intelligence-gathering, laying the groundwork, together with Sam Ervin's Senatorial Committee inquiries, for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.It also investigated CIA drug smuggling activities in the Golden Triangle and secret wars in Third World countries.Additionally, Church is remembered for his voting record as a strong liberal and environmental legislator, and he played a major role in the creation of the nation's system of protected wilderness areas in the 1960s. In 1964, Church was the floor sponsor of the National Wilderness Act. In 1968, he sponsored the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act and gained passage of a ten year moratorium on federal plans to transfer water from the Pacific Northwest to California. Working with other members of Congress from northwestern states, Church helped establish the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area along the Oregon-Idaho border, which protected the gorge from dam building. He was also the primary proponent in the establishment of the Sawtooth Wilderness & National Recreation Area in central Idaho in 1972.
This was all the more remarkable considering that he represented one of the most conservative states in the nation. He was also instrumental in the creation of Idaho's River of No Return Wilderness in 1980, his final year in the Senate. This wilderness was comprised of the old Idaho Primitive Area, the Salmon River Breaks Primitive Area, plus additional lands. At 2.36 million acres (9,550 km²), over 3600 square miles, it is the largest wilderness area in the nation outside of Alaska. It was renamed the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness in March 1984, weeks before his death, and is known regionally as "The Frank."
Church was a key figure in American foreign policy during the 1970s. He served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations from 1979 to 1981. Church was one of the first senators to publicly oppose the Vietnam War in the 1960s, although he had supported the conflict earlier. In the late 1970s he was a main Congressional supporter of the Torrijos-Carter Treaties, which proposed to return the Panama Canal Zone to Panama. The latter position proved to be widely unpopular in Idaho and led to the formation of the "Anybody But Church Committee (ABC)" by conservative activists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_ChurchIn 1942, Fulbright was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served one term. During this period, he became a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In September 1942, the House adopted the Fulbright Resolution which supported international peace-keeping initiatives and encouraged the United States to participate in what became the United Nations. This brought Fulbright to national attention. In 1944, he was elected to the Senate, where he served five six-year terms.
In 1949 Fulbright became a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. From 1959-1974 he served as chairman, the longest-serving chairman of that committee in history.
His Senate career was marked by some notable cases of dissent. In 1954 he was the only senator to vote against an appropriation for the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which was chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy in turn, repeatedly called him Senator "Halfbright". In 1961, he also raised serious objections to President John F. Kennedy about the impending Bay of Pigs invasion.
-snip, 'cos Fulbright's racial record was spotted-
His most notable case of dissent was his public condemnation of foreign and domestic policies, including his belief that right-wing radicalism had infected the United States military. This led to his being denounced by two conservative senators: Senator J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Senator Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona. Goldwater, John G. Tower, the Texas conservative senator, and some radical right-wing leaders had announced that they were going to Arkansas to campaign against Fulbright, but Arkansas voters reelected him. A plot to assassinate Fulbright by the Minutemen, an extremist group, was uncovered.
On 30 July 1961, two weeks before the erection of the Berlin Wall, Fulbright said in a television interview, "I don't understand why the East Germans don't just close their border, because I think they have the right to close it". It has been speculated that President Kennedy asked Fulbright to make this statement as a way of signalling to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that the erection of a wall would be viewed by the United States as an acceptable way of defusing the Berlin Crisis.
In 1963 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Fulbright claimed that five million tax-deductible dollars from philanthropic Americans had been sent to Israel and then recycled back to the US for distribution to organisations seeking to influence public opinion in favour of Israel. This statement led to friction with the organized Jewish community in the US.
On August 7, 1964, a unanimous House of Representatives and all but two senators passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which led to the further escalation of the Vietnam War. Fulbright, who voted for the resolution, would later write:
Many Senators who accepted the Gulf of Tonkin resolution without question might well not have done so had they foreseen that it would subsequently be interpreted as a sweeping Congressional endorsement for the conduct of a large-scale war in Asia.
In 1966, Fulbright published The Arrogance of Power (ISBN 0812992628) in which he attacked the justification of the Vietnam War, Congress's failure to set limits on it, and the impulses which gave rise to it. Fulbright's scathing critique undermined the elite consensus that U.S. military intervention in Indochina was necessitated by Cold War geopolitics. Some critics of U.S. foreign policy argue that U.S. policy has changed little since Fulbright wrote his book and find his words applicable today.
In his book, Fulbright offered an analysis of American foreign policy:
Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But... when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.
Fulbright also related his opposition to any American tendencies to intervene in the affairs of other nations:
Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations — to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work.
He was also a strong believer in international law:
Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_FulbrightYou'll note the Tonkin Gulf precedent that Kerry SHOULD have known, understood and acted upon when confronted with something even worse.
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