COLD WAR RHETORIC: STRATEGY, METAPHOR, AND IDEOLOGY by MEDHURST IVIE SCOTT WANDER

Author:MEDHURST, IVIE, SCOTT, WANDER
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published: 2010-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT AND THE “PATHOLOGY OF POWER”

Ironically, the same senator who had concluded as early as 1946 that Soviet totalitarianism was an immoral, aggressive force, and who had criticized Henry Wallace in 1947 for delivering a speech that sounded “just as though it had been written in the Kremlin,” was himself the author thirty years later of a powerful attack on U.S. Cold War doctrine. 64 “Few modern books on foreign policy have been so influential,” conceded one of his critics, “as Senator J. William Fulbright’s classic lectures, The Arrogance of Power. To find a world of comparable impact on American opinion one has to go back to Mahan. ”65 Although signs of Fulbright’s reassessment of Soviet-American relations were present in his Old Myths and New Realities, published in 1964, the transition was not complete until two years later.66 His “arrogance thesis” emerged in the midst of growing frustration over American involvement in Vietnam and was restated prior to American disengagement from the war in The Crippled Giant.67 Thus, my analysis of the senator’s leading metaphorical concepts emphasizes vehicles displayed in his two principal works during the Vietnam era.68

Unlike Wallace, Fulbright rejected the GAME metaphor which, in his assessment, led to a “conception of politics as warfare”: Even the most dazzling success in the game of power politics does nothing to make life more meaningful or gratifying for anybody except the tiny handful of strategists and geopoliticians who have the exhilarating experience of manipulating whole societies like pawns on a chessboard. 69

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