Foreign Policy and Education: A Confusion of Purposes: A Review Essay
Public Law 584 of the Seventy-sixth Congress (I946), the Fulbright Act, was produced in the early days of an extraordinarily creative period in American foreign policy. An approximate contemporary of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and Point Four, the Fulbright Act would be of interest if only because it is one of the few foreign-policy initiatives of the postwar period that originated in the legislative rather than the executive branch of government. In addition to that distinction, few programs of the federal government are more widely known, at least by name; and the author of the Act, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, if he had done nothing else in his tenure in the Senate, would nevertheless be among the bestknown members of that body by virtue of that Act alone. All of this would suggest that what was set in motion in I946 must by now be counted as something of a success. So it is, and Walter Johnson and Francis J. Colligan have produced a chronicle of that success. The authors have both had long associations with the Fulbright program. Mr. Johnson was a member of the Board of Foreign Scholarships from I947 to I954 and chairman of the Board from I950 to I953. Mr. Colligan was executive secretary of the Board from I948 to I957 and is at present director of Policy Review and Coordination for the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the Department of State. Given this background, serious criticism of the program was hardly to be expected, even if it were warranted. And while the writers specifically deny that their book is in any sense an "official history" of the program, the portrait has surely been painted by friendly artists. If there are warts on the subject's face, they do not appear in this picture. What we are given is, on the one hand, a straightforward account of the major events in the program's history and, on the other, a more or less unrelieved picture of adversities overcome, successes attained, and accomplishments in hand. And there are undoubtedly enough of all of those to fill a book. Starting with an imaginative and humane idea for using funds received in other countries for the sale of surplus war property, the program has developed into an extremely complex network of exchanges for a variety of specific purposes with a host of other countries. The bare statistics alone are impressive: