...the exhaustive research, clear prose, and mature scholarship make this book the definitive account of Fulbright's life. H-Net Book Review
...Woods's excellent biography provides a detailed account of Fulbright's life and political career. Gracefully written and well researched, Woods's study is sympathetic to Fulbright but independent in its judgements. American Historical Review
...a superb life-and-times biography of one of America's leading senators of the twentieth-century, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas....Wood's study is likely to remain virtually definitive for many years to come. Georgia Historical Quarterly
An engrossing biography... Foreign Affiars
...Woods wisely resists the temptation to make the crooked lines straight. ...Wood's biography--which, like Fulbright's career, is long but never dull... The New Republic
Because Fulbright has been one of the most important and controversial figures in 20th-century American politics, and certainly, foreign policy, this biography has long been needed. Woods has given us a most significant account, for he has a sure grasp of the larger foreign and domestic issues, the sources (especially the Fulbright papers), and Arkansas politics with which Fulbright had a love/hate relationship and where his mother was a forces as a newspaper editor. And the book is as readable as it and its subject are important. Walter LaFeber, Cornell University
J. William Fulbright was one of the most diversely intelligent legislators of his time. He had a wonderful will to urge what was right, reverse himself on the rare occasion when he was wrong, and to annoy deeply the more rigid of the world's stuffed shirts. This fine book tells it all, and to one's true delight. John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard University
Chapter after chapter, I found myself wishing that Fulbright had been listened to, that his voice had carried farther--on Vietnam, the Middle East, overcommitment abroad, militarism, Soviet-American detente, the imperial presidency. What a different history--certainly less destructive and more progressive from that contained in this fair-minded book--we would have had if the advice of the outspoken senator from Arkansas had been heeded. Thomas Paterson, author of Contesting Castro: The United States and the Triumph of the Cuban Revolution and Professor of History, University of Connecticut
The book is through--almost every page has an interesting bit of information. Arkansas Democratic Gazette
Randall Woods, a distinguished diplomatic historian at the University of Arkansas, has written a thoughtful and thorough biography of one of America's most outspoken United States Senators....Based on extensive archival research and oral histories, Woods' meticul;ous study is likely to join William Berman's William Fulbright and the Vietnam War (1988) in becomming on eof the standard accounts of Fulbright and postwar American foreign policy. Robert K. Brigham, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society
