Just Plain Bill

J. William Fulbright is quite likely the world's best-known Arkansan. An international scholarship program bears his name. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has become a hero to dissenters everywhere who oppose the war in Viet Nam. Twice, he has been a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet last week he was doing his durnedest to come across as "just plain Bill."

Since Memorial Day, Fulbright has been combing hill and hollow across Arkansas for votes in next week's Democratic preferential primary. Normally a shoo-in, he is involved this year in a bitter, four-cornered fight. Last week at the annual Mount Nebo chicken fry near Dardanelle, Ark., one critic got the biggest cheer of the day when she attacked his absenteeism from his home state. Minutes later, Fulbright himself drew only lukewarm applause.

A Nekkid Girl. Fulbright is still the leader in preprimary polls, but he faces a broad spectrum of dissatisfaction in Arkansas. The state's many hawks are angered by his Viet Nam stand. Labor officials are testy about his indifference. Negroes and white liberals are fed up with his consistent votes against civil rights laws, most recently open housing. He has even irritated some up-country puritans because he wrote an article for Playboy that appeared embarrassingly close to a gatefold photograph of what one foe described, in a shocked voice, as "a nekkid girl."

Nonetheless, the lackluster or extremist quality of his opponents is likely to ensure Fulbright a fifth term. One candidate, Foster Johnson, 53, campaigns wearing a sandwich board "so nobody will have any trouble knowing who I am." Another, Bobby K. Hayes, 37, preaches an isolationist populist program that includes such unlikely reforms as a $2.50-an-hour minimum wage and elimination of capital gains taxes. Fulbright's strongest adversary is former State Supreme Court Justice Jim Johnson, 44, an avowed segregationist whose extremism as the Dem ocratic nominee for Governor in 1966 helped make Winthrop Rockefeller Arkansas' first Republican Governor since Reconstruction. Now Johnson's wife Virginia is a candidate for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Together they stump the state, espousing George Wallace's values and lambasting Fulbright as "Hanoi's pinup boy."

Though the A.F.L.-C.I.O. state political-education committee has grudgingly endorsed Fulbright as a lesser evil than Jim Johnson, a Negro leader has urged union members to join Negroes and white liberals in a protest vote for Bobby K. Hayes. The object would be to take enough votes away from Fulbright to force him into a runoff with Jim Johnson. What if Fulbright should lose such a runoff? Said another bitter Ne gro leader: "We don't care that much." Probably, though, a majority of Arkansans still do. What they want is more response from Bill Fulbright--perhaps some of the down-home concern that now impels the scholarly Senator to pop into his car alone and disappear for days at a time into the just-folks country, squeezing hands and lifting his hat to compare bald spots. The primary will be only the first hurdle. The winner will still have to face Republican Charles Bernard, 40, a racial moderate and a fiscal conservative who is considered the strongest G.O.P. senatorial candidate in recent years.

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