Like Walter Lippmann, James Reston, and other observers of American foreign relations, Fulbright sensed that in the wake of the Berlin and U-2 crises, the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and the Cuban missile confrontation the American people were once again growing frustrated with and weary of the burdens of world leadership. The great danger in all of this, he believed, was that the country was ripe for an isolationist resurgence.

In the spring of 1961 Fulbright began to receive reports from friends and admirers across the country that the U.S. military had embarked on a carefully orchestrated campaign to acquaint the American public with the dangers of communism. In the process, they were providing a forum for right-wing Russophobes who not only denigrated the Soviet Union but equated liberalism with “socialism” and “communism.” Fulbright first became concerned about the military's self-appointed role as a propaganda agency for the right when James McCormick, an employee of Stars and Stripes, wrote him complaining that members of the U.S. command in Germany had forbidden the paper to publish stories on recent SFRC hearings in which Fulbright and others had criticized aid to Turkey. Fulbright immediately complained to Secretary of Defense Thomas Gates and demanded that censorship of Stars and Stripes cease at once. Gates's reply was far from satisfactory, but Fulbright assumed that with the election of John F. Kennedy, the military would stick to purely military matters. He was mistaken.

On April 19, 1961, Marcy passed Fulbright a letter that one of his contacts in the Department of Defense (DOD) had given him.