In early 1959, ten years after his appointment to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright became its chairman. Although from the beginning he had been closely identified with foreign affairs, Fulbright's rise to a position of influence on the committee was unusually swift. Through deaths, departures, and defeats, and through the seniority system he had initially deplored, he moved upward rapidly. By 1956 he was the number two man. Tom Connally, the chairman when Fulbright joined the committee, had left the Senate in 1952 at the age of seventy-five. Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, who became the Republican chairman under Eisenhower, was sixtynine and seventy during the two years he held the post. When the Democrats regained control of the Senate in 1954, Walter George assumed the reins at the age of seventy-seven. After Herman Talmadge took George's seat, the aged Theodore Francis Green became the chairman.

By 1959 Green was ninety years old and, not surprisingly, found it difficult to keep up with what day it was, much less the complexities of foreign affairs. The de facto chairman of the SFRC was Chief of Staff Carl Marcy. During the debates over the mutual security bills, it was customary for the press to be admitted to the committee room, where in executive session the members had “marked up,” that is, made specific revisions in, the administration's proposed measure. “Senator Green loved to have the press come storming into the room so he could tell them what happened,” Marcy remembered. The reporters would ask a question or two and then leave.