Since 1967 J. William Fulbright had decried and described the corrosive effect the war was having on both Vietnamese and American society. By 1971 his focus was almost entirely on the havoc being wrought on the U.S. economy, its Constitution, and its common ideals. “When a war is of long duration, when its objectives are unascertainable, when the people are bitterly divided and their leaders lacking in both vision and candor, then the process of democratic erosion is greatly accelerated, ” he declared in his Florida State speech. “Beset by criticism and doubt, the nation's leaders resort increasingly to secrecy and deception.” That was what was happening in America in 1971, and as a result, the very institutional foundations of the Republic were at risk. “When truth becomes the first casualty, ” he warned the Senate, quoting a familiar aphorism, “belief in truth, and in the very possibility of honest dealings, cannot fail to become the second.”

In mid-March Fulbright decided to attack the whole concept of executive privilege. It lay, he was convinced, at the very heart of the imperial presidency, and it was being used to conceal American involvement in Southeast Asia and other real and imagined trouble spots around the world. By 1971 Nixon and Kissinger had succeeded in shifting most diplomatic policy and decision making from the cabinet departments to the NSC, which was part of the office of the president and as such exempt from congressional accountability. Unwilling to see anything slip through the veil of secrecy, however, the president extended executive privilege beyond the confines of the White House to cover even communications between regular cabinet officers and the president.