The first week in October 1969 J. William Fulbright observed to the Senate of the United States that President Nixon had been in office nine months, “the normal period of gestation for humans.” During the fall campaign the president had told the American people that he had a “secret plan” to end the war. What had happened to that alluring scheme? Noting that nearly ten thousand American soldiers had died in Vietnam since the new administration had come to power, he proclaimed that it was time for the United States to leave Vietnam; it was time for the Vietnamese to fight their own war. Fulbright also announced his support for the national moratorium scheduled for October 15, declaring it to be “in the best American tradition of peaceful protest for the redress of grievances.”

As the antiwar movement veered sharply toward the political and cultural center in 1969, Fulbright became more closely identified with it and important to it. Partial proof of that was the fact that he became anathema to the movement's more radical elements.

No less than Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson, the Arkansan perceived that the battle on the home front was a struggle for the political center. It was to patriotic, law-abiding, churchgoing, property-owning Americans to which the movement would have to appeal. To this end, Fulbright repeatedly and publicly repudiated the tactic of draft resistance. Throughout 1967, 1968, and 1969, young men planning to burn their draft cards or flee to Canada wrote the chairman of the SFRC, asking for his advice.