WASHINGTON -- Former senator J. William Fulbright, whose stirring criticism of the "arrogance of power" in the Vietnam War made him a hero to activists half his age and anathema to the White House, died Thursday of a stroke. He was 89.


Fulbright's widow, Harriet, said the powerful former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee died peacefully early Thursday. Fulbright had been at home the last three weeks after being previously hospitalized for a series of strokes.


Fulbright's 30-year career as a senator from Arkansas also spurred the creation in 1946 of the international student exchange program that continues under his name. More than 100,000 people from abroad have studied in the United States and more than 65,000 U.S. students and professors have studied overseas under the Fulbright Scholarships.


One of Fulbright's young staff aides in the 1960s was fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton, then a student at Georgetown University.


In May 1993, President Clinton awarded Fulbright a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor a president can bestow.


"The American political system produced this remarkable man, and my state did, and I'm real proud of it," Clinton said.


Fulbright's interest in international affairs demonstrated itself early. Soon after his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1942, Fulbright crafted a 55-word resolution stating U.S. support for an international peacekeeping organization. This was a forerunner to the United Nations, established in 1945.


As he often rubbed President Lyndon Johnson the wrong way with his stances, so had he irritated President Harry Truman, who called him "overeducated," and Senator Joseph McCarthy, who branded him "Senator Halfbright."


It was lines like the following, from his 1966 book "The Arrogance of Power," that so riled supporters of the Vietnam War:


"Gradually but unmistakably America is showing signs of that arrogance of power which has afflicted, weakened, and in some cases destroyed great nations in the past. In so doing we are not living up to our capacity and promise as a civilized example for the world. The measure of our falling short is the measure of the patriot's duty of dissent."


Fulbright's legislative career closed in 1974 when he lost the Democratic nomination to the U.S. Senate to Dale Bumpers.


After his congressional service, Fulbright, a lawyer, became a lobbyist, representing a number of foreign interests from his Washington office.


During a long public career, Fulbright also tangled with President Richard Nixon, who in 1969 attacked congressional critics of the Pentagon as "new isolationists."


Fulbright responded that he and fellow critics of the war were "questioning the political judgments that led us into this quagmire."


James William Fulbright was born April 9, 1905, in Sumner, Missouri.