Senator J. William Fulbright (1905–1995) of Arkansas had become a staunch opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War by 1966. As a senator since 1945 and chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1959 to 1975, Fulbright first held a committee hearing on the war on February 4, 1966. This was the first of a series of high-profile hearings that would be collectively known as the Fulbright Hearings. The last of these hearings, and the most extensive and detailed of them, took place from April 20 to May 27, 1971. During the five years from 1966 to 1971, public opinion slowly gravitated from support for the war in Southeast Asia, to skepticism, to widespread disenchantment as luminaries like Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy openly announced their disapproval and anti-war demonstrations spread around the country, forcing President Lyndon Baines Johnson to abandon his campaign for re-election and compelling presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon to pledge to end the war—though he did not specify when or how. Although Nixon was elected president, the war was still going on more than two years later.