It is a little known fact of Australia’s Vietnam War that America’s leading dissenter Senator J.William Fulbright made a short visit here in late 1965, a few months after the Menzies government had committed troops, and well before Vice President Hubert Humphrey (1966) and President Lyndon Johnson (in 1967). As Chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee he is known as the man who helped ‘lead the US’ in repudiation of its tragic course on Vietnam. In Australia he caused a controversy in the press that nearly became a diplomatic incident when he commented unfavourably on the size of Australia’s troop commitment. The  episode has never previously  been investigated. The visit is unknown to historians on either side of the Pacific. This paper reconstructs the incident and explains the  controversial comments as consistent with subsequent expressions of Fulbright’s dissent and also with Australian labour’s opposition to US policy.