John Newhouse, the SFRC's designated Southeast Asia expert, recalled that he experienced considerable difficulty in persuading Fulbright to focus on Vietnam during the Kennedy administration and the first stages of the Johnson presidency. He seemed more interested in Europe, in foreign aid, and in the exchange program. Several times when Newhouse brought up the Indochinese situation, Fulbright accused him of trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. Then, in May of 1964, a horrifying picture in the Washington Post caught Pat Holt's attention. A prostrate Vietcong guerrilla, clad only in his undershorts, was being chained to an armored personnel carrier on a riverbank by South Vietnamese soldiers. They would drag him back and forth through the stream in an effort to get him to talk. Revolted and angered by the scene, Holt took the picture to Fulbright, who reacted similarly. “I want to know if this is the kind of advice the numerous American advisers are giving the Vietnamese,” Fulbright subsequently wrote Robert McNamara. Aside from the fact that torture was morally repugnant, he declared, it was counterproductive as well. If the struggle in Vietnam was basically political, that is, one for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people, then such abuses would play into the hands of the communists, especially in view of the fact that they came hard on the heels of reports of “napalm bombing of innocent villagers simply because the presence of Viet Cong is suspected.” Even without reports of torture and indiscriminate bombing, Fulbright told McNamara, he had become “gravely concerned” over the situation in Vietnam.