Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech
Churchill described an iron curtain across Europe in a speech at a small Missouri college in March 1946. He was out of office, having lost the 1945 election, and was introduced by Truman, who had read the text and travelled with him from Washington, which made the speech impossible to treat as a private opinion. The phrase was not new — it had been used by Goebbels and by Churchill himself in a telegram to Truman the previous May — and this is where it entered general use: a curtain from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, with the ancient capitals of central and eastern Europe behind it and all subject to a very high measure of control from Moscow. The prescription was a fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples and enough combined strength to make aggression unattractive, since he had concluded from the 1930s that the Soviets admired strength and had no respect for military weakness. The immediate reception in the United States was mixed and largely negative; several newspapers thought it warmongering, and Truman publicly distanced himself while privately agreeing. Stalin answered in Pravda within a week, comparing Churchill to Hitler on the ground that both had begun by asserting the superiority of a language group. Kennan's long telegram had arrived in Washington three weeks earlier and made the analytical case for containment, and the Truman Doctrine followed a year later. The speech is the conventional marker for the beginning of the Cold War. The Fulton speech is also a lesson in who gets to say what. A serving president could not have delivered it in March 1946 without a diplomatic crisis, and a former prime minister standing beside him could, which is precisely why Truman went.
- Year: 1946 CE
- Category: Political
