On 5 March 1946, barely eight months after being ousted in the General Election, Winston Churchill travelled to Missouri, the home state of the President who had succeeded the great American wartime leader, Franklin D Roosevelt. President Truman had invited the former British Prime Minister, whom he barely knew when he entered the White House, to take a short tour with him, and Churchill was delighted to accept the honour. Truman had brought a new broom to Washington. Whereas Roosevelt had been keen to get along with the Soviet leader Marshal Stalin, confident that the two post-war superpowers could work well together, Truman was more hostile. Everywhere he looked, he saw the Soviets breaching their wartime agreements. Churchill, too, was deeply troubled and upset by what he saw as Soviet aggression and the failure of Stalin to compromise over the question of Poland.
So when Truman asked Churchill to deliver a speech about the prospects of peace in the post-war world at a little-known college in Fulton, Churchill eagerly accepted the invitation. The speech he prepared began by expressing great faith in the new United Nations Organisation, which had only just come into being. Churchill anticipated the debate that would last for decades by insisting that the UN would need to have its own armed forces, made up of soldiers, sailors, and airmen recruited from its member states, in order to enforce its decisions and guarantee the peace. He also put great faith in the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and America, and in how the ‘English-speaking peoples’ were standing at the ‘pinnacle of world power’.
But the speech is best remembered for one section that contained a major warning about the future. Churchill said he understood Stalin’s desire for a barrier with the West – but went on to condemn this in some of his finest rhetoric. ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,’ he declared, ‘an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia… all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.’
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