Churchill Warns of an Iron Curtain Across Europe

On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill delivered an address in the packed gymnasium of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, while loudspeakers carried his voice to an overflow crowd outside. Although he had led Great Britain through the Second World War, Churchill spoke not as prime minister but as a private citizen and the British Leader of the Opposition, having lost office following the Conservative Party defeat in July 1945. Wintering in the United States on medical advice, he had accepted an invitation from the college after President Harry S. Truman, a native Missourian, endorsed it with a handwritten note promising to introduce him. The two men traveled together by special train from Washington, with Churchill still revising his text along the way.

While the wartime Grand Alliance between the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain remained formally intact, post-war tensions were mounting sharply. The Soviet Union pressed territorial demands against Turkey, delayed the departure of its forces from Iran, and extended its influence across Eastern Europe, while civil conflict erupted in Greece. At the same time, many Western observers maintained that friendly relations with Moscow could endure. Churchill believed that an exhausted Europe could not counter Soviet ambitions alone and that the United States, unravaged by conflict and holding a monopoly on nuclear weapons, occupied the sole position of global leadership capable of deterring further expansion.