“Winston Churchill had been invited to speak at Westminster College in Fulton, Mo., by President Harry Truman. Although Churchill was no longer the British prime minister—he was defeated in the election of 1945 and moved on to head the parliamentary opposition—his words carried tremendous weight.
Churchill used the speech, titled “The Sinews of Peace,” to warn America and the Western world of the looming threat posed by Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union. “A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. ... From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. …’”
“Churchill’s words stunned and angered many people, especially in America. After World War II, few wanted to hear that there was a new threat, particularly that it was a former ally. A New York paper described the speech as an “ideological declaration of war against Russia,” while many in Congress called it “shocking.”
“This negative reaction at the time reflected the fact that many Americans still believed that it would be possible to work with their wartime Russian allies in securing the peace,” explains the BBC, noting that the Truman administration’s distrust of the Soviets had not be made public. “So the out-of-power British leader’s candid appraisal of the deteriorating relationship between the west and the Soviet Union, expressed a reality that no American or British government official was yet prepared to acknowledge in public.”
A British Foreign Office report on the speech found that Churchill’s conclusions were supported by U.S. conservatives in military departments, but condemned by Congress, the media and the public. Nevertheless, it stated, the speech gave “the sharpest jolt to American thinking of any utterance since the end of the war” and would “set the pattern of discussion on world affairs for some time to come.’”
http://www.findingdulcinea.com...tain--Speech-.html#1
