Winston Churchill: Iron Curtain Speech (1946)
About the Author
Winston Churchill was born in 1874, the son of a prominent British Conservative Party politician and an American heiress and socialite. After making a poor showing in school as a youngster, he was not accepted to university—as most young men of his social status would have been—and he ended up in the British army, where he proved to be a brave soldier on campaigns in Africa. In a later job as a journalist, he was captured by the enemy during the South African War (also known as the Boer War) and made a daring escape from a prisoner of war camp that made him famous in Britain overnight. He rode his fame to election in the House of Commons in 1900, where he embarked on the career that would make him a somewhat unlikely world hero during World War II.
By March 1946, Churchill was seventy-one years old. He had attained status as a war leader and hero against the Nazis that had made him a “statesman of the world,” a phrase repeatedly applied to his postwar career....
