Winston Churchill: Iron Curtain Speech

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. In some respects, this was ironic, as Churchill was manifestly a man with a nineteenth-century temperament—he was an imperialist, a chauvinist, and a blind patriot. Yet in his speech “The Sinews of Peace” he richly earned his newfound status as an icon of internationalism, showing that he had perhaps learned the lessons of two world wars better than any other Western politician of the twentieth century. In September 1946, just six months later, he made another of his greatest speeches in Zurich, Switzerland, in favor of the possibility of establishing a future “United States of Europe”; he thus helped lend vision and credibility to the project of creating what is today the European Union. In 1951 he would return to the British prime minister's position and preside in a largely ceremonial position over Britain's return to postwar economic prosperity while other ministers ran the country. Churchill himself was most interested in negotiating the terms of the cold war that he himself had helped define at Westminster College in 1946. He retired in 1955 and died on January 24, 1965.