In this speech, Stalin bore no resemblance to the man Roosevelt had mistaken him for. Truman was beginning to recognize the need for a new approach to Soviet relations, one based on facts rather than on wishful thinking. Analysis of Stalin’s presentation having yet to arrive from the US Embassy in Moscow, Churchill’s take on what was going on at the Kremlin was suddenly of particular interest. And the visitor had something even more important to offer. At a time when Truman had yet to emerge from Roosevelt’s shadow, it might be difficult politically to depart from his predecessor’s Soviet policy. The Fulton speech, delivered by a private citizen who also happened to be a master of the spoken word, as well as a figure of exceptional appeal to Americans, would allow Truman, at no political cost to himself, to see if the public was ready to accept a change.
After he met with Truman, Churchill spent the night at the British Embassy. He had planned to return to Florida the next day, but snow-bound airfields caused him to stay an additional night. Besides, the difficult trip north had left him feeling bilious and unsteady on his feet. His condition persisted in the days that followed. Back in Miami Beach, he remained in bed when he received James Byrnes, the US Secretary of State, for two hours of talks. Following Churchill’s White House visit, an announcement had gone out that he and Truman would fly to Missouri together on 4 March. In view of his health, it was later quietly agreed that they would travel by train instead. Less than forty-eight hours before he and Clementine Churchill left for Washington on the first leg of his trip, he was coughing and complained on the phone to a friend that he was unwell.
Again, the timing of Churchill’s appearance in the capital was fortunate. Again, actions taken by Stalin the day before Churchill arrived gave point to the visitor’s argument. On 2 March, the Churchills were en route from Florida when Stalin failed to heed the deadline by which it had long been agreed that all Red Army troops would be withdrawn from Iran. It was the first flagrant violation of a treaty obligation since Hitler, and commentators in the US and Britain were soon anxiously comparing it to the Führer’s march into the demilitarized Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles a decade before. The Rhineland episode had been only the first of many such unilateral violations. Would Iran prove to be the same?
In the fortnight since Churchill’s visit, the State Department had received an eye-opening message from the US Embassy in Moscow. US chargé d’affaires George Kennan had long been frustrated by his government’s naive view of Stalin. He used the present opportunity to put his considerable literary skills to work limning the postwar Soviet mind-set. Widely distributed and much read within the administration, the 8,000-word cable known as the Long Telegram did much to alter attitudes left over from the Roosevelt era. It fell to Churchill, however, to test the waters publicly. When Truman reviewed the final draft of the Fulton speech as they travelled on the ten-car presidential special to Missouri on the 5th, he called it admirable, said it would do nothing but good, and predicted it would cause a stir. Nevertheless, Churchill understood from the outset that he could count on White House support only if his presentation was well received. If he sparked off a controversy, he was on his own.
Resplendent in red robes that prompted some spectators to remark that he resembled a well-fed cardinal, Churchill made his case about time, the bomb, and the Soviet menace to an audience of 2,600 in the college gymnasium. Billed as the opinions of a private individual with no official mission or status of any kind, his comments were broadcast on radio across the US and reported around the world. As he talked on, he alternated between holding the chubby fingers of his left hand splayed across his round torso and using that hand to drive home a point.
He spoke again (though most listeners would be hearing that arresting phrase for the first time) of an ‘iron curtain’ that had descended across the continent from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic. As he had done with Stalin at Potsdam, he ticked off the names of the Eastern and Central European capitals now under Soviet control. ‘This is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.’ He rejected the idea that another world war was either imminent or inevitable, and he argued that Soviet Russia did not at present desire war, but rather ‘the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines’.
Churchill observed that in his experience, there was nothing the Soviets respected so much as strength and nothing for which they had less respect than weakness, particularly military weakness. He called on Britain and the US to emphasize their ‘special relationship’, in the interest of being able to negotiate from a position of strength. The danger posed by Soviet expansionism would not be removed by closing one’s eyes to it; it would not be removed by waiting to see what happened or by a policy of appeasement. What was needed was a settlement. The longer a settlement was put off, the more difficult it would be to achieve and the greater the danger would become.
Returning to the theme of fleeting time which he had sounded in his address in the House of Commons on 16 August 1945, he emphasized the necessity of acting in the breathing space provided by one side’s exclusive possession of the atomic bomb. ‘Beware, I say; time is plenty short. Do not let us take the course of allowing events to drift along until it is too late.’
The Fulton speech set off an avalanche of criticism and controversy in the US. In the wake of Stalin’s remarks the previous month and of the Red Army’s failure to leave Iran, there was perhaps little room to quarrel with Churchill’s blunt review of the unpleasant facts. His recommendations were another matter. Members of Congress lined up to administer a vigorous spanking to Churchill for – as they had heard him, anyway – proposing an Anglo-American military alliance, calling on Washington to underwrite British imperialism, and nudging the US in the direction of a new war. At the time, Halifax privately compared Churchill’s situation in the US to that of a dentist who has proposed to extract a tooth. His many detractors were not so much claiming that the tooth was fine (given the recent news, how could they?), only that the dentist was ‘notorious for his love of drastic remedies’ and that surely modern medicine offered ‘more painless methods of cure’.
When he spoke in Missouri, Churchill had been careful to call attention to Truman’s presence on the same platform and to point out that the President had travelled a thousand miles ‘to dignify and magnify’ the occasion. Truman had applauded Churchill’s address for all to see and he had praised it to him afterwards in private conversation. In view of the uproar, however, he was quick to distance himself publicly. Three days after Fulton, he claimed not to have read the speech beforehand, and he declined to comment now that he had heard it. He wrote to his mother that while he believed the speech would do some good he was not ready to endorse it yet. Other figures associated with the administration also ostentatiously backed off. Secretary of State Byrnes denied advance knowledge of the content of the speech, though he, like Truman, had been shown a copy by Churchill himself. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson abruptly cancelled a joint appearance with Churchill in New York.
In the belief that his views had been misrepresented in Congress and in a broad swathe of the American press, Churchill spent the next two weeks trying to undo some of the damage. He made widely reported speeches and public appearances, but he also did some of his most important and effective work behind the scenes in Washington and New York. In one-on-one sessions with journalists, government officials, military leaders, and other opinion-makers, he patiently and methodically pointed out that he had called for a fraternal association, not a military alliance or a treaty. He maintained that, contrary to popular fears, he did not expect the US to back British foreign policy in every respect, or vice versa. He clarified that he had asked for a build-up of strength in pursuit of negotiations and that his purpose, as laid out in the text of the speech, was to prevent another war, not to start one. Throughout, Churchill toned down his language considerably; it was not his natural idiom perhaps, but it was what he felt people wanted to hear.
Halifax judged that by the time Churchill finished meeting with everyone on his long list he had