A recently discovered document sheds new light on the wartime leader’s ‘iron curtain’ address
It was a speech that electrified the world, one that coined a phrase that was to characterise the political era that followed the second world war. But its content could have been very different, reveals a document freshly unearthed by a historian researching the life of Winston Churchill.
On 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, before a huge crowd which included the US president, Harry Truman, Britain’s wartime leader issued a famous description of the political division that was opening across Europe between the Soviet-dominated Communist east and the western democracies. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill declared, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent.”
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