With the American president’s blessing, his clarion call for Anglo-American resistance to the Soviet Union’s “Iron Curtain” (his metaphor for the spread of communism dividing up Europe) would launch the decades-long Cold War. Only months after being turned out of high office, Churchill journeyed to a college gym in nearby Fulton to give one of the most significant speeches of his career. When asked that year about his secret of success, the old warhorse advised, “Conservation of energy-never stand up when you can sit down, and never sit down when you can lie down.” After a long train ride from Washington, the seventy-one-year-old former British prime minister was careful not to exert himself too much. The two grinning politicians were surrounded by dour security agents (standing guard on the running boards) as the limo drove through the state capital on March 6, 1946. In an open-air limousine convertible, Winston Churchill sat beside Roosevelt’s successor while thousands of Missourians waved and greeted them at the train station. Old Glory and the Union Jack draped the streets of Jefferson City, Missouri-the perfect symbolism for a visit by President Harry Truman and the man who Truman said had saved Western civilization. This excerpt is from When Lions Roar: The Churchills and the Kennedys by ICIJ member Thomas Maier. Churchill’s 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri, warning against his former Communist ally during World War II, set the stage for a new conflict known as the Cold War, which lasted for decades and still haunts international relations today. Surprisingly voted out of office after World War II, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill privately became an advocate for an Anglo-American first strike atom bomb attack against the Soviet Union, as once secret FBI records indicate.
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