OUR SUPREME TASK: HOW WINSTON CHURCHILL'S IRON CURTAIN SPEECH DEFINED THE COLD WAR ALLIANCE by Philip White
Our Supreme Task: How Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech Defined the Cold War Alliance by Philip White
The year 1945 was chaotic -- both for the world, of course, and for Winston Churchill. One moment he was sitting across the negotiating table from Stalin at Potsdam, and the next found himself voted out of office and back in England. Out of power, Churchill was keenly aware of the perils of the postwar world: Communism was on the march and the people of Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland all found themselves in the grip of the Soviets. The Red Army occupied a large German territory, and the Kremlin was manipulating post-war food shortages, labor disputes, and social unrest in Greece, France, and Italy. Having spent his "wilderness years" in the late 1930s warning of the dangers of diplomatic and military weakness and the growing menace of Nazism, Churchill once again required a platform from which to make his views known, and he soon found it. In 1946 he made a trip to the unlikely venue of Fulton, Missouri, to deliver a speech entitled "The Sinews of Peace" -- now known as the Iron Curtain Speech -- which served to fundamentally define the dangers of Soviet totalitarian Communism. This is the story of that pivotal speech and a portrait of the irrepressible man who delivered it.
Public Affairs, Hardcover, 1st Edition, 1st Printing, 2012
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.