March 28, 2013

Finest Hour 155, Summer 2012

Page 45

Our Supreme Task: How Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech Defined the Cold War Alliance

Our Supreme Task: How Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech Defined the Cold War Alliance, by Philip White. Public Affairs, hardbound, 280 pp., illus., $26.99, Kindle $14.84. Member price $21.60.

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By Philip White

Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” speech, delivered at a small liberal arts college in March 1946, is one of the best-known orations in modern history. White sets out to tell the tale of how the speech came to be. While not living up to its subtitle, the book gives a good sense of the issues and era, providing context for the speech’s ringing words.

Why Fulton, Missouri? It’s an oft-told tale, not least in Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech Fifty Years Later (University of Missouri Press, 1999), a collection of papers evolving from a joint Churchill Centre/Churchill Memorial colloquium in 1996, edited by James W. Muller. Westminster College’s president, Frank “Bullet” McCluer, was a friend of Harry Vaughn, Westminster alumnus and military aide to President Harry S. Truman. McCluer decided to invite Churchill to deliver a speech on his campus, approached Vaughn to obtain Truman’s encouragement, and the President agreed, offering to introduce Churchill—surely the factor that pushed Churchill to accept the college’s request.

The event offered Churchill a venue to state his views on the developing postwar scene. Truman’s presence assured widespread media coverage, but also underlined the administration’s agreement with Churchill’s message calling for western resolve in the face of growing Soviet intransigence. The speech was a shot in the arm for the speaker and Westminster College.

Only on page 161 do we get to the speech itself. Chapter 8 provides the full text, with some annotations by the author. But this leaves precious little space for assessing the speech along the lines suggested in the subtitle.

We do learn a great many tidbits about lesser-known people, and sidebars cover events in the months and weeks leading up to the great day (a map of the campus would have been useful). Indeed, I found myself mentally marking out whole pages and paragraphs of trivia that contribute little to the story at hand. And the editors missed too many clangers—such as saying Chamberlain signed the 1938 Munich Agreement on Hitler’s desk in Berlin; that Harry Vaughn was Truman’s naval aide; that Churchill wore a bowler hat while traveling to Missouri.

For an assessment of how the speech “defined” the Cold War, readers must look elsewhere, such as the abovementioned 1996 anthology. This book will tell you more about who ate what, when and where.