SOURCE: “Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech: Forty Years After,” in Modern Age, Vol. 30, No. 2, Spring 1986, pp. 113-19.

In the following essay, Rossi examines Churchill's delivery of his speech “The Sinews of Peace” as a key event in the beginnings of the Cold War.

Oceans of ink have been spilled in an attempt to clarify the origins of the Cold War. Scholarly reputations have been made and destroyed in this intellectual war. Some scholars have sought the origins of the Cold War in the closing months of the Second World War as suspicion mounted between the Western Allies and Stalin's Russia. Others have looked to the months following the end of the war when the Soviet system slowly but inexorably closed over Eastern Europe. But for many Americans the event which dramatized the seriousness of the situation was a single dramatic speech—Winston Churchill's famous “Iron Curtain” address at...