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own speech.
“Sinews of Peace”
(March 5, 1946)

 
    Churchill’s words were the primary model for Kennedy: vigorous, down-to-earth, a clarion call. Churchill’s words informed, explained, called for action, and predicted success. He was a moralist, realist, activist, and visionary. After a Churchill speech, there was no choice but to sally forth, to do the deeds that would win the affection and honor of later generations. Churchill’s rhetorical power came above all from the sense of fierce realism that he conveyed. He would not hold back vital information from compatriots and allies. His listeners knew this, and felt empowered by it.
    In Fulton, Churchill had a few specific purposes. 8 He bid his listeners that day, including President Harry Truman, to grasp the reality of the newly divided Europe. Using the phrase that came immediately to define the Cold War, he sounded the alarm: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” “Iron curtain” had an earlier provenance, having appeared in diplomatic, literary, and political references during the preceding half century; Churchill himself used it on several occasions in 1945. But it was the “Sinews of Peace” speech that defined the new era in those terms for the entire world.
    Churchill’s speech emphasized peace as well as the Cold War. It made clear that “we understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression.” Churchill underscored, “I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their powers and doctrines.” He urged the United States and the United Kingdom to meet that expansionist tendency together firmly but peacefully.
    Churchill’s urgent message on that day was more about willpowerthan military might. He called for a special relationship between the United States and the British Commonwealth and Empire. He spoke of that relationship in the terms of everyday life, not of high diplomacy. “If two of the workmen [building the Temple of Peace] know each other particularly well and are old friends, if their families are intermingled … why cannot they work together at the common task as friends and partners?”
    He called for building the new United Nations, so that “its work is fruitful, that it is a reality and not a sham, that it is a force for action, and not merely a frothing of words, that it is a true temple of peace in which the shields of many nations can some day be hung up, and not merely a cockpit in a Tower of Babel.” And under the general authority of the UN he called for a new relationship with Russia, not at a vague point in the future, but then and now, in 1946. We should reach, said Churchill, “a good understanding on all points with Russia under the general authority of the United Nations Organization and by the maintenance of that good understanding through many peaceful years, by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and its connections.”
    Churchill ended his remarks to his American listeners with a challenge, a promise, and a vision. Our efforts could redeem the future, create the peace we sought:
    If we adhere faithfully to the Charter of the United Nations and walk forward in sedate and sober strength seeking no man’s land or treasure, seeking to lay no arbitrary control upon the thoughts of men; if all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association, the highroads of the future will be clear, not only for our time, but for a century to come.
    Churchill’s promise—peace “not only for our time, but for a century to come”—not only referenced Chamberlain’s debacleeight years earlier in declaring the attainment of “peace in our time” after Munich, but looked forward confidently to a new era of peace. It was a turn of phrase that John