fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to the logic of reason, it is highly sensitive to the logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw — and usually does — when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so.
In the years since this historic telegram sparked along the cables from Moscow to Washington, George Kennan has claimed more than once that he was writing less of military containment than of political. Washington did not read his sermon that way, and its language makes clear why. When the US naval attache in Moscow alerted the Chief of Naval Operations to the document, for example, he noted that it revealed the “utter ruthlessness and complete unscrupulousness of [the] Soviet ruling clique.” James Forrestal embraced it, writes Kennan, “had it reproduced and evidently made it required reading for hundreds, if not thousands, of higher officers in the armed services.” Byrnes thought it a “splendid analysis.” Louis Halle, a State Department official, remembered that “it came at a moment when the Department, having been separated by circumstances from the wartime policy towards Russia, was floundering about, looking for new intellectual moorings. Now, in this communication, it was offered a new and realistic conception to which it might attach itself. The reaction was immediate and positive. There was a universal feeling that ‘this was it,’ this was the appreciation of the situation that had been needed. Mr. Kennan's communication was reproduced for distribution to all the officers of the Department… We may not doubt that4t made its effect on the President.” Truman read it at a time when he had concluded that “unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making… I do not think we should play compromise any longer… I'm tired of babying the Soviets.” Nothing much happened immediately as a result of Kennan's analysis except that he won recognition as a master strategist and saw his “official loneliness [come]… to an end,” but in fact the long telegram had defined a new American policy toward the Soviet Union nearly as ideologically rigid as the policy Stalin had defined toward the West.
The third defining statement may have been the most important of all. Winston Churchill, now seventy-two, deposed as Prime Minister of England during the Potsdam Conference the previous July, traveled to Florida early in January 1946 to continue his recuperation from the hard years of war and the shock of losing election. He arrived with an invitation in his pocket to speak at a small Protestant men's college in Fulton, Missouri, a town of Southern ways in rich farm country north of the Missouri River in the center of Truman's home state. Truman's military aide, General Harry Vaughan, was a Westminster College graduate and had promoted the invitation with the President, who had endorsed it with a promise to travel to Fulton with Churchill and introduce him.
The former Prime Minister was worried about the hastening Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe. Americans seemed still to trust the Russians and he believed that trust dangerously misplaced. He decided to write a deliberately shocking speech, to give the West a wake-up call, as he had tried to wake up England to the Nazi threat in the decade between the world wars.
Perhaps to his surprise, he found that “the dire situation with which the insatiable appetites of Russia and of international Communism were confronting us was at last beginning to make a strong impression in American circles.”[22] Byrnes and Truman both read Churchill's speech before he delivered it, although Truman afterward denied having done so because it advanced a harsher line than he was yet prepared to take. Byrnes in late February delivered a tough anti-Soviet speech at the Overseas Press Club. Truman's exasperation with “babying the Soviets” evidently warmed him to Churchill's views. “The President invited me to travel with him in his train the long night's journey to Fulton,” Churchill recalled. “We had an enjoyable game of poker.” Since Truman “seemed quite happy” about Churchill's “general line,” the doughty Prime Minister “decided to go ahead.”
Forty thousand people had descended on Fulton that warm Tuesday afternoon, March 5, 1946. Westminster is set on a hill westward several blocks from the Fulton town square. Churchill, robed in scarlet for an honorary degree, spoke on national radio in the college gymnasium; loudspeakers carried the orotund Churchillian rumble to audiences in other buildings and to the crowds outdoors.
This was Churchill's famous speech “The Sinews of Peace,” when the former Prime Minister defined in a memorable phrase what had happened in Europe since the end of the war:
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of central and eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow.
Bluntly Churchill specified Moscow's measures of control: “Communist parties… raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers,” “police governments… prevailing,” “Turkey and Persia… both profoundly alarmed and disturbed,” “a pro-Communist Germany” that would “cause new serious difficulties in the British and American zones.” “Whatever conclusions may be drawn from these facts,” Churchill summarized, “… this is certainly not the liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essentials of permanent peace.”
The British statesman nevertheless found it possible to “repulse the idea that a new war is inevitable; still more that it is imminent… I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they do desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines.” The answer, he thought, must be Western strength and Anglo-American alliance. “From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than military weakness.” The “western democracies” would have to “stand together.” If they did so, “no one is likely to molest them.”
The condemnation of a former ally was shocking — to Stalin as well as to Americans. (“Mr. Churchill has now adopted the position of a warmonger,” Stalin soon
It would… be wrong and imprudent to intrust the secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb, which the United States, Great Britain and Canada now share, to the [United Nations], while it is still in its infancy. It would be criminal madness to cast it adrift in this still agitated and ununited world. No one in any country has slept less well in their beds because this knowledge and the method and the raw materials to apply it are at present largely retained in American hands. I do not believe we should all have slept so soundly had the positions been reversed and some Communist or neo-Fascist state monopolized, for the time being, these dread agencies. The fear of them alone might easily have been used to enforce totalitarian systems upon the free democratic world, with consequences appalling to the human imagination. God has willed that this shall not be, and we have at least a breathing space before this peril has to be encountered, and even then, if no effort is spared, we should still possess so formidable superiority as to impose effective deterrents upon its employment or threat of employment by others.
Which was nothing less than a call to an all-out atomic arms race.
Walter Bedell Smith, Dwight Eisenhower's aide during the Second World War, who had just been appointed the new US ambassador to the Soviet Union, stopped in to pay his respects to the British statesman in New York shortly after the Fulton speech. The street outside Churchill's hotel was noisy with picketers demonstrating solidarity with the Soviet Union. “I found him in the bathtub,” Smith sets the scene, “but he called me in; and as he dressed himself I read the speech which he was to make that night [in Manhattan]:
The former Prime Minister obviously was disturbed by the picketing outside. It was his first experience, in America, of any sentiment other than friendship. But he stood firm in his belief in the correctness of his Fulton analysis, declaring, “Mark my words — in a year or two years, many of the very people who are now denouncing me will say, ‘How right Churchill was.’”
