The Iron Curtain; Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War

New York, N.Y. Oxford University Press, 1986. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xiv, 370 pages. Includes Introduction; Churchill and America; Churchill, Bolshevism, and the Grand Alliance; Churchill Faces Postwar Problems, Teheran to Yalta; Yalta to Postdate; Anglo-Soviet Cold War, United states-Soviet Rapprochement; Churchill and Truman; The "Iron Curtain"; The Making of a Showdown; Confrontation; Aftermath and Conclusion. Also includes Notes, Bibliography, and Index. Fraser Jefcoate Harbutt was a history professor at Emory University for 35 years. He produced three books (one nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) and multiple articles that explored U.S. political and diplomatic history and the Cold War. Fraser started his career as a lawyer and practiced for ten years, first as a partner in New Zealand's largest law firm, Russell McVeagh, and later in England. However his life-long love of history and politics took over, and in the 1970s he received a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley. Prior to coming to Emory he taught at UCLA, Smith College and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Iron Curtain: Churchill, America, and the Origins of the Cold War which co-won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize from the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations; The Cold War Era; and Yalta 1945: Europe and America at the Crossroads which won the Southern Historians Association's Charles White Prize in European History, received a Special Citation from the Academy of American Diplomacy, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. This book is at once a fascinating portrait of Churchill as the leading protagonist of an Anglo-American political and military front against the soviet Union (a surprisingly neglected chapter in his extraordinarily well-documented career) and a penetrating reexamination of diplomatic relations between the United stats, Great Britain, and the U.S.S.R. as the world moved from war to an uneasy peace. Pointing out the Americocentric bias in most histories of the period, Harbutt shows that the Europeans played a more significant part in precipitating the Cold War than most people realize. He stresses that the same pattern of events that earlier led America belatedly into two world wars, namely the initial separation and then the sudden coming together of the the European an American political arenas, appeared here as well. From this combination of biographical and structural approaches, a new historical landscape emerges. The United States appears at times to be the rather passive object of competing Soviet and British maneuvers. The turning point came with the crisis of early 1946, which here receives its fullest analysis t date, when the Truman Administration in a systematic by carefully veiled and still widely misunderstood reorientation of policy (in which Churchill figured prominently) led the Soviet Union into the political confrontation that brought on the Cold War.

Derived from a Kirkus review: A work of history written from an English perspective. Harbutt argues that Churchill craftily led the Truman Administration to understand that it had no option but to put its foot down with Stalin, stepping into the vacuum that Great Britain could no longer fill. Churchill's visit to Washington in February, 1946, and his famous ""Iron Curtain"" speech at Fulton, Missouri, a month later, were crucial, Harbutt says, in leading first Truman, then the American public, to this realization. All that was left was for opportunities to present themselves, and here Stalin clumsily played right into Anglo-American hands when he occupied Northern Iran. The US worked the United Nations skillfully in this case, and it was only left for Truman to later consolidate his position with the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift.

On March 5, 1946, at the request of Westminster College in the small Missouri town of Fulton (population of 7,000), Churchill gave his now famous "Iron Curtain" speech to a crowd of 40,000. In addition to accepting an honorary degree from the college, Churchill made one of his most famous post-war speeches. In this speech, Churchill gave the very descriptive phrase that surprised the United States and Britain, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." Before this speech, the U.S. and Britain had been concerned with their own post-war economies and had remained extremely grateful for the Soviet Union's proactive role in ending World War II. It was Churchill's speech, which he titled "The Sinews of Peace," that changed the way the democratic West viewed the Communist East. Though many people believe that Churchill coined the phrase "the iron curtain" during this speech, the term had actually been used for decades (including in several earlier letters from Churchill to Truman). Churchill's use of the phrase gave it wider circulation and made the phrase popularly recognized as the division of Europe into East and West. Many people consider Churchill's "iron curtain speech" the beginning of the Cold War.
Condition: Very good / Very good.

Keywords: Winston Churchill, Cold War, Harry Truman, Soviet Union, Iron Curtain, Teheran Conference, Yalta Conference, Potsdam Conference, Foreign Policy, Containment, James Byrnes, George F. Kennan, Molotov, United Nations

ISBN: 0195038177

[Book #79647]

Price: $40.00