Speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman seated behind him, Churchill warned that Soviet influence had split the continent, stating 'from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.' The speech shocked many Western listeners still allied in spirit with wartime partner Moscow and became a defining rhetorical marker of the emerging Cold War.
Churchill was no longer prime minister, having lost the 1945 election, but he remained one of the most recognizable voices in the world, and Harry Truman invited him to speak at a small Missouri college partly to lend prestige to the occasion and partly to test the waters for a harder American line against Moscow. Truman sat on the platform as Churchill spoke, nodding along, though the White House later distanced itself from the speech's blunt tone.
Churchill's phrase was not entirely original, versions of 'iron curtain' had appeared in earlier writing, including his own private telegrams to Truman the previous year, but the Fulton speech gave it permanent currency. He described Soviet control descending over Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia, cities he called part of 'the Soviet sphere,' subject to police governments and Moscow's dictates.
Soviet reaction was furious; Stalin compared Churchill to Hitler for preaching racial and ideological division. But the speech crystallized a mood already forming in Washington and London. Within a year, the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan would give Churchill's rhetorical curtain a concrete policy architecture, and the term itself would outlive the conflict, remaining the era's most durable metaphor until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.