Churchill used "iron curtain" ten months before Fulton

Winston Churchill gave his “Iron Curtain” speech, titled “The Sinews of Peace”, on 5 March 1946 in a college gymnasium at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Harry Truman on the platform, warning that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Was Fulton the first time Churchill said “iron curtain”?

No. On 12 May 1945, four days after the German surrender, Churchill sent Truman a telegram marked personal and top secret. Alarmed that American forces were already leaving Europe while Soviet divisions stayed, he wrote of the Red Army:

“An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front. We do not know what is going on behind.” — Churchill to Truman, 12 May 1945

The cable is printed in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States and held in Britain’s National Archives. What Fulton did was give the image a world stage, with the President of the United States sitting beside him. The National WWII Museum credits the speech with making “iron curtain” a household phrase; it also put Churchill’s call for a “special relationship” between Britain and the US into wide circulation.

Why was he speaking in a small Missouri town?

Because a college president asked, and Truman helped. Westminster’s president, Franc McCluer, used an alumnus with access to the White House; Truman added a handwritten note to the invitation: “This is a wonderful school in my home state.” Churchill had lost the general election in July 1945 and was now Leader of the Opposition, so he introduced himself as a “private visitor”.

The timing gave the words their force. Stalin had given a speech on 9 February that the WWII Museum describes as declaring war between East and West inevitable, and George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” from Moscow had followed within weeks. The line Churchill drew that afternoon later took physical form when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961.