Winston Churchill Remembered

Today the American History Channel aired an audio recording of Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain“ speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.

Only an audio recording was made, and though I knew of it, I had never read a transcript of the speech. But I remembered as I listened this evening to Churchill’s majestic rhetoric that, twenty-two years later in 1968, I encountered Lady Churchill in a wheelchair on a return train from Paris to London. Her husband had died three years previous but she bore the celerity of her late husband with grace.

“The Speech” is world famous and recalls Churchill’s listeners to the need to defend Christian civilization from a totalitarian regime in Russia that had laid down an “Iron Curtain” across East and parts of Central Europe.

Much of the particulars are dated, of course. But it bears listening as we await equivalent leaders today to appear who give us their assessment of the dangers of “the Deep” administrative state as its tentacles wrap around our throats and constrict the oxygen needed to sustain American freedom today.