Francis P. Sempa
Eighty years ago this month, the Cold War was emerging into U.S. and Western consciousness, despite the work of those within our government and society who consciously or unconsciously advanced communist goals. Just five months after celebrating V-J Day and the end of the Second World War with our Soviet “allies,” George F. Kennan, then a relatively unknown American diplomat assigned to our Moscow embassy, wrote a Long Telegram to his superiors in the State Department about the nature of the Soviet communist threat to the West. The classified telegram arrived in Washington on February 22, 1946. A few weeks later, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill delivered a commencement address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, and announced to President Harry S. Truman (who was in attendance) and the world that the Soviet Union had erected an “iron curtain” across central and eastern Europe.
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