Tiny College Again Hosts a Giant Figure : History: Site of Gorbachev speech is same forum where Winston Churchill delivered his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ warning in 1946.

The world was different then. World War II was over. Evil had been vanquished. The boys were coming home. And Winston Churchill, still an international hero even though he’d been voted out of office, chose an unlikely stage from which to warn of a new world threat.

In a packed gymnasium on an obscure college campus in a tiny Midwestern town, the ex-British prime minister delivered in 1946 what would become one of his most famous speeches.

“A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory . . . “ he intoned in an address credited with marking a turning point in East-West relations. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”

Forty-six years, one Cold War and a new world order later, the shadow has lifted. The Berlin Wall, the Iron Curtain’s concrete manifestation, has been torn asunder, its shards carted away for trinkets.

And on Wednesday, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet reformer and another beloved world leader so recently rejected by his own people, will come to this same village tucked away in the rolling hills of central Missouri to mark the end of the epoch Churchill signaled.

“It’s come full circle,” said Bob Karsch, a retired history professor who was on the faculty at Westminster College in 1946 and was in the audience when Churchill spoke.

That was a glorious time for Fulton, then a hamlet of 7,000 people. Twenty-five thousand people showed up to cheer Churchill and President Harry S. Truman even though only one-tenth of that number could get inside the gymnasium. The speech was broadcast nationally and world reaction--much of it hostile--was swift.

Even today, said Westminster President J. Harvey Saunders, “when I go to other parts of the country, if anyone knows anything about Westminster, it will be that identification.”

It is for this very reason that Gorbachev decided to deliver the first and most important address of his 14-day U.S. tour here. It will be the only speech he will give that is not attached to the trip’s fund-raising mission.

“When Churchill spoke here in 1946, the iron curtain was falling and the world was at an historic turning point,” said Jim Garrison, executive director of the San Francisco-based Gorbachev Foundation USA, which is organizing the tour. “We are now at another crucial point in time--the end of the Cold War--and Mr. Gorbachev is deeply concerned that we unite and take stock of what the future holds. We have a very limited opportunity to figure out what the world should be. Otherwise, if we muddle along, the future will make victims of us. This is Gorbachev’s passion, as we will learn from his speech.”

In Saunders’ eyes, Churchill’s speech was one of the few in history that changed the world. “The whole Western policy of containing Soviet Communism began here,” he said, adding that it would perhaps be unrealistic to expect a similar “profound international change” to result from Gorbachev’s address Wednesday.

Nevertheless, he and others are anxiously waiting to see whether Gorbachev’s speech will be largely symbolic or if it will contain concrete proposals for altering relations between the United States and the former Soviet Union.

The symmetry of the occasion is lost on no one, especially at Westminster, where Churchill’s visit and the town’s place in history are endlessly commemorated.

Robert E. McIntosh, a retired business executive and Westminster trustee, remembers Churchill’s speech well. “I was 21 years old, had just gotten out of three years in the Navy during the war and was very excited to be close to these two world leaders,” he said. “I was taken by his phrase of an iron curtain descending.”

Today, Westminster is home to the Churchill Memorial, a museum and library inside a 300-year-old London church that was relocated and reconstructed here after it had been bombed during World War II. A life-size statue of Churchill stands outside. And nearby is a 32-foot long sculpture fashioned from sections of the Berlin Wall that will serve as the backdrop for Gorbachev’s speech. The sculptor was Edwina Sandys, one of Churchill’s 10 grandchildren.

There are some, including Karsch, who believe Westminster has inflated the significance of Churchill’s Fulton address.

Nevertheless, it was Churchill’s usage of the term “iron curtain” in Fulton that caught the public imagination.

To Karsch’s mind, Gorbachev’s speech potentially is of greater historic importance. “I think by his coming now, so soon after he unleashed the forces of democracy and the free market in the Communist parts of Eastern Europe and Asia, to make a sort of capstone address would seem to me to be an historic event,” said the historian, who retired in 1980 from the University of Missouri in nearby Columbia.

The level of interest in the address from local citizens and the national and international press would seem to indicate that others share this view.

More than 300 media representatives have applied for credentials to cover the speech, and the 15,000 to 20,000 people now expected to attend far surpasses the 8,000 to 12,000 originally estimated. That many people would swamp the postage stamp-sized campus.

“If we have 15,000 to 20,000 people, there will be people who will not see the speech,” said Bruce Hackmann, Westminster director of press relations, in a display of understatement.

So how did it come to pass that this tiny school, which even today has only 700 students, became a forum for world leaders?

It began with college President Franc L. McCluer issuing an invitation to Churchill via an alumnus, Major Gen. Harry H. Vaughan, who then was Truman’s chief military aide. Before sending it to Churchill, Truman scribbled across the bottom of the invitation: “This is a wonderful college in my home state. Hope you can do it. I will introduce you.”

The college already had an endowed lecture. After Churchill’s speech, Westminster had no trouble getting presidents, captains of industry and other national leaders to speak here.

Gorbachev declined in late 1989 when the college first invited him. “We knew that our chances were fairly slim,” said Saunders. This fall, after the college began developing a symposium to mark the end of the Cold War, another invitation was issued to Gorbachev. This time, seeking a suitable forum for his message, he decided to accept.