As research for a pending work, I just re-read Churchill's 1946 "The Sinews of Peace" speech in Fulton, Missouri. His lessons of political accountability are timeless, his prophesies of communist oppression are frighteningly accurate and his hopes for the United Nations are lamentable in their having come to despair.

The speech applies to every age and every confrontation involving the American democracy, and is another indispensible lesson in American political science.