Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, in office only eight days, was in Washington on this date in 1984 for his first meeting with U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The pair had first met four months earlier, again in Washington, while Mulroney was Leader of the Opposition. In coming to office, Mulroney had promised Canadians he would pursue better Canada-U.S. relations which had often been strained under Pierre Trudeau. “We planned,” he later wrote in his Memoirs concerning this meeting with the U.S. President, “to maintain our independent stand in our foreign policy – and President Reagan and I were indeed destined to have sharp disagreements on the U.S. approach to Cuba, aid to the Contras in Nicaragua, apartheid in South Africa, and future arms control with the Soviets. But I promised that we would reciprocate in his administration’s wish for a return to the days of a special relationship between Canada and the United States.” Over the next four years Reagan and Mulroney did indeed establish a unique relationship and this culminated with the successful negotiations that led to the historic Free Trade Agreement between the two countries. caption id="attachment_584178" align="alignleft" width="364" Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President Ronald Reagan at the White House/caption Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist.  He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy.  A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.