Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey, Vice President of the United States under Lyndon Johnson, was very much a fan of Canada. It is therefore not surprising that on this date in 1968 he was pleased to take a phone call from his northern neighbour’s new Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. But, there was only one problem as the person calling the Veep wasn’t, in fact, Trudeau! This came out when the PM was asked by a reporter to describe the conversation he had had with Humphrey.
“Well, no, I cannot,” Trudeau replied, “because there was actually no such conversation. I do not think that Vice President Humphrey would have been deluded into taking a phone call from some wiseacre who called himself by my name. But there was no communication between Vice President Humphrey and myself, and, as usual, the press has made a mistake.”
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.