Prime Minister Mackenzie King was in Washington on this date in 1940 where he held talks with Franklin Roosevelt at the White House. The meetings came only days after King had also met privately with FDR at the President’s Warm Springs, Georgia retreat.
In his famous diary, King wrote that he was beyond pleased at the talks he’d held with the U.S. Chief Executive. “No man ever received a more wholehearted or brotherly welcome than I did in connection with the Administration with whom I came in contact,” he wrote in typical fashion. “It is not short of a miracle that, in the manner of timing, the visit could have come at the very hours and minutes that it has.”
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.