Prime Minister Mackenzie King was in Washington on this date in 1927. He was there for talks with President Calvin Coolidge, the pride of Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Cool Cal hosted a luncheon in King’s honour at the White House. That evening, Canada’s Prime Minister described Coolidge in the privacy of his famous diary.
“All through our conversation I felt the President was a man of much clearer vision and thought than I had believed,” King wrote. “He is a man well-informed, very careful in all his utterances and exceedingly astute. He looks the pin of perfection in dress, is quiet and composed beyond words... The impression I have formed of him is much more favourable than I had supposed it would be. I regard him as anything but a silent man only.”
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.