Prime Minister Mackenzie King was in Washington on this date in 1938 for meetings with President Franklin Roosevelt and senior members of the latter’s Administration. Despite a heavy official schedule, the PM took time out to visit with an old friend, Julia Grant, whom he had known for many years. When both were young, King had been one of her tutors. She, of course, was the granddaughter of none other than President Ulysses S. Grant, hero of the U.S. Civil War. I’ll let Mr. King himself, via his famous private diary, continue with the story.
“At dinner in the evening I took Julia Grant, we talked of many things and after dinner I saw her home and talked with her at her apartment, looking at letters of her grandfather’s, one from Lincoln to him which she said she had willed to me,” King wrote. “She said all my letters to her were sealed in a box, her son knowing of them and they to be given to me after her death.”
Julia, like Mr. King, was an active spiritualist.
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.