President Franklin Roosevelt’s first Envoy to Canada (the position in Ottawa wasn’t called “Ambassador” until 1943) passed into history on this date in 1935. Only days previously he had stepped down from his post in Ottawa due to what proved to be his final illness. Robbins was only 49 when he died.
He had been sent to Ottawa by FDR when the latter’s administration took office in 1933. Robbins was a career American diplomat who served in the State Department for 25-years.
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.