Time capsule graced with memories of past U.S. presidents
Arthur Milnes and his wife Alison embarked upon a special project to mark Canada’s sesquicentennial year: a time capsule. But rather than filling it with things from around their home in Kingston, the pair has reached out far and wide to people, places and institutions with any connection to this country. The responses, whether from small towns or celebrities, have been overwhelming. This is the latest in a series of columns on his Canada 150 time capsule by Arthur Milnes.
When I was growing up, my parents, both now dead, instilled in us kids that we should always, regardless of our political views, respect the office of president of the United States.
Even if we didn’t like the president of the day.
To them, America was Canada’s closest friend and ally and we, as Canadians, were privileged to live next door to such a dynamic, open and friendly people.
To my father (a John Diefenbaker fan), flashy presidents such as John F. Kennedy were not the ones he admired, though he often agreed, he said, with JFK’s policies. Instead, dad always told me the president he admired most was Gerald R. Ford.
Like Harry Truman, dad would say, Ford was not an intellectual and couldn’t deliver a soaring speech if he tried. But he was a decent man and a former football coach, just like dad was at R.H. King Collegiate in Scarborough in the 1950s and 1960s, who restored honour and respect to the U.S. presidency after Watergate.
Later, dad spoke with admiration of the leadership on Canadian issues demonstrated by U.S. president George Herbert Walker Bush. And, just like Ford, Bush 41 lacked the rhetorical skills of a Kennedy or Barack Obama.
But to dad, Bush’s message for Canada was what mattered. Not the style in which it was delivered.
For mom, who unlike dad rarely discussed politics at all, her “perfect” U.S. president was Jimmy Carter.
“Art,” she said to me more than once when I was a kid, “President Carter is a good and decent man.”
Sadly, for me, my mother had died (in 1995) and my father was already in decline when their son got to interview president Ford in 2001 about his positive relationship with Pierre Trudeau.
I also don’t think, looking back 20 years now, that dad understood — at least he never mentioned to me — the importance to my career of the day in 1997, while Alison and I were living in an isolated village north of 60 in the Northwest Territories, when Bush 41 responded to my request and wrote a fishing column for the tiny weekly, the Deh Cho Drum, I edited back then. Hell, we even lived at the paper. Delivered it around town most weeks. Welcome to the North. For 20 years, even as recently as this summer, the Bush fishing column has continued to open doors for me as a journalist then and as a public historian of Canadian prime ministers and U.S. presidents in the Canada-U.S. context today.
In 2005, when president Bush 41 had Alison and me over to his Houston office for coffee — where we discussed only Canadian Arctic fishing and nothing about politics — I told dad.
However, he was less than a year from death and I don’t think he got it. Of course, I could be wrong. And my mother? Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter’s biggest fan in Canada back in the day?
Connie Milnes never got to enjoy learning that the Carters stayed at her son and daughterin-law’s home overnight in Kingston and even planted trees for us and Canada in our nowfamous garden out back.
She wasn’t there in Plains when president Carter teared up at the launch of her son’s book about the Carters as the 39th president recalled the actions of Canada during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979-80.
But with that all said, both president Bush and president Carter, through messages and photographs, are in our Confederation 150 Time Capsule. They will be for 100 years. My parents would like that. Alison and I? We like that as well.