When Elizabeth ascended the throne, the Soviet Union was in the iron grip of Joseph Stalin, China was led by Mao Zedong and the president of the United States was Harry Truman.
The Queen held an audience with 15 British prime ministers, most recently Liz Truss, but her record reign also spanned 14 American presidents, from Truman to Joe Biden. She met them all, Democrat and Republican, except Lyndon Johnson.
After the monarch’s death on Thursday at the age of 96, flags at US government buildings and embassies flew at half-mast and commentators noted the indefinable yet undeniable role she played for seven decades in what was called “the special relationship” by her first prime minister, Winston Churchill.
“She was always an emollient factor in the special relationship,” said Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton. “While the prime ministers, as the heads of government, had to do the dealings with American presidents, it was the Queen who was the eternal head of state. Seemingly eternal.”
America declared independence from the tyranny of King George III in 1776. The Queen’s father, George VI, became the first reigning British sovereign to visit the US in 1939. He discussed the gathering storm of war in Europe with President Franklin Roosevelt.
When George VI died in 1952, and Elizabeth ascended the throne while in Kenya on a royal tour, Truman was the incumbent president. In 1951 the then princess and her husband, Philip, had stayed with the Truman family at Blair House, where they were living during a White House renovation. Truman described them as a “wonderful young couple who have so completely captured the hearts of all of us”.
Truman’s grandson, Clifton Truman Daniel, said: “I know that he was impressed by her. They got along well. She was England for 70-plus years. I’m sorry, I’m not usually tongue-tied, but I was sort of stunned to learn that she passed away. She’s been Queen for all of my life and then some.”
Truman’s successor, Dwight Eisenhower, who had been allied commander during the second world war, hosted a state dinner for the Queen in 1957. Three years later she entertained Eisenhower at Balmoral in Scotland, where he was so impressed by the scones that she sent him the recipe.
Blumenthal, a biographer of Abraham Lincoln, observed: “Eisenhower was a figure of immense military and political authority for someone in their 20s and he was followed by someone much closer to her in age: John F Kennedy. That was also the beginning of a cultural and economic shift in Britain itself as the winds of change of post-colonialism blew.”
Dinner with the Kennedys in 1961 did not go smoothly at first. The Queen was reportedly reluctant to invite First Lady Jackie Kennedy’s sister and brother-in-law because they were divorcees, though she eventually relented. Jackie expressed disappointment that Princess Margaret and Princess Marina were absent. But the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, described the evening as “very pleasant”.
After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Prince Philip represented the Queen at the funeral.
The sovereign never met Lyndon Johnson but hosted Richard Nixon at Buckingham Palace in 1969 (when Nixon met her as vice-president in 1957, he forgot to bring black tie and had to borrow a suit in “desperation” from another guest, who was packed off upstairs).
The Nixon Foundation said in a statement on Thursday: “The Queen was a leader of unparalleled ability, a pillar of strength in the Western world who brought inspiration, hope, reassurance and stability to all of the countries of which she was Sovereign, and to her friends across the world, for a staggering seven decades.”
After Nixon’s resignation due to the Watergate scandal, Gerald Ford invited the Queen to a state dinner at the White House in 1976 to mark the bicentenary of US independence. But Ford made a gaffe when he asked the Queen to dance to the song, The Lady Is a Tramp.
There was another mishap when Jimmy Carter went to Buckingham Palace in 1977. The Queen Mother reportedly said “he is the only man, since my dear husband died, to have had the effrontery to kiss me on the lips”. Carter was marginally the Queen’s senior: he turns 98 next month; his wife, Rosalynn, is 95.
Ronald Reagan, a former actor who at the time was the oldest US president in history, became the first to stay at Windsor Castle. He in turn hosted the Queen at his ranch in California in 1983 – both loved horses – and commented in a newspaper interview that she is “a truly fine and gracious lady” and “delightful person”.
At a dinner with Reagan in San Francisco, the Queen said: “By far the most important idea which we share is our belief in freedom … It is an idea whose power is such that some men will go to as great lengths to suppress it as others will to keep it alive, as our two countries have fought to keep it alive.”
The Queen hosted George HW Bush at Buckingham Palace in 1989 and attended a Baltimore Orioles baseball game with the president two years later. She became the first British monarch to address the US Congress, with Bush observing that she had been “freedom’s friend for as long as we can remember”.
The Queen first met Bill Clinton in 1994 at a ceremony commemorating the 50th anniversary of D-Day. Clinton and his wife, Hillary, stayed overnight on the royal yacht.
The president wrote in his memoir: “Her Majesty impressed me as someone who, but for the circumstance of her birth, might have become a successful politician or diplomat. As it was, she had to be both, without quite seeming to be either.”
Princess Diana, estranged wife of Prince Charles and a modern celebrity, threatened to steal the Queen’s thunder in America before her death in a Paris car crash in 1997. The Queen soldiered on. She expressed solidarity with the US after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, stating in a condolence message: “Grief is the price we pay for love.”
Not for the first time in his career, George W Bush misspoke in 2007 when welcoming the Queen to a state dinner, confusing 1776 with 1976 before quickly correcting himself. He paused, glanced at the monarch and wryly told the gathering: “She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child.”
When Barack Obama made a state visit to Britain in 2011, first lady Michelle Obama made an apparent blunder by placing her hand on the Queen’s back. In her memoir, Michelle wrote that she later discovered that she “was committing what would be deemed an epic faux pas”, but the Queen appeared “okay with it, too, because when I touched her, she only pulled closer, resting a gloved hand lightly on the small of my back”.
In 2019 the Queen received Donald Trump at Buckingham Palace during his state visit to the UK. The norm-busting president breached protocol by briefly walking in front of the monarch as they were inspecting her honor guard.
Blumenthal commented drily: “I believe there was only one incident of a lack of manners and understanding and that, of course, involved Donald Trump. He walked ahead of her and simply didn’t understand that he was not the king.”
Despite the incident, Trump was invited back for a state dinner at Buckingham Palace the following year. He bragged to the Fox News network: “There are those that say they have never seen the Queen have a better time, a more animated time.”
Finally, last June, the Queen welcomed Joe Biden to Windsor Castle. The president said she had been “very gracious”, adding: “I don’t think she’d be insulted, but she reminded me of my mother in terms of the look of her and just the generosity.”
On Thursday Biden signed a book of condolence at the British embassy in Washington. In a statement released by the White House, he noted that he had first met the Queen in 1982 after traveling to the UK as part of a Senate delegation. “Queen Elizabeth II was a stateswoman of unmatched dignity and constancy who deepened the bedrock Alliance between the United Kingdom and the United States,” he added. “She helped make our relationship special.”
America is bitterly polarized on almost every issue but Democrats and Republicans remained united on one thing: there was no downside to courting the Queen.
Michael D’Antonio, a political author and commentator, said: “Presidents loved to be photographed with her. This association would have been politically advantageous to almost any president, which is remarkable given our history with England and what changed it in 1776.
“But the special relationship is something that’s based on genuine affinity and affection so if America ever had respect for a monarch, it was respect for Elizabeth.”
