It happened in Canada: This series, on the revolutionaries, luminaries and criminals who have visited the Great White North, was originally published in 2014
In 1923, the first time a sitting U.S. president ever set foot in Canada he made the odd decision to do it in Vancouver: A rugged, damp port city thousands of miles away from any significant bastion of Canadian political power.
And for Warren G. Harding, the unusual choice of venue would prove to be fatal.
After addressing a crowd of 50,000 star-struck British Columbians, Harding began exhibiting a case of pneumonia while teeing off at the city’s Shaughnessy Heights Golf Club. A week later he was dead.
In Stanley Park, there still exists an impressive Harding memorial that the local Kiwanis Club erected to atone for their city’s role in killing the American head of state.
But Vancouver was not done with presidential history. More than seven decades after it killed a president, the city would threaten to throw another one out of a job.
“Happy Birthday, Mr. Premier,” U.S. president Bill Clinton told B.C. Premier Glen Clark as he bounded down the steps of Air Force One.
The 42nd president had just touched down in Vancouver for the November 1997 Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation summit, and he had made sure to remember Mr. Clark’s 40th birthday.
The detail left the B.C. leader awestruck. “He looks right in your eyes and makes you feel like you’re the only person he’s talking to,” he said later.
For the next three days plenty of other Canadians found themselves seduced by the charisma of the Arkansas-born Democrat.
The president charmed Victoria MP David Anderson by recounting the honeymoon visit he and Hillary paid to the city’s famous Butchart Gardens. He got so chummy with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien that he was seen slapping the 63-year-old on the back.
And as the presidential motorcade left Vancouver’s Waterfront Centre Hotel at the end of the summit, Mr. Clinton left his limousine idling to pose for a group photo with hotel staff.
“We just couldn’t have had a nicer house guest,” hotel manager Michael Kaile said at the time.
Best of all, though, was when Mr. Clinton slipped out of his hotel room on a Sunday night to pay an impromptu visit to Hill’s Indian Crafts, a high-end purveyor of Aboriginal art in the Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood.
For an entire hour, the president and his entourage roamed the Gastown store perusing its selections of masks, carvings and handicrafts.
At visit’s end, as store staff wrapped up Mr. Clinton’s purchases, the president asked them to keep his selections secret as he intended to give the B.C. souvenirs as Christmas presents.
According to a clerk at the family-owned establishment, Mr. Clinton’s visit was the “greatest thing that happened to this store.”
Only 10 months later, not only did the world find out that the president had purchased a “marble bear’s head” at Hill’s Indian Crafts, but the carving (likely soapstone, not marble) was now at the centre of a sex scandal that threatened to have Mr. Clinton impeached.
The president was discovered to have carried on a secret two-year affair with 24-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Affairs by themselves do not turf U.S. presidents from office, but Mr. Clinton had denied the relationship under oath during an unrelated sexual assault trial.
The tender gift of a Canadian souvenir, opponents argued, showed that he had lied — and lying under oath was what could get him impeached.
One month after the president’s Vancouver visit, on December 28th, Mr. Clinton had called a private meeting with Ms. Lewinsky in the Oval Office.
It was to be their last encounter before Ms. Lewinsky left for New York, and the president presented her with a gift bag that included the Canadian carving as its centrepiece.
Ms. Lewinsky had previously noted that the president gave “absolutely perfect presents,” and the sculpture he had picked out for her in Vancouver was presumably no exception.
But after she thanked him with a final round of passionate kissing, Ms. Lewinsky noticed hesitancy as the president handed over the package of gifts.
“I thought to myself ‘I wonder if he’s thinking he shouldn’t give these to me to take out,’” she would testify later.
And indeed, the Canadian carving was considered so toxic to the office of the president that it only took a few hours before Mr. Clinton’s personal secretary, Betty Currie, drove to Ms. Lewinsky’s house, collected the presents and stashed them under her bed.
Word of the exchange leaked via the betrayal of one of Ms. Lewinsky’s confidants, however, and by the next August Mr. Clinton was before a grand jury recounting his spontaneous visit to Hill’s Indian Crafts in staid legal language.
“Did you also give (Lewinsky) a marble bear’s head carving from Vancouver, Canada?” asked an attorney. “I did do that, I remember that,” the president answered.
The U.S. House of Representatives impeached Mr. Clinton a few months later. Although the Senate would ultimately acquit him of the charges, the Articles of Impeachment called Ms. Currie’s under-the-bed stashing of the Canadian carving a “scheme to conceal evidence.”
Located just down the street from Gastown’s famous steam clock, Hill’s Indian Crafts — now known by the more politically correct title of Hill’s Native Art — remains a prime Gastown destination for Vancouver tourists looking to pick up a moccasin, dreamcatcher or a $7,000 cedar mask.
As the Lewinsky scandal unfolded in 1998, the store was barraged by media asking what else Mr. Clinton had purchased, how much he had paid and whether he had mentioned any comely interns, perhaps.
“What difference does it make what he gave to one of his staff people?” owner Dorothy Martin told the Vancouver Sun.
To this day, guidebooks identify it as the place “where Bill Clinton picked up a little bear statuette as a gift for you-know-who.”
But Hill’s has nothing at all to commemorate the hour the store spent with the leader of the free world: No photos, no plaques and no newspaper clippings. When one new staff member was asked about the 1997 visit, he professed never to have heard of it.
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