American Assembly has an exquisite sense of timing. Since 1945, Canada-U S relations have experienced serious spasms of discontent, neatly spaced at ao-year intervals, and the assembly has arranged be there on each occasion report on testing times and turning points. Its first study appeared in 1964, right after a great argument over nuclear weapons and just before an ostentatious nationalist enthusiasm seized segments of Canadian opinion. Two decades later, the assembly caught another mood of unease and period of transition, this time poised between a special relationship which had collapsed and a free trade movement that was clearly gaining momentum. Now, early in the zist century, Canadians again sneer at a swaggering cowboy in the White House, and Americans again glance northwards at a wayward neighbour. It is time talk once more.During the second World War, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Mackenzie King inaugurated the modern Canadian-American relationship in their border meeting at Ogdensburg, NY, in August 1940. Americans who noticed such things were apt from then on think of Canada as a vital piece of strategic real estate. Canadians could occasionally seem troublesome, preaching Washington about how run its foreign policy, but the northern neighbour was a solid, stable, and reliable ally. US rendered the same service, but not without plenty of condescension, as the assembly's 1964 volume illustrated. Everett C. Hughes, an American sociologist who had taught on both sides of the border, wrote that the people of his country were always a bit astonished that Canadians do not want be United States Americans. It was hard take Canada entirely seriously. experiment north of the border would surely come unstuck. The myopia of ethnocentrism, Hughes called the US attitude.1Editor John Sloan Dickey of Dartmouth College described the assembly's publication, TAe United States and as an undertaking in mutual understanding. He concentrated his remarks on the famous border between the countries, not because it was undefended, but because it operated unequally as a boundary separating the two peoples. Most Americans had little experience of the border, while most Canadians had little experience but the border. Canada was simply one of America's problems, as the University of Rochester historian Mason Wade put it, while for Canada the United States was the problem, ubiquitous and continuous. By this measure, and even putting aside the disparities of size, power, wealth, and global responsibilities, it was understandable if the United States paid little attention Canada.The volume's American chapters, written by generalists wide Canadian experience and contacts, all emphasized the unequal border, but they did so varying degrees of patience. Hughes was sympathetic: To Canadians who feel pushed, the United States must seem very close indeed. For Dickey, the inequality of the border explained much about the relationship. Canada could scarcely do more than react the border's pull, and thus reactive nationalism was a Canadian necessity. But it was a second class force, hardly a substitute for the positive sense of identity and independence that the country seeks-and merits. From his perch at Princeton, and reflecting on his work in the US government, Jacob Viner acknowledged the widespread American ignorance of things Canadianin my academic and civil service experience never met or heard of a specialist on Canadian affairs in Washington. Yet he dismissed the claim that Canada was poorer because of it. United States was far from perfect, but it had treated important Canadian files preferentially, and with special generosity. I am not going present a catalogue of 'benevolent' American actions toward Canada, he continued, to match the Canadian catalogues of grievances which Canada suffers. But taking 'benevolence' as it manifests itself in international relations, could do so, and others no doubt could much extend my catalogue. …