Tim Kaine laughs as Queen Elizabeth II listens during a welcoming ceremony at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., on May 4, 2007. | AP Photo When Tim Kaine met the Queen The meeting helps explain why his rollout as Hillary Clinton’s running mate has gone smoothly.

When Queen Elizabeth II traveled to Virginia in 2007, the visit went off largely without a hitch — publicly at least.

That’s because, behind the scenes, then-Gov. Tim Kaine and his aides were scrambling to put out fires and avoid protocol breaches that would have created an embarrassment on both sides of the Atlantic, especially for Buckingham Palace.


The episode, revealed through dozens of internal emails reviewed by POLITICO, illuminates Kaine’s approach as governor — immersed in detail and always cognizant of the optics — and helps explain why his rollout as Hillary Clinton’s running mate has so far gone off without a hiccup.

Kaine and his inner circle strategized over all aspects of the historic royal visit: They agonized over how to discuss the queen’s trip so soon after the Virginia Tech massacre and also how to handle “brutal” headlines detailing her itinerary in the U.S. before it was made official. They advised the queen’s representatives to reject an unusual request for her to bestow a posthumous honor on a 17th century explorer. And his top aides even edited a draft of the queen’s speech, urging her to tone down her references to slavery.

The emails, available via Virginia’s state library, show Kaine and his aides struggled over the right tone to take as they prepped for the queen’s visit, which was originally arranged to mark the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown but ended up coming less than a month after the Virginia Tech tragedy.

There were no easy answers.

“I think the idea of doing some proactive press ... to position us facing forward is good,” Kaine wrote in an email in late April 2007 to his staff as they discussed ways to pivot from the campus shooting. “My only quibble is the ‘turn the page’ formulation that I think might strike family members of the lost and wounded as insensitive. We cannot suggest that we are moving on beyond those events when they are still so raw in the minds of the family.”

“I haven’t come up with a better thematic formulation, but you get what I mean,” Kaine concluded.

Mourning the Virginia Tech slayings also made for another difficult moment for Kaine and his aides when they were caught off-guard by an Associated Press report detailing plans the queen had made — but not yet publicly disclosed — to meet with some of the Virginia Tech survivors.

“This is most distressing to read,” Kaine’s chief of staff, Bill Leighty, wrote in an email to his British contacts. “I deeply apologize that someone (apparently in Richmond) chose to say something.”

Amanda Howe, who served as Kaine’s lead liaison for the queen’s visit, called the AP article “brutal” in an email to several colleagues on Kaine’s staff. But she also put the blame for the leak on Buckingham Palace itself.

“The thing is, the Palace opened themselves up to this in a way,” she wrote. “They had said this week that the Queen wanted to acknowledge Tech and I think that made reporters search for exactly how.”

Howe then explained that Kaine’s office had recently done a walk-through to help state House and Senate legislative aides and the Capitol police prepare for the queen’s visit. During that staging exercise, there’d been a mention about where the Virginia Tech students would go. “Things get around,” she wrote, referring to how details might have circulated prematurely.

Hosting an international figure like the Queen of England is, of course, no easy task. Planning goes on for months ahead of time and routinely involves assistance from a State Department office that’s entirely dedicated to things like foreign dignitary arrival ceremonies and proper gift giving. A seemingly minor misstep or faux pas can cause an international uproar: Just ask first lady Michelle Obama, who was cleared of any offense when she embraced the queen during a 2009 visit to Buckingham Palace but nonetheless prompted a frenzy in the British press.

For the queen’s visit to Virginia, Buckingham Palace and the British Embassy dispatched more than a dozen staffers who were in regular contact with Kaine’s office in the months ahead of her arrival. In February 2007, they rushed to give Kaine’s office advice on how to respond to media inquiries into the queen’s itinerary for the rest of her visit to the United States beyond Virginia, which at the time was one of the few official events on the books.

A news organization had just published a story quoting by name the lead Secret Service official in Louisville, Kentucky, who had confirmed preparations for the queen to visit the state on the same weekend as the Kentucky Derby. But the queen’s representatives insisted on Kaine’s office making no public comment. As an “out,” they suggested referring any persistent reporters to the embassy and Buckingham Palace.

“This is done very much for security purposes, but also avoids critical or mischievous media picking holes in the programme before we can even get it off the ground,” Steve Atkins, a British Embassy press aide, wrote in an email to Howe that referenced the “standard line that the Embassy and Palace are sticking firmly to” which declined to provide additional details on the queen’s visit.

The emails show that the queen’s representatives also leaned on Kaine’s office for advice. One exchange from the British Embassy shows staffers detailing the choreography for the queen’s visits at the Jamestown sites, requesting Kaine’s aides sign off “to make sure that everything is OK from the perspective of your boss.”

In another email chain, Kaine’s chief of staff explained that the queen should first mention the mayor of Williamsburg, Virginia, at a luncheon before anyone else, so long as President George W. Bush wasn’t in attendance.

“No one except the President outranks a Mayor in their home jurisdiction and no one out ranks a Governor except the President in his home state,” Leighty wrote to his U.K. contact, explaining it was “the official finding to the Committee on Protocol for the Queen’s Visit.”

But a day later, Dominic Martin, a U.K. counsellor for political, economic and public affairs, responded to Leighty that the State Department had given him a different opinion on the proper order for mentioning dignitaries. “So let’s hold fire,” Martin wrote. “I don’t want to provoke a federal-state constitutional crisis over this.”

Kaine’s office gave advice to defuse other potential land mines, too. Leighty, for example, urged the British Embassy to reject a request from a Virginia GOP state delegate, Vince Callahan, who had written to British officials requesting that one of Jamestown’s founders, Captain John Smith, be awarded a decoration for gallantry because “he was the first to recognize the true worth of North America’s abundant natural resources to England.”

Confused by the delegate’s letter, the queen’s staff asked Kaine’s office for advice on how to handle it.

“This is most a curious request,” Leighty replied. “I would respond that you have forwarded the request on to BP for consideration. ... I certainly could not endorse this request. ... Oh, the controversy it would spark.”

Kaine’s office also got a chance to edit the queen’s speech. Martin had sent over a draft — he said it was already largely cleared with Buckingham Palace — seeking guidance to measure “if I have struck any jarring or anachronistic notes; or strayed into dangerous territory inadvertently; or missed out something or somebody in a way that would give offence; or got my history wrong; or oversimplified the issues; or simply got the tone not quite right.”

Howe, Kaine’s liaison, responded with a number of suggestions: describing the Jamestown settlers as “Englishmen” instead of “British citizens,” clarifying a mention that the colony “was full of indolent noblemen, with a propensity to spend their hours playing bowls” and flagging an awkward reference to Douglas Wilder, then Richmond’s mayor, as a “grandson of slaves.”

“A little weird to refer to slavery as a tradition,” Howe wrote in a marked-up version of the queen’s speech that she sent to Martin.

Some of Howe’s suggestions may have even resonated. The queen’s delivered speech made no reference to indolent noblemen. The mentions of both Wilder and his forebears were also dropped, and the queen’s only allusion to slavery came near the end of her remarks, when she described the recent 200th anniversary in the United Kingdom of a parliamentary act to abolish the transatlantic slave trade.

Throughout the planning stages for the royal visit, Kaine’s aides recognized it would be a big deal. A week before the queen’s arrival, Howe flagged to the governor’s staff and Martin that there’d already been 10,000 hits on a special Web page about the event. “We’re moving,” she wrote.

Kaine knew, too. In an email to his top aides just days before the royal speech, the governor wrote, “It will be a special moment.”

The queen’s flawlessly executed visit would also win Kaine accolades. “Those are the sorts of things that put Virginia on the map,” state Sen. John Watkins, a Republican, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Indeed, Kaine would list his work bringing the queen to Virginia in a memo he later penned for staff highlighting his own accomplishments. “Led state efforts to welcome Queen Elizabeth II and President Bush to Virginia for Jamestown 400th commemoration,” he wrote, sandwiching it between his work with Virginia Tech families to “creatively” resolve potential legal claims, and banning smoking in state buildings and vehicles.