This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox. During her 70-year reign, Queen Elizabeth met almost every U.S. President from Dwight Eisenhower to Joe Biden. But it was in 1991, when she met with President George H.W. Bush, that she became the first British Monarch to address a joint session of the U.S. Congress.  The visit couldn’t have been better timed. President George H.W. Bush was riding sky-high popularity—76% approval in Gallup’s polling that same month!—after having painstakingly assembled an international coalition to win a clean war in the Middle East. Bush and Prime Minister John Major were thick as thieves. The United States was negotiating the final stages of tariff-reducing NAFTA and framing up what would become the World Trade Organization. Bush was in constant contact with Mikhail Gorbachev to stage-manage the structured collapse of the Soviet empire.…