Identity area
Reference code
Title
Date(s)
- 1968 - 1981 (Creation)
Level of description
Extent and medium
Context area
Repository
Archival history
McNamara's dictated impressions of his trips were removed from this file at his request, after he left office and before he transferred the series to the Bank-Fund Joint Library, by Blanche Moore, McNamara's former secretary. Ms. Moore prepared an item list for each country's file, consisting of date of each meeting and the persons in the meeting and their titles; she annotated the list to show each item removed and retained by McNamara. A copy of this list is filed at the beginning of the file for each country.
After the series was transferred to the Archives by the Joint Library, two blackbooks of briefings for McNamara's trip to China in 1980 were removed from this series and placed in the Travel Briefings series, WB IBRD/IDA EXC-10-4540S.
Immediate source of acquisition or transfer
Content and structure area
Scope and content
The Contacts - Member Countries files are the record of President McNamara's meetings with famous individuals, representatives of member countries other than the United States, and representatives of organizations (e.g., Executive Directors, Annual Meeting delegates, heads of States and organizations, government officials, parliamentarians, bankers, businessmen, industrialists, economists, journalists). The files contain minutes of meetings, briefings, questions and answers for press interviews, background material and some correspondence.
Although the minutes were generally prepared by staff from the concerned region or the Personal Assistant to the President, the files contain many memoranda of conversations and notes on meetings and visits drafted by McNamara, some handwritten. Also in McNamara's hand are a number of points to discuss for meetings and annotations on the briefs prepared by staff. Among the items personally drafted by McNamara are notes of, or for, meetings with King Baudouin (1969), Pierre Trudeau (1976), Anwar Sadat (1975), Georges Pompidou (1969), Valery Giscard d'Estaing (1972, 1975, 1979), Karl Otto Poehl, Hans Dietrich Genscher, Helmut Schmidt (1975), Indira Gandhi (1973), the Shah of Iran (1973), Felix Houphouet-Boigny (1969), Takeo Fukuda (1978), William Tolbert (1973), Nicolae Ceausescu (1968), Leopold Senghor (1969), Alec Douglas-Home (1972), Edward Heath (1973), U Thant (1969), Joseph Mobutu (1972).