George Woods and the World Bank

A Twentieth-Century Horatio Alger

ROBERT W. OLIVER

njanuary 1, 1963, at age sixty-two, George David Woods
I became the fourth president of the World Bank, serving a
full five-year term—plus three months. He was suc¬
ceeded by Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon B.Johnson. Woods had been a confidant to
Eugene Black, the third president of the World Bank, in part
because Woods and the First Boston Corporation helped Black to
market the bonds of the World Bank. Black and Woods spoke by
telephone almost daily, and Black entrusted Woods with a number
of important overseas missions.

In August 1962 at the White House, President John F.
Kennedy personally urged Woods to accept the position. Kennedy
told Woods, in effect: Everything we in the United States have
done since the end of the war, including the Marshall Plan, to try
to build a peacefiil and stable world is threatened by the growing
gap between the poor and the rich countries. If that is not solved,
it is going to cause the collapse of our policies, including
American foreign policy. We have to do something about this, and
I think the World Bank, of the institutions available, is the most
promising. This is our chosen instrument, and I want you, George
Woods, to be the one to make the Bank a bridge between the poor
and the rich countries.

George Woods had a knack for gaining people's confidence that
was compounded by integrity, a brilliant mind, and a prodigious
capacity for work. A career in investment banking at First Boston,
the surviving corporation of Harris, Forbes and Company, and at
the World Bank led a poor boy from Brooklyn to become familiar
with presidents, ministers, and ambassadors the world over. As
banker to the world, he wielded great power.