PRESIDENTIAL HANDWRITING FILE Documents Annotated by the President, 1974-77

History of the Presidential Handwriting File
President Lyndon Johnson's staff started the practice of maintaining a separate handwriting file. Gertrude Fry copied the practices of the Johnson White House when she joined the Nixon staff and continued to be responsible for the file under President Ford.

Ms. Fry and her staff filed the documents chronologically by the date of the latest item in the document case. In the early months of the Ford administration, Ms. Fry indexed most handwriting items by creating subject and name cross references which she kept in her office. For most documents she also made a different type of cross reference sheet which she sent to Central Files.

In a June 1975 reorganization of the Staff Secretary's Office, Ms. Fry's duties changed, her staff was cut, Special Files was discontinued, and all indexing of handwriting items ended. She nonetheless continued to add materials to the Handwriting File during the remainder of the administration, including scattered items which bore no handwriting yet which she apparently considered too sensitive for Central Files (items which might have been filed in Special Files had it not been discontinued).

When received by the Ford Library, the Presidential Handwriting File consisted of the chronologically arranged originals and the subject and name index covering only the early months of the administration. During archival processing of the White House Central Files Subject File, many photocopies of handwriting documents were made and attached to their Central Files cross reference sheets. Since as many as two-thirds of the documents were never cross referenced into Central Files, however, the Ford Library staff later photocopied the entire Handwriting File and arranged the photocopies by subject in 1987-88.

Related Materials (June 1988)
This collection relates in some manner to most other collections in the Library, especially the White House Central Files. The Presidential Paperwork Logs, also maintained by Ms. Fry and her staff, record the date and time that documents were submitted to the President, the time returned to the outbox, and the subsequent disposition of the items. The records of the Special Files Unit contain a series on Special Files administration which describes another aspect of Ms. Fry's work. Scattered materials on her work may also appear in the files of her supervisor James Connor, the Staff Secretary and Secretary to the Cabinet.