President's Daily Diary, 1974-1977

The Daily Diary is a minute‑by‑minute log of President Ford's official and social activities, noting attendees at meetings and persons to whom he spoke by telephone, and where and when these contacts took place.  The sections below describe the Daily Diary, the index compiled by the Ford Library staff, the electronic version of the Diary, and related materials among the Ford Library's holdings.

The Daily Diary
During the Ford administration, personnel attached to the Staff Secretary's Office compiled the Diary.  In order to make it as complete as possible, the compilers drew upon such sources as:

Telephone operators' logs
Secret Service movement logs
White House Residence Usher's logs
Military Aide's logs
Air Force One flight manifests
Logs of the Aide to the President and the Oval Office reception desk
Daily schedules
Event briefing memoranda

The Diary staff pulled the information together into a single log of Presidential activities for each day and filled in gaps in the sources or resolved conflicts between them by querying staff members involved in the event.  Because of delays in obtaining source materials and resolving problems, they generally completed each day's Diary about three to eight weeks after the day itself.

National Archives personnel, working in the White House complex, had compiled a very similar Diary during the Nixon administration. These Nixon Diaries proved instrumental in retrieving White House tapes for the Watergate Special Prosecutor.  Perhaps it was in reaction to the Nixon experience that the Ford administration closed the National Archives' White House liaison office early in the administration and stopped the compilation of the Daily Diary.  Even after the preparation of the Diary resumed several months later, the Ford administration considered the Diary a very sensitive document and severely limited access to it.

In January 1975 the White House Staff Secretary's Office hired Susan Yowell, the former compiler for the National Archives, to resume preparation of the Diary.  Yowell and her assistant Ellen Jones continued this work throughout the remainder of the administration and all through the Carter presidency.  Yowell and Jones began the retrospective compilation of the missing 1974 Diaries in November 1975 and completed the project in January 1977.  An exception is November 17‑25, 1974, when President Ford was on his overseas trip to the Pacific Basin.  The Diary staff was unable to locate the Military Aide's log for this trip and therefore could not reconstruct the President's activities.  They substituted schedules showing planned activities in place of Diaries for these days.

The Diary form simplified and standardized the recording of information about a day's activities.  Date and day of the week, as well as the place that the day began, appear at the top of each page.  For each activity the form provides a space for the beginning and ending time.  For telephone calls, a code indicates whether the President placed ("P") or received ("R") the call.  The form provides space for a short description of the activity, but this is seldom more than a few words long and only occasionally indicates the subject discussed.  The compilers listed attendees at meetings of small groups in the narrative and attendees at meetings of large groups in appendices.

Although the Diary is exhaustive and generally accurate, it cannot be regarded as authoritative.  Certainly, the Diary is no more accurate than the variety of logs and other sources upon which the the staff based it.  Because they completed the 1974 Diaries a year or two late, some sources were hard to find and it was also difficult to verify facts with participants.  For example, Yowell and Jones missed several telephone logs for August 1974 which may now be found in the collection "President's Telephone Logs" (Staff Secretary's Office).

In addition to multiple copies of the Diaries and the source materials used in their compilation, the collection includes a Subject File containing a small amount of administrative materials about the Diary office, plus such items of note as a September 1974 study of presidential time allocation and several payroll lists for the White House which are useful for studying personnel changes in the Ford White House.

The Daily Diary Database
As part of its testing of optical character scanning technology, the Archival Research and Evaluation Staff of the National Archives and Records Administration began a project in 1988 to convert the Ford Daily Diary to a machine‑readable form.  The Ford Library sent the ribbon copy (original typescript) of the Diary to Washington to help ensure the accuracy of the scanning process. The National Archives hired the British firm Optiram Automation Limited to do the initial scanning and optical character recognition work and then spent months checking the electronic version of the Diary for accuracy, reformatting it into a data file structure suitable for use with the "askSam" text retrieval software, and designing retrieval formats.

The National Archives staff who worked on the project feel that they achieved a high degree of accuracy in the electronic version of the Diary, in spite of the poor quality of many of the appendices (which are often photocopies rather than originals).

The Daily Diary database includes only the Diaries and appendices. None of the source material found in the Ribbon Copy series is included.  The value of the Daily Diary database lies in making available the information which was not indexed by the Ford Library staff in 1977 (see the description of the Daily Diary index below).  For instance, one could search for the number of times Henry Kissinger saw the President or even the total amount of time they spent together in any given time period.  In addition to names, it is possible to search on words such as "golf" or "Cabinet."  Researchers should be aware that the electronic version of the Diary retains any inconsistencies in spelling or word usage that were present in the hard copy. The Ford Library staff will be glad to conduct searches of the Daily Diary database for researchers.

The Daily Diary Index
Beginning in 1972, the Diary staff used the White House Central Files computers to index the Nixon Daily Diaries.  The Carter Daily Diaries had a similar index.  Although the Ford Diary staff made several proposals to implement such indexes, they were never approved (see Box 1 ‑ "Diary Office Administrative Memoranda").

In 1977, Ford Library archivists manually prepared a very selective name and geographic index as an internal work aid.  This index is available in the research room card catalog.  White index cards contain listings of Presidential meetings, while blue index cards refer to telephone calls.

The index is selective.  It excludes:

• Most of the event and meeting attendees listed in the appendices
• People encountered during domestic and foreign trips (only Congressmen, Governors, and Mayors were indexed for domestic trips; nobody was indexed for foreign trips)
• Ford family members
• All White House staff
• Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
• OMB Director James Lynn
• Secret Service agents
• Some members of the intelligence community

The index does include:

• People whom Ford met at the White House, Camp David, and vacation residences, especially Vail, Colorado.  They include, for example:  Cabinet members, Vice President Rockefeller, personal friends, Congressmen, foreign officials, reporters, agency officials, state and local officials, and representatives of various organizations and groups.  For EXCEPTIONS, see above.
• Each country visited (but none of the people Ford met)
• Each state and community visited (but only Governors, Mayors, and Congressmen met during domestic trips)
• Cabinet and National Security Council meetings (but not each attendee)
• Special Events (e.g., Alfred E. Smith Dinner, Army‑Navy football games, Signings‑Bills, etc.)
• Names of institutions, organizations and groups which Ford addressed, met with or visited regardless of locale.  Many of the entries are idiosyncratic to the Diary (e.g., Black Republican Leaders, Mid‑Atlantic Newspaper Editors, Arizona Republican National Convention Delegates, or Italian‑American Leaders).  Other entries are more standard (e.g., U.S. Chamber of Commerce, International Longshoremen's Association, or Armed Forces Policy Council)
• Names of all telephone callers and call recipients.  All entries relating to telephone calls appear on blue index cards rather than white.

Related Materials (August 1990):  
White House Central Files Subject File category PR 7 and its subdivisions concern the President's schedule and category TR concerns his trips.  The President's Telephone Logs contain lists of his contacts by telephone.  The papers of Press Secretary Ron Nessen contain much on the President's schedule, as do scattered folders in a number of other collections.  The files of the Scheduling and Advance Office currently are unprocessed and not available for research, but the files of director Jerry Jones may be opened by 1991.