Copybooks, 1960-1979

Each president since Samuel Gompers has maintained sets of copybooks of letterbooks that consist of routinely filed copies of outgoing correspondence with a hand-written index. George Meany followed this practice. Copybooks can be an excellent research tool because they presumably encompass all outgoing letters and because they provide a strict chronological view of the office's activities. Pitfalls exist, however, depending on office practices for letters prepared elsewhere for a president's signature, and on indexing practices. We know, for example, that contrary to the expectation that a letter would be indexed according to the recipient's last name, sometimes letters were indexed by the name of the organization or, as in the case of letters to President Jimmy Carter, indexed on the letter "P".