THE MARGARET MCNAMARA MEMORIAL FUND (MMMF)

Who was Margaret McNamara?

The story of the Margaret McNamara Memorial Fund begins with Margaret Craig McNamara. Born in Spokane, Washington, in 1915, she moved as a child to Alameda, California. She graduated from the University of California in Berkeley in 1937. For three years, she taught science and physical education in the public schools of Alameda and San Rafael. In 1940, she married Robert Strange McNamara. They had been classmates at the University of California. He had completed graduate work at the Harvard Business School and had been appointed to its faculty.

The McNamaras lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for six years. Their two daughters were born there. During the Second World War, Mr. McNamara served in the U.S. Army as a statistical control officer in the European, China-Burma-India, and Pacific theatres. As the war was ending, both he and Mrs. McNamara were stricken with polio. His case was lighter than hers; she was hospitalized for eight months and wore arm braces for nearly two years. She responded well to intensive physical therapy and recovered her full physical powers.

In 1946, Mr. McNamara joined the Ford Motor Company and the family moved to Michigan, first to Dearborn and then to Ann Arbor. The third child, a son, was born soon afterwards, Mrs. McNamara spent the Michigan years absorbed in the many varied tasks of the mother of three youngsters and the wife of a rising corporate executive. She found time, however, to participate in a host of community activities, including the public schools, the Cub Scouts, her church, and the Juvenile Court in Ann Arbor.

Her complete recovery from polio enabled Mrs. McNamara to continue her athletic and recreational pursuits. She had grown up in a family of fishing enthusiasts and was a skilled fisherwoman. She was also a vigorous skier and tennis player. These interests help to explain family vacations in northern Michigan in the summers and Aspen, Colorado, in the winters.

Mr. McNamara became president of the Ford Motor Company in 1960. Within a few weeks, President John F. Kennedy appointed him Secretary of Defense. The McNamaras moved to Washington. With one child in college and the other two in school all day, Mrs. McNamara was soon absorbed in volunteer work.

Along with other Cabinet wives, Mrs. McNamara was a sponsor of The Hospitality and Information Service (THIS), an organization whose purpose was to provide help and information to families who came to Washington from other countries for diplomatic service. She also became a volunteer with the Urban Service Corps that provided tutors in reading in the Washington, D.C. public schools, and she served on the Board of the D.C. Citizens for Better Public Education.

Mrs. McNamara's work in the Washington public schools convinced her that disadvantaged children needed powerful incentives to learn to read. She was aware that many children she worked with had never owned a book and had no books or other printed material in their homes. It occurred to her that simply owning a book would encourage such children to read. She envisioned an organization that would provide books from which a child could choose one he or she wanted and could then keep it.

With this idea, "Reading is FUNdamental" was born. "Freedom of choice and pride of ownership are the fundamental tenets of RIF," Mrs. McNamara often said. Some friends joined her and together they were indefatigable in securing donated books from publishers and contributions of funds from individuals and foundations. Mrs. McNamara travelled throughout the country visiting schools and Boards of Education, meeting potential contributors, and speaking at money-raising functions. She attended many gatherings of children where they examined the books RIF offered, chose books they wanted, and learned to read them. She always carried with her a heavy satchel filled with children's books.

Mrs. McNamara lobbied Congress for national legislation that underwrote the cost of the RIF program and led to its expansion throughout the country. In 1993, there were chapters in all 50 states, served by more than 150,000 volunteers. In that year, RIF distributed nearly 19 million books in many institutions-schools, libraries, hospitals, migrant worker communities, Indian reservations, day care centers, schools for the blind, and correctional institutions.

For her contribution to Reading is FUNdamental. President Jimmy Carter awarded Mrs. McNamara the Medal of Freedom in January, 1981. Ravished by cancer and with only weeks to live, Mrs. McNamara received the award in the East Room of the White House. The citation read:

"Margaret Craig McNamara saw a need in our society and filled it. By creating the Reading is FUNdamental program, which has provided youngsters all over this country with millions of books, she has opened new doors in the minds of our young people and has given fresh meaning to the lives of parents, teachers, and volunteers who have joined her program. Commenting on the honor conferred on Mrs. McNamara, an editorial in the Washington Post stated, "For the community, and for her book-toting 'customers' everywhere. this pause for thanks."

Mr. McNamara became President of the World Bank in 1968. Mrs. Mclvamara became deeply interested in the Bank and its work in the developing countries, especially as it affected women and children. She traveled with her husband and visited World Bank projects in many countries in Africa. Asia, and Latin America. With him and on her own, she visited schools and health centers in villages, towns, and cities. She told children stories and taught them songs. She met with teachers, education officials, and women's groups wherever she went. She took notes and remained in touch with persons she met through correspondence and saw them again on return visits. Handicrafts interested her, especially those made by women, and she often visited the workshops and small factories where they were produced. She saw handicrafts as a means by which women could generate additional family income.

Mrs. McNamara often commented that the lives of millions of women in developing countries were shaped by hard and unrewarding labor, and she expressed concern that they were likely to be overlooked when economic development occurred. Consequently, she took great interest in some World Bank research in the early 1970s that demonstrated that the education of girls had a measurable effect on the health and education of the next generation of children. She wanted women to be freed from poverty and neglect so that they might live more fulfilling lives and make a greater contribution to their families and their countries.

Her interest in the role of women in the development process led Mrs. McNamara to initiate a seminar on women at the Annual Meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1970. Such meetings were attended by Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors of the World Bank's member countries. Activities for women accompanying their husbands to the Annual Meetings were not new, and Mrs. McNamara, along with the wives of earlier Bank presidents, had helped arrange interesting activities and excursions. But she felt that it was important, in the year designated by the United Nations as the International Women's Year, to have a substantive seminar on women and development. She did most of the planning, identified the speakers, took a personal interest in their invitations, and presided at the seminar. Similar seminars on the topic were held at the Annual Meetings for several years afterwards.

Seeking to share her growing interest in the work of the World Bank, Mrs. McNamara organized a series of seminars for the wives of Bank staff so they might learn about the history and operations of the Bank. Her seminars were held annually and continue, in a somewhat altered format, today.

The Bank's staff expanded rapidly during the early years of Mr. McNamara's presidency. While the Bank had a program for easing the arrival of new families, the wives of many experienced staff recognized the need for a more effective one, one that they might design and manage themselves. That recognition led to the formation of WIVES, an acronym for World Bank Volunteer Services (today WBFN, World Bank Family Network). The history of WIVES is told separately and will not be repeated here.

Mrs. McNamara's support and encouragement of WIVES is an important thread in the history of the fund that bears her name. She empathized with newcomers because of her own experience in moving her family and because of her association with international families in THIS. When Ruth Isbister, one of the founders of WIVES, talked to her about the needs of new families and the interest of experienced staff wives in forming a group to help them, Mrs. McNamara responded at once and offered to help. She intervened informally and personally with Bank administrators on behalf of WIVES, often attended Executive Committee meetings and other gatherings, and made a presentation herself in a seminar on volunteerism. While her first priority in the management of her own time was Reading Is FUNdamental, the second was surely WIVES.

Mrs. McNamara had many friends among the wives of World Bank staff who grieved as they saw her wasted by cancer during the last year of her husband's presidency of the Bank. They wanted to honor her service to women and children in the United States and in the developing counties. But they knew that whatever form the honor took, it would soon be a memorial.

Mrs. McNamara died on February 3, 1981. At the memorial service at the National Cathedral on February 6, her old friend. Lydia P.S. Katzenbach, delivered the following eulogy (excerpts only).

... On one of my recent weekend trips from New York to Washington to visit with Marg, I left New York in cold, gray, mean and vengeful, mid-winter chilling weather. As the flight took off, I slept, tired from the week's work. Suddenly, a bright light filled the cabin of the plane as we reached beyond the clouds into the warm shining late afternoon lowering sun. I woke with the thought: "Marg must have just died. Look how the heavens light up."

Most of us spend a lifetime trying to be able to love. Success is not at all certain. We settle for being somewhat lovable: it's easier and of less consequence and risk. But to love another or others is a difficult task. For Marg it was the air she breathed, the essence of her whole being.

Marg loved not only in what she did, but in her heart. And she had a very accommodating, forgiving, and crowded heart that took in all sorts of permanent boarders all across this land and into the furthest countries of the world.

Marg was a grateful person…She truly believed that people were good, that something could be done to alter misfortune, deprivation, to release life forces, turn an ugly detour back in the right direction.

She was pure in her enjoyments and enthusiasms. She was thankful and felt lucky…

For all time, most important to Marg was her love and gratitude for her beloved husband, Bob ... He took her bright blue shining eyes around the world, letting them meet and take in and shine on the most lowly and the most mighty...She would not have changed her life...Bob and her life with him, their children...her precious granddaughter, her friends—these were her riches. Of course she was pleased and shy about the work she did, especially with RIF and the WIVES organization of the World Bank. But if you asked her to celebrate and rejoice, it would be for the closeness, and the remembering and the joys of her family...

Marg was a gutsy lady, and full of fun...She could laugh and she could play-on a mountain top, learning how to drive a tractor, on the tennis court, traveling, or at work…She had enormous courage. Even knowing her for as long as I did, I was amazed when she said a few weeks after her first operation that she was going to Nepal, a long planned excursion. She went, saying before she left, "Well, Lydia, if I have to die I might just as well not miss this, and being there with loved ones is as good a place as any…"

I think Marg had a quiet sense of a simple destiny in her life. I don't think she took special pride in her achievements. Rather, I think she had a feeling that she did what was there to be done, she went where it was open to go. She said an uncomplicated "Yes" to life's presentations…

Marg lived her dying as she had lived her life: with love, courage, and playing with her own insistences ... She left to those of us who loved her and whom she loved the greatest gift of all, the strength to face our own mortality…