International Finance: Woods’s Next Walk

In the 13 years since he became president of the World Bank, rangy Eugene Black, 64, has capitalized on a unique blend of financial acuteness and infectious Southern charm to borrow some $2 billion from private investors and relend it to backward nations for carefully chosen investment projects. In the process, the international financial community has come to think of the World Bank (official title: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) as “Gene Black’s bank.” This week, with Black close to the mandatory retirement age, the bank’s 18 executive directors will name a new boss for Gene Black’s bank. Their almost cer tain choice: George D. Woods, 61, since 1951 chairman of First Boston Corp., one of Wall Street’s top investment banking houses.

Woods, who was hand-picked for the job by Black himself, has the same sort of deceptively casual air as Black. He likes to drape his long, thin frame over a chair in his First Boston office, fix visitors with his liquid brown eyes and invite them to “walk around the problem.” The walk is friendly and pleasant, but when it is over, the visitors usually find themselves accepting Woods’s view.

After Night School. Woods started on Wall Street at 17 as an office boy. He learned the academics of finance in night school, quickly demonstrated an ability to analyze investment opportunities that should sustain the World Bank’s reputation for hardheadedness. Early in his career, Woods formed a close friendship with a bond salesman from Atlanta named Eugene Black. After Black took over the World Bank, he called on Woods to help organize private development corporations in India, Pakistan and the Philippines. Woods’s biggest international coup came when he persuaded Egypt’s Nasser to compensate the former shareholders of the Suez Canal.

Woods’s only important liability lies in his association with the Dixon-Yates case. Congressional Democrats accused him of planting one of his men in the Budget Bureau to swing a controversial AEC power contract to a private utility group that retained First Boston as its financial agent. Woods was later exonerated, but the association cost him the chance to head the U.S. foreign aid program last year when Oregon’s Senator Wayne Morse threatened to fight his nomination.

All the Everests. For the World Bank job, senatorial confirmation is not required. Woods has Black’s backing and the support of Treasury Secretary Dillon and President Kennedy. That should be enough to get him the job, which traditionally goes to an American, since the U.S. holds 30% of the bank’s stock. Woods is eager to take it on. Says his longtime friend, U.S. Disarmament Negotiator Arthur Dean: “Woodsie has climbed all the Mt. Everests there are to climb on Wall Street, and he has a yen for public service. He feels that we have tremendous problems with underdeveloped countries, and people with ability cannot remain comfortably on the outside if we are going to solve them.”