Harry Dexter White
Harry Dexter White (October 29, 1892 – August 16, 1948) was a senior U.S. Treasury department official. Working closely with the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., he helped set American financial policy toward the Allies of World War II. He was later accused of espionage by passing information to the Soviet Union.[1]
Harry Dexter White
October 29, 1892
August 16, 1948 (aged 55)
Bretton Woods agreement
First U.S. Director of IMF (1946-47)
2
He was a senior American official at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that established the postwar economic order. He dominated the conference, and his vision of post-war financial institutions mostly prevailed over those of John Maynard Keynes, the British representative who was the other main founder. Through Bretton Woods, White was a major architect of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.[2]
White was accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviet Union, which he adamantly denied. He was never a Communist party member, but he had frequent contacts with Soviet officials as part of his duties at the Treasury. That he passed sensitive and classified documents on to people he knew were agents of the Soviet Union has been confirmed, although hard evidence only came over time via the decoded and finally declassified Soviet cables intercepted in the Venona Project,[3] plus the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s.
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Background[edit]
Harry Dexter White was born on October 29, 1892, in Boston, Massachusetts, the seventh and youngest child of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, Jacob Weissnovitz (or Weit) and Sarah Magilewski, who had settled in the US in the 1880s. In 1917, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, and was commissioned as a First Lieutenant and served in France as head of Company H of the 302nd Infantry until the end of World War I. Aside from one term at Massachusetts Agricultural College (1911-12), he did not begin his university studies until age 29, first at Columbia University where he studied government starting from 1922; then, after three terms there, at Stanford University, where he earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in economics; and finally at Harvard University, where he taught for four years while studying for his Ph.D., which he completed in 1932 at 40 years of age.[4] White then taught for two years at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin. His PhD dissertation won the David A. Wells Prize granted annually by the Harvard University Department of Economics. Harvard University Press published his Ph.D. thesis in 1933, as The French International Accounts, 1880–1913.[5]
Accusations of espionage[edit]
Chambers accusations 1939, 1945, 1948[edit]
On September 2, 1939, Assistant Secretary of State and Roosevelt's adviser on internal security Adolf Berle had a meeting, arranged by journalist Isaac Don Levine, with defecting Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers. In his notes of that meeting, written later that night, Levine listed a series of names, including a "Mr. White".[23] Berle's notes of the meeting contain no mention of White.[24] Berle drafted a 4-page memorandum on the information which he then passed to the President, who dismissed the idea of espionage rings in his administration as 'absurd'. The director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, as late as 1942,[25] also dismissed Chambers' revelations as 'history, hypothesis, or deduction.'
On March 20, 1945, State Department security officer Raymond Murphy interviewed Chambers. His notes record that Chambers identified White as "a member at large but rather timid", who had brought various members of the American communist underground into the Treasury.[26]
In Spring 1948, Truman aide Stephen J. Spingarn questioned Whittaker Chambers, an admitted former Soviet espionage agent, about Harry Dexter White: "Chambers ... told me that he didn't believe Harry White was a Communist; he believed that he was a man who thought he was smarter than the Communists, and he could use them, but really they used him."[27] Chambers subsequently testified on August 3, 1948, to his association with White in the Communist underground secret apparatus up to 1938.[28] Chambers produced documents he had saved from his days as a courier for the Soviets' American spy-ring. Among these was a handwritten memorandum that he testified White had given him. The Treasury Department identified this document as containing highly confidential material from the State Department, while the FBI Laboratory established that it was written in White's handwriting.[29] Chambers stated, however, that White was the least productive of his contacts.[30] Chambers said of White, "His motives always baffled me" (a point later underscored by grandson David Chambers).[31]
Bentley accusations 1945, 1948, 1953[edit]
On November 7, 1945, defecting Soviet espionage courier Elizabeth Bentley told investigators of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that in late 1942 or early 1943 she learned from Soviet spies Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and Ludwig Ullmann that one source of the government documents they were photographing and passing on to her and NKVD spymaster Jacob Golos was Harry Dexter White.[32]
The next day, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a hand-delivered letter to Truman's Military Aide, Gen. Harry Vaughan, at the White House, reporting information that "a number of persons employed by the government of the United States have been furnishing data and information to persons outside the Federal Government, who are in turn transmitting this information to espionage agents of the Soviet government." The letter listed a dozen Bentley suspects, the second of whom was Harry Dexter White.[33]
The FBI summarized the Bentley information and in its follow-up investigation on the suspects she named, again including White,[34] in a report entitled 'Soviet Espionage in the United States',[35] which was sent to the White House, the Attorney General and the State Department on December 4, 1945.[36] Six weeks later, on January 23, 1946, Truman nominated White as U.S. Director of the International Monetary Fund. The FBI responded with a 28-page memo specifically on White and his contacts, received by the White House on February 4, 1946.[37] White's nomination was approved by the Senate, acting in ignorance of the allegations against White, on February 6, 1946.
(Six years later, Truman would testify that White had been "separated from the Government service promptly" upon receipt of this information—first from the Treasury, and then from the IMF.[38] In fact, White was still at the IMF on June 19, 1947—more than two years after the FBI had alerted the White House about him—when he abruptly resigned (vacating his office the same day), after Attorney General Tom Clark ordered a Federal grand jury investigation of the Bentley charges.[39])
On July 31, 1948, Bentley told the House Committee on Un-American Activities that White had been involved in espionage activities on behalf of the Soviet Union during World War II,[40] and had passed sensitive Treasury documents to Soviet agents. Bentley said White's colleagues passed information to her from him. In her 1953 testimony Bentley said that White was responsible for passing Treasury plates for printing Allied military marks in occupied Germany to the Soviets, who thereupon printed currency with abandon,[41] sparking a black market and serious inflation throughout the occupied country,[42] costing the U.S. a quarter of a billion dollars.[43] However the alternative explanation is that Treasury officials feared that denying Soviet use of the plates in their occupation sector would endanger postwar cooperation.[41]
Bentley wrote in her 1951 autobiography that she had been "able through Harry Dexter White to arrange that the United States Treasury Department turn the actual printing plates over to the Russians".[44] Bentley had not previously mentioned this to the FBI or to any of the committees, grand juries or prosecutors before whom she had testified earlier, and there was no evidence at the time that Bentley had any role in this transfer. Some questioned Harry Dexter White's role in it.[45] In her 1953 testimony before Joseph McCarthy's Senate subcommittee, she elaborated, testifying that she was following instructions from NKVD New York rezident Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov (who operated under the cover name "Bill") to pass word through Ludwig Ullmann and Nathan Gregory Silvermaster for White to "put the pressure on for the delivery of the plates to Russia".[46] This is the only case in which Bentley biographer Kathryn Olmsted concluded that Bentley was lying about her role,[42] citing historian Bruce Craig's conclusion that "the whole 'scheme' was a complete fabrication".[47] However, Bentley's testimony would later be corroborated in dramatic fashion by a memorandum found in Soviet archives after half a century. In it, Gaik Ovakimian, head of the American desk of the NKVD (for which Bentley worked),[48] cites a report from New York (where Bentley was based)[49] from April 14, 1944 (when Bentley was running the Silvermaster group)[50][51] reporting that, "following our instructions" via Silvermaster, White had obtained "the positive decision of the Treasury Department to provide the Soviet side with the plates for engraving German occupation marks".[52]
Personal life[edit]
In 1918, White married Anne Terry. They had two daughters, Ruth (May 11, 1926 - December 28, 2009) and Joan (March 12, 1929 - September 9, 2012).[53][54]
On August 13, 1948, White testified before HUAC and denied being a communist. After he finished testifying, he had a heart attack. He left Washington for a rest on his Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire farm. He had just arrived when he had another heart attack.[55] Two days later, on August 16, 1948, he died, age 55.[56][57] Spurious allegations later made it look as if an overdose of digoxin was the cause of death.[58]
Legacy[edit]
Accusations by Jenner and McCarthy 1953[edit]
Senator William Jenner's Interlocking Subversion in Government Departments Investigation by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) looked extensively into the problem of unauthorized and uncontrolled powers exercised by non-elected officials, specifically White. Part of its report looked into the implementation of Roosevelt administration policy in China and was published as the Morgenthau Diary (China).[59] The report stated:
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Media related to Harry Dexter White at Wikimedia Commons