Harry Dexter White (October 29, 1892 – August 16, 1948) was an American government official in the United States Department of the Treasury. 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 found to be a soviet spy after passing information to the Soviet Union.
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.
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, passed sensitive and classified documents to people he knew were agents of the Soviet Union, and influenced policy which benefitted the Soviet Union, including maneuvering to keep tensions between Japan and the United States high. This evidence came to light prior to his death via decoded Soviet cables in the Venona Project, and later with the opening of Soviet archives in the 1990s.
Background
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 bachelor's and master's degrees in economics; and finally at Harvard University, where he taught for four years while studying for his PhD, which he completed in 1932 at 40 years of age. 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 PhD thesis in 1933, as The French International Accounts, 1880–1913.James M. Boughton, "Harry Dexter White and the International Monetary Fund." Finance and Development 35.3 (1998): 39.
Treasury Department
In 1934, Jacob Viner, an economist working at the Treasury Department, offered White a position at the Treasury, which he accepted. Viner would receive an honorary degree from Lawrence University, where White taught before joining the Treasury, in 1941. White became increasingly important in monetary matters, and was a top advisor to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., especially on international financial affairs dealing with China, France, Great Britain, Japan, Latin America, and the Soviet Union. In 1938, Morgenthau created a new division—the Division of Monetary Research—and promoted White to be its director. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, Morgenthau promoted White again, naming him Assistant to the Secretary. The post of Assistant Secretary, the most senior economist position in the Treasury, finally opened up in 1945, and Morgenthau promptly nominated White to fill it. White left the Treasury in 1946 to become the U.S. Executive Director at the newly established International Monetary Fund.
Japan policy
In November 1941, White sent a memorandum to Morgenthau that was widely circulated and influenced State Department planning. White called for a comprehensive peaceful solution of rapidly escalating tensions between the United States and Japan, calling for major concessions on both sides. Langer and Gleason report that White's proposals were totally rewritten by the State Department and that the American key demand had been formulated long before White. It was an insistence on Japanese withdrawal from China, which Japan totally refused to consider.William Langer and Everett Gleason, The Undeclared War (1953) pp 875-901. The complex negotiations at the top ranks of the US government, and its key allies of Britain and China, took place in late November 1941 with no further input from White or Morgenthau. White's proposals were never presented to Japan.Blum, The Morgenthau diaries: years of Urgency: 1938-1941 (1965) pp 384-86 Some historians have argued, however, that White manipulated Morgenthau and Roosevelt to provoke war with Japan in order to protect Stalin's Far Eastern front.John Koster, Operation Snow: How a Soviet Mole in FDR's White House Triggered Pearl Harbor (Regnery Publishing 2012), esp Ch. 5, "The May Memorandum."Steil, Benn (2013), The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order, Princeton University Press, p. 55-56Sean McMeekin (2021), Stalin’s War, Basic Books, p. 379-380
After the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, Secretary Morgenthau appointed White to act as liaison between the Treasury and the State Department on all matters bearing on foreign relations. He was also made responsible for the Exchange Stabilization Fund. White eventually came to be in charge of wartime international matters for the Treasury, with access to extensive confidential information about the economic situation of the US and its wartime allies. He passed numerous secret documents to men he knew were Soviet spies.
White was a dedicated internationalist, and his energies were directed at continuing the Grand Alliance with the USSR and maintaining peace through trade. He believed that powerful, multilateral institutions could avoid the mistakes of the Treaty of Versailles and prevent another worldwide depression. As head of the independently funded Office of Monetary Research, White was able to hire staff without the normal civil service regulations or background enquiries. He probably was unaware that several of his hires were spies for the USSR.
Morgenthau Plan
According to Henry Morgenthau's son, White was the principal architect behind the Morgenthau Plan, designed to permanently weaken Germany's military capabilities. The Morgenthau postwar plan, as authored by White, was to take all industry out of Germany, eliminate its armed forces, and convert the country into an agricultural community, in the process eliminating most of Germany's economy and its ability to start another war. A version of the plan, limited to turning Germany into "a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character", was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944. However, someone in White's department with access to details of the plan leaked it to the press, and White himself provided an advance copy to Soviet intelligence. Public protests forced Roosevelt to publicly and partially pull back. The Nazis and Joseph Goebbels used the Morgenthau Plan as a propaganda coup to encourage their troops and citizens to fight on. General Omar Bradley, among others, noticed "a near-miraculous revitalization of the German army." In the end Morgenthau still did manage to influence the resulting occupation policy.Frederick H. Gareau "Morgenthau's Plan for Industrial Disarmament in Germany" The Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Jun., 1961)
Bretton Woods Conference
White was the senior American official at the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, and reportedly dominated the conference and imposed his vision over the objections of John Maynard Keynes, the British representative.Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations: Economic Paths to War and Peace, Oxford University Press, 2006 Numerous economic historians have concluded that White and the powerful U.S. delegation were wrong in dismissing Keynes's innovative proposal for a new international unit of currency (the "Bancor") made up of foreign exchange reserves held by central banks. Benn Steil, in 2013, argued that since 1971, experts have been disillusioned with the 1944 framework.Benn Steil, The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (2013) p 2 Eric Helleiner, in 2014, argued that the main goal of the United States was to promote international development as an investment in peace, to open the world for cheap imports, and to create new markets for American exports. He argues that policy-makers and analysts from the Southern hemisphere increasingly denounced the Bretton Woods system as "a Northern-dominated arrangement that was ill-suited to their state-led development strategies."Eric Helleiner, Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods: International Development and the Making of the Postwar Order (2014) p 3See also Brad DeLong, "Review" (2002) Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Fighting for Britain, 1937–46 (2001) pp 337-74.
After the war, White was closely involved with setting up what were called the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These institutions were intended to prevent some of the economic problems that had occurred after World War I. As late as November 1945, White continued to argue for improved relations with the Soviet Union. White later became a director and U.S. representative of the IMF. On June 19, 1947, White abruptly resigned from the International Monetary Fund, vacating his office the same day.
Accusations of espionage
Chambers' accusations 1939, 1945, 1948 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". Berle's notes of the meeting contain no mention of White.John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p.90-91 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,Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes:Fighting for Britain, 1937-1946, Macmillan, London 2000 p.256 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.