By Peter Blitstein
Assistant professor of history
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2005
On
July 31, 1948, a woman named Elizabeth Bentley appeared before the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) with an astonishing story. The 40-year-old
graduate of Vassar College claimed to have acted as a courier between Soviet
intelligence agents and employees of the federal government between the summer
of 1941 and the end of 1944. In November 1945, she walked into an FBI office,
confessed, and provided a list of over 80 names. The FBI quickly followed up
on Bentley’s information, putting 250 agents on the case, tapping telephones,
opening mail, and subjecting the suspects to intensive surveillance. Among
the people Bentley named was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Harry Dexter
White.
Several days after Bentley testified, Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers
appeared before HUAC. Chambers too admitted that he had been a courier between
government employees and Soviet agents; he had defected in 1938, but his claims
had been largely ignored by American counter-intelligence. After Bentley’s
defection, Chambers’ story seemed more credible. Chambers and Bentley
did not know one another personally, but provided similar information. Although
best-known for his accusations against State Department official Alger Hiss,
Chambers also named Harry Dexter White as a Soviet agent.
Who was Harry Dexter White?
In
1946, President Truman appointed Harry Dexter White to be the American director
of the International Monetary Fund. As Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau’s
principal advisor on international questions, White was the chief force behind
the post-World War II Bretton Woods arrangements, which created the World Bank
and the IMF. He was, therefore, a principal architect of the Cold War-era global
capitalist economy. Most important, White was the highest-ranking American
government official ever to have been reliably accused of being a Soviet spy.
Long before that, however, White had been a Lawrence professor. After receiving
his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1930, he was hired by President Henry
Merritt Wriston and taught at Lawrence College from 1932 to 1934.
Moving on to government service at the beginning of the New Deal, White worked
at the U.S. Treasury Department from 1934 to 1946. He became director for monetary
research in 1938, assistant to the secretary in 1941, and assistant secretary,
the number-two position in the department, in 1945. (In the photo, above, White,
at left, is shown with John Maynard Keynes at the inaugural meeting of the
International Monetary Fund Board of Governors in March 1946; photo courtesy
of the IMF.)
Conflicting testimony
In their appearances before HUAC, Chambers and Bentley asserted that White
belonged to a Soviet underground network in the 1930s and in the 1940s. Both
accused him of providing them with government documents. Bentley also accused
White of secretly influencing American policies on Soviet orders.
On August 13, two weeks after Bentley appeared, White himself testified before
HUAC. He denied the accusations made against him and pronounced his “American
creed” of individual liberty, democracy, and equality of opportunity.
Most members of HUAC found his testimony “utterly convincing,” to
quote Bruce Craig, a recent historian of the case.
On his way back to New Hampshire, where he had just purchased a home, White
experienced severe chest pains. He had already suffered several heart attacks
over the previous year. Several days later, on August 16, 1948, Harry Dexter
White died of a massive coronary.
In and out of view
Because of the sensationalism of the developing Hiss case and the revelations
about Soviet espionage on the atomic bomb project, Harry Dexter White was soon
forgotten. His case reemerged briefly in November 1953, when President Eisenhower’s
attorney general, Herbert Brownell, gave a speech at the Chicago Executives
Club accusing President Truman of covering up the fact that White was a “Russian
spy.” As a result of Brownell’s speech, White made the cover of
Time magazine five years after his death.
It was true that Truman appointed White the American director of the IMF in
1946 despite the warnings of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. In his own testimony
at HUAC that year, Hoover insisted that his reports should have convinced Truman
to reject White’s appointment, but there remained no firm evidence that
White was, in fact, a spy. Hoover himself could not corroborate Brownell’s
accusations because the available evidence remained classified. Bentley’s
and Chambers’ testimony was suggestive but not sufficient. And White
was, after all, dead. Again, White disappeared from public scrutiny.
Then, in 1996, as Craig writes in his recent book Treasonable Doubt, the
public release of previously classified materials known as Venona — Soviet
cables intercepted and eventually decrypted by U.S. counter-intelligence — “blew
open the case, leaving little doubt of Harry Dexter White’s complicity
in the Soviet underground.” Evidence from Venona is supported by limited
information from KGB archives presented by the historian Allen Weinstein in
collaboration with former KGB official Alexander Vasilliev in their book The
Haunted Wood. Taken together, these new sources appear to confirm that White
was involved with the Soviet underground in Washington from the mid-1930s until
Chambers’ defection in 1938 and again during the Second World War. They
thus corroborate Chambers’ and Bentley’s claims.
The evidence suggests that White provided written summaries of documents to
Soviet agents. Some Venona decrypts reveal White to be a reluctant spy who
feared that his actions would be disclosed. His Soviet handlers occasionally
expressed
frustration that,
since he was not a Party member, they could not simply order him to produce
materials. And while the latest sources do not confirm Bentley’s accusations
that White was an agent of influence, there is evidence that he provided Soviet
negotiators with information and advice. Among other things, Venona decrypts
show that he provided information about the American negotiating positions
on the formation of the United Nations, the postwar borders of Poland, German
reparations, and future loans to the Soviets. However, the exact nature of
these conversations remains unclear. Some historians contend that White may
not have known his interlocutor was an intelligence agent and was merely offering
advice to a fellow diplomat.
Why did he do it?
There are three common motives for spying: money, ideology, and the fear of
being compromised. Apart from the Soviet-provided gift of an oriental rug that
Chambers gave him, and which White was reluctant to accept, there is no evidence
that White was paid. He was not a Party member. Of course, he could have been
a secret Communist, as Hiss seems to have been, but White was a much more prominent
figure than Hiss. His economic and political views were consistently on public
record. There is simply no evidence that he believed in Communism at all. If
anything, he was a Keynesian who sought humane ways to preserve capitalism.
Nor is there any evidence of his being in a position to be compromised.
Instead, White appears to have been motivated by an egotistical conviction
that he understood how to preserve the peace and guarantee economic prosperity
in the postwar world. White was a New Dealer and an internationalist. According
to author Bruce Craig, “he believed that no country could achieve
prosperity unless other countries prospered as well and that balanced global
growth required cooperation among governments.” Therefore, White was
looking for ways to preserve good relations with the Soviet Union in the postwar
period and to integrate the USSR into the global economy; he believed this
was more likely to occur if he spoke frankly to Soviet officials. At the end
of 1945, the USSR decided to reject that course, much to White’s dismay.
In short, by giving his Soviet colleagues information about America’s
negotiating positions, White apparently thought he was helping to establish
a postwar international system that would guarantee the peace. In this, he
was not unlike the scientists at Los Alamos who, after they had developed the
atomic bomb, lobbied to have atomic energy placed under international control.
Although he understood himself to be a patriotic American, White also looked
beyond what he saw as a narrow patriotism toward a cosmopolitan future.
Questions remain
To this day, historians debate White’s actions. Was he a traitor? Does
it matter whether the information he passed was even of value to the Soviets?
Does it make any difference that White despaired over the emerging Cold War
and blamed both sides? Since the end of the Cold War, archives have been opened
and historians have been able to penetrate many of its mysteries. But the motives
of some of its most vivid participants may remain unknowable. How one and the
same person could be both a Soviet agent and a savior of international capitalism
is one puzzle that even formerly secret sources may never solve.
Related reading
www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/1998/09/boughton.htm
Bruce Craig, Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case (2004)
Peter Blitstein, assistant professor of history, joined the Lawrence faculty
in 2001. A graduate of Johns Hopkins University (B.A.) and the University of
California, Berkeley (M.A., Ph.D.), his scholarly interests include the history
of Russia and Eastern Europe and the study of nationalism. This article is
excerpted from a talk he gave at a Lunch at
Lawrence event in March.
