INVESTIGATIONS One Man's Greed
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He was a peddler's son, a puny boy born in the shadow of the el in a Boston slum. At school his grades were not notable and hardly anyone noticed him—except the bullies. They picked on him. Even when he grew up and became a Doctor of Philosophy he had to take a job he didn't like. And then, suddenly, Harry Dexter White got his chance to show everyone how important he could be.
His chance came in Washington, in the U.S. Treasury Department. He got a job there, and he pushed and shoved and schemed his way upward until he was one of the most important men in the world. Before long, he was sneering publicly at Robert A. Taft, telling him haughtily in a session of the Senate Banking Committee that a certain monetary matter was beyond Taft's "knowledge and competence." He was telling big people what to do: he bullied Lord Keynes, the famed British economist. As a result of White's maneuvering, Winston Churchill unhappily put his "W.S.C." on a plan for postwar Europe which, if it had been carried out, might have resulted in the domination of Europe by Russia. He built a sort of substitute State Department in the U.S. Treasury. His influence on U.S. policy was massive, and while he used it, he also passed U.S. secrets to a Communist spy ring. Then, as his very importance began to build a trap around him, he died.
Who was Harry Dexter White? How did he get his power?
Life Beneath the El. White's parents were Jacob and Sarah Weit, who came to the U.S. from Lithuania (then a province of Russia). A peddler, Jacob moved into the hardware and crockery business, and at one time the family had four stores. Harry White was born Oct. 29, 1892, at 57 Lowell Street, Boston, in a crowded, busy, tenement district beneath the dust and roar of the el. A nervous boy, he belonged to a grade-school group that met one night a week at the Webster Literary Club, where each boy would write and read a composition and all would discuss them. When the family began to prosper, they moved to Everett, a Boston suburb, where Harry attended high school. His grades (79 in French, 85 in chemistry) gave no clear sign of his later brilliance.
Out of school, he first tried the hardware and crockery business, which had been left to him and two elder brothers by his father. Perhaps in revolt against Lowell Street, he thought for a time about being a farmer. He registered at the
Massachusetts Agriculture College (now the University of Massachusetts), where he was admitted conditionally in the fall of 1911; he had failed two entrance examinations: American history and civics. He stayed on only one semester, got an average of 80.8, then went back to selling hardware. Just six days after the U.S. declared war on Germany in April 1917, White (who had earned a 99 in military science in his one college semester) enlisted in the Army, was sent to officers' training school.
Just before he went overseas in 1918 (to serve with the 3O2nd Infantry, 27th Division), Harry White married Russian-born Anne Terry, a student at Pembroke College in Providence. A Phi Beta Kappa and later a successful author of children's books (e.g., Prehistoric America, Lost Worlds, Three Children and Shakespeare), Anne Terry White became an intense "liberal."