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He could hold his own in technical arguments, but his greatest talent was his ability to put a technical point in broad, political perspective and reduce it to plain English. An associate recalls: "He could talk economics in kindergarten terms." This was important because his boss as Secretary of the Treasury was Henry Morgenthau Jr., who had every reason to appreciate a man who could talk in kindergarten terms.
White soon became a forbidding figure at Treasury. A stocky little man with a cropped brush mustache that twitched when he was nervous, he lunged around the corridors with a jerky gait. He was a ruthless martinet with subordinates, bluntly critical of those he considered his intellectual inferiors—and that included just about everyone. He was intolerant: a man who opposed Harry White was likely to fall under suspicion of being "pro-Nazi." He worked and schemed constantly, slept and played little. Said one of his associates: "He ranged everywhere, like a waterbug."
Harry White cared not at all for comforts or luxury. What he wanted was power, and he got more and more of it.
Within four years after he started at Treasury, a new division, Monetary Research, was created at his suggestion. The logical choice to head the department: Harry Dexter White. To push himself ahead, he flattered his superiors shamelessly. He used to tell his staff members that he learned the trick of flattery as a salesman. He could always sell a man after a compliment, he said. His advice: "You can't pile it on too thick."
This gave some staff members an idea. If the boss thought that technique worked so well, maybe it would work on him. They tried it, and work it did. When an employee would tell him that he was a greater economist than Britain's Lord Keynes, the man White envied most, White would preen himself. The Communists, too, learned that White could be flattered. Their technique was revealed when a baffled Washington carpenter named Harry White received a container of caviar, then a case of vodka, and then an engraved invitation to a social occasion at the Soviet embassy. Through a mistake in addresses, Carpenter White had received Harry Dexter White's flattering mail from the Soviet embassy.
Willing & Witting. As head of Monetary Research, Harry Dexter White had one of the most remarkable personnel gimmicks in Washington. His funds did not come from Congress, but from profits of the $2 billion revolving stabilization fund. This enabled him to hire his staff without the usual civil service red tape. As a result, he surrounded himself with many employees who might not have passed even the loose scrutiny of the day. Some of them took refuge in his agency after having security-clearance trouble in other jobs; at least five of them later ducked behind the Fifth Amendment, refusing to say whether they were 1) Communists, or 2) spies, on the ground that an answer might incriminate them. Among these were Frank Coe, A. George Silverman, Harold Glasser and William Ludwig Ullmann.