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The Double Play. On one international policy question in 1945, White found himself playing one hand under the table and one above board. The Russians wanted to print, for use in Germany, occupation marks that would be identical to American occupation currency. Elizabeth Bentley testified that White turned a sample of the currency over to the Communist espionage ring. When that sample failed to serve their purpose, the Russians put pressure on to get the U.S. printing plates released to them officially. White did that too, and the Russians printed millions of occupation marks, some of which were redeemed in U.S. dollars.
From the day he went to the Treasury, Harry Dexter White stopped pushing and scheming for only about a year. That was after the Nazi-Soviet pact in 1939, when he seemed to lose interest in the big political picture. His normally intense, hard-driving division relaxed. Before, he had guarded his staff jealously; in that year he began to lend his economists to other agencies. He explained to one of his unoccupied staff that his group had nothing to do with defense work.
After some 15 months in the doldrums, Harry White swung back into action, and his years of greatest influence were the early 19405. He kept on drawing plans until the day he left public service. A search through his papers at Princeton University (they were donated by his widow) last week showed that he had proposed 1) that the U.S. give Russia a $10 billion postwar credit, and 2) that the U.S. conserve its raw-material resources for the next two generations and import from Russia to meet domestic needs. This combination of plans, of course, would have been of great help to Russia.
"I'm Leaving." From his post as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, White moved on in 1946 to become U.S. director on the International Monetary Fund, at a tax-free $17,500 a year. The current controversy centers around White's appointment by President Truman to that post. He held the job for eleven months, and then, one April morning, he announced to his startled boss, Belgian Financial Expert Camille Gutt: "I'll be out of here in an hour. I'm leaving."
White cleared every scrap of paper out of his office, packed his goods in crates, and rode off in the truck that carried the crates. Eleven months later White was called to testify before the New York federal grand jury, which was investigating Communist infiltration. The jury did not indict him. That was 20 months before Chambers identified the pumpkin-paper memorandum in White's handwriting.
In August 1948, after he had been denounced publicly by Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, White demanded and got an opportunity to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He sparred magnificently and arrogantly with the committee, got applause from the spectators, all the while admitting that he had been a close friend of at least ten Government workers who had been named as spies. Three days later, at his farm in New Hampshire, White suddenly died of a heart attack. Liberals cried that he was a martyr and used his case as the supreme example of 'witch-hunting.'