The case of the late Harry Dexter White boiled up in the nation's headlines, touching off the sharpest political controversy since the 1952 elections. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, in a Chicago speech last week, revived the charges that White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and an important policymaker of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, was a spy for Russia. Brownell added a new and serious accusation: President Truman had promoted White after the White House had received two written FBI reports saying that White was a spy.
The case was even more grave than the exposure of Alger Hiss, inasmuch as 1) White held higher positions in the Government, and 2) it was never alleged that a President of the U.S. had been officially informed that Hiss was a spy.
To the Brownell charge, Harry Truman reacted promptly—perhaps hastily. He said: "I know nothing about any such FBI report ... As soon as we found out White was disloyal, we fired him." At the White House, Press Secretary James Hagerty refuted from the record Truman's statement that White had been fired. White resigned, and got a laudatory letter from President Truman. When this was put up to Truman, he said: "White was fired by resignation."
Party Orders. Before the Brownell speech, neither Truman nor any other leader of his Administration had ever publicly suggested that White was fired, or that they believed him to be disloyal. In fact, White, who died on Aug. 16, 1948, apparently of a heart attack, three days after being questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee, has been considered in pro-Truman quarters as an innocent martyr to "witch hunters."
White's suspected pro-Communist activities fall into two groups: espionage and influencing policy.
Elizabeth Bentley testified that White was part of an espionage ring headed by his friend and fellow Government official, Nathan Gregory Silvermaster. Documents in White's handwriting were among Whittaker Chambers' "pumpkin papers."
As to policy, Elizabeth Bentley testified that White, carrying out Communist Party orders, was the architect of the Morgenthau plan for the postwar emasculation of Germany. White's boss, Henry Morgenthau Jr., carried this plan to the 1944 Quebec Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill. It called for the dismantling of German industry and the creation of a "pastoral" Germany. Witness Bentley said that this plan was espoused by Communist grand strategy to create a power vacuum between Russia and a weakened Western Europe, so that the whole Continent would be subject to the weight of Russian power.
In his testimony to the House committee, White neither admitted nor denied a connection with the Morgenthau plan, but he did deny espionage activity and swore that he had never been close to the Communist Party or its ideas.
Sincere Regret. In reviving the case, Brownell said that the FBI in December 1945 sent to President Truman, through his aide, Brigadier General Harry Vaughan, a written report saying that former Communist Elizabeth Bentley had said that White was spying for the Russians. The next month Truman promoted White to executive director for the U.S. in the International Monetary Fund.