Harry Dexter White - Treasury Department

Treasury Department

In 1934, Jacob Viner, a professor at the University of Chicago working at the Treasury Department, offered White a position at the Treasury, which he accepted.

After the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, White was appointed assistant to Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the Secretary of the Treasury, to act as liaison between the Treasury and the State Department on all matters bearing on foreign relations. He was also made responsible for the "management and operation of the Exchange Stabilization Fund without a change in its procedures." White eventually came to be in charge of international matters for the Treasury, with access to extensive confidential information about the economic situation of the USA and its wartime allies.

According to Henry Morgenthau's son, White was the principal architect behind the Morgenthau Plan. The Morgenthau postwar plan, as authored by White, was to take all industry out of Germany, eliminate its armed forces, and convert the country into an agricultural community, in the process eliminating most of Germany's economy and its ability to defend itself if attacked. A version of the plan, limited to turning Germany into "a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character", was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944. However, someone in White's department with access to details of the plan leaked it to the press, and White himself provided an advance copy to Soviet intelligence. Public protests forced Roosevelt to publicly backtrack. The Nazis and Joseph Goebbels were ecstatic at the revelations, using the Morgenthau Plan as a propaganda coup to encourage their troops and citizens to fight on and to nullify emerging German criticism of the war and arguments for a separate peace with Western governments. White's actions also benefited the Soviet Union, virtually ensuring that the Nazi government or its successors would not negotiate a separate peace with the West. In the end Morgenthau still did manage to influence the resulting occupation policy, particularly through the Occupation Directive JCS 1067, which was in effect until the summer 1947, and which forbade activities designed for economic reconstruction in Germany. In a report on the German situation after 2 years of occupation, former President Herbert Hoover would in March 1947 remark:

There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a "pastoral state". It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.

Dismantling of German heavy industry in the west, agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference, continued until 1951.

White was the senior American official at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, and reportedly dominated the conference and imposed his vision over the objections of John Maynard Keynes, the British representative. After the war, White was closely involved with setting up what were called the Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These institutions were intended to prevent some of the economic problems that had occurred after World War I. As late as November 1945, White continued to argue for improved relations with the Soviet Union. White later became a director and U.S. representative of the IMF.

On June 19, 1947, White abruptly resigned from the International Monetary Fund, vacating his office the same day.