Working closely with the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., he helped set American financial policy toward the Allies of World War II.

He dominated the conference, and his vision of post-war financial institutions mostly prevailed over those of John Maynard Keynes, the British representative who was the other main founder.

Harry Dexter White was born on October 29, 1892, in Boston, Massachusetts, the seventh and youngest child of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, Jacob Weissnovitz (or Weit) and Sarah Magilewski, who had settled in the US in the 1880s.

[6] White became increasingly important in monetary matters, and was a top advisor to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., especially on international financial affairs dealing with China, France, Great Britain, Japan, Latin America, and the Soviet Union.

The post of Assistant Secretary, the most senior economist position in the Treasury, finally opened up in 1945, and Morgenthau promptly nominated White to fill it.

[7] The complex negotiations at the top ranks of the US government, and its key allies of Britain and China, took place in late November 1941 with no further input from White or Morgenthau.

[8] Some historians have argued, however, that White manipulated Morgenthau and Roosevelt to provoke war with Japan in order to protect Stalin's Far Eastern front.

[9][10][11] After the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, Secretary Morgenthau appointed White to act as liaison between the Treasury and the State Department on all matters bearing on foreign relations.

As head of the independently funded Office of Monetary Research, White was able to hire staff without the normal civil service regulations or background enquiries.

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.

[13][17] Numerous economic historians have concluded that White and the powerful U.S. delegation were wrong in dismissing Keynes's innovative proposal for a new international unit of currency (the "Bancor") made up of foreign exchange reserves held by central banks.

[18] Eric Helleiner, in 2014, argued that the main goal of the United States was to promote international development as an investment in peace, to open the world for cheap imports, and to create new markets for American exports.

He argues that policy-makers and analysts from the Southern hemisphere increasingly denounced the Bretton Woods system as "a Northern-dominated arrangement that was ill-suited to their state-led development strategies.

"[19][20][21] 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.

[citation needed] On September 2, 1939, Assistant Secretary of State and Roosevelt's adviser on internal security Adolf Berle had a meeting, arranged by journalist Isaac Don Levine, with defecting Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers.

[31] On November 7, 1945, defecting Soviet espionage courier Elizabeth Bentley told investigators of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that in late 1942 or early 1943 she learned from Soviet spies Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and Ludwig Ullmann that one source of the government documents they were photographing and passing on to her and NKVD spymaster Jacob Golos was Harry Dexter White.

[43] However the alternative explanation is that Treasury officials feared that denying Soviet use of the plates in their occupation sector would endanger postwar cooperation.

[41] Bentley wrote in her 1951 autobiography that she had been "able through Harry Dexter White to arrange that the United States Treasury Department turn the actual printing plates over to the Russians".

[45] In her 1953 testimony before Joseph McCarthy's Senate subcommittee, she elaborated, testifying that she was following instructions from NKVD New York rezident Iskhak Abdulovich Akhmerov (who operated under the cover name "Bill") to pass word through Ludwig Ullmann and Nathan Gregory Silvermaster for White to "put the pressure on for the delivery of the plates to Russia".

[62] NSA cryptographers identified Harry Dexter White as the source denoted in the Venona decrypts at various times under the code names "Lawyer",[63] "Richard",[64] and "Jurist".

[65] Two years after his death, in a memorandum dated October 15, 1950, White was positively identified by the FBI, through evidence gathered by the Venona project, as a Soviet source, code named "Jurist".

According to the previous information received from [Venona] regarding Jurist, during April, 1944, he had reported on conversations between the then Secretary of State Hull and Vice President Wallace.

[citation needed] This codename was confirmed by the notes of KGB archivist Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, in which six key Soviet agents are named.

[66] Another example of White acting as an agent of influence for the Soviet Union was his obstruction of a proposed $200 million loan to Nationalist China in 1943, which he had been officially instructed to execute,[67] at a time when inflation was spiraling out of control.

After America became involved in World War II, Glasser received appointments to several higher-level positions in the government on White's approval.

In 2000, Robert Skidelsky, in reviewing the evidence, concludes: A combination of naivety, superficiality and supreme confidence in his own judgment — together with his background — explains the course of action White took.

[72] In 2004, Stephen Schlesinger wrote, "Among historians, the verdict about White is still unresolved, but many incline toward the view that he wanted to help the Russians but did not regard the actions he took as constituting espionage.

[74]In 2012, David Chambers wrote, "Perhaps White had ends of his own, too... Perhaps he used his position to foster the Soviet Union — then a new, budding American ally, recognized only in 1933 — beyond New Deal policy.

It is this chasm between what is known publicly of White's economic and political views, on the one hand, and his clandestine behavior on behalf of the Soviets, on the other, that accounts for the plethora of unpersuasive profiles of the man that have emerged.

In 1990, they stated, "Despite years of close surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which included shadowing and wiretaps, the evidence produced against White never consisted of anything more than the unsubstantiated allegations of two F.B.I.