Whitewashing Comrade White
Craig, R. Bruce
BOOKS IN REVIZW 'Whitewashing Comrade White Treasonable Dots The Harry Dexter White Spy Case by R. Bruce Craig (University Press of Kansas, 496 pages, $34.95) Reviewed by Harvey...
...But no one else in the American government seemed to be aware of his unique style of negotiation, least of all his superiors...
...But while Craig indignantly denies the charge that White in any way subverted American policy, he admits that the Venona decryptions demonstrate that White was providing information to Soviet intelligence on issues like American policy on German reparations, the proposed loan to the USSR, American foreign policy, etc...
...While he is quick to castigate Bentley and Chambers for inconsistencies and lies, Craig is far more forgiving of White...
...Although he does not use her words, Craig agrees with Ellen Schrecker's apologia for spies—unlike traditional patriots, they "were internationalists whose political allegiances transcended national boundaries...
...He resists calling White a spy since he engaged only in "a species of espionage...
...SINCE BENTLEY WAS GENERALLY ACCURATE and since White was indeed himself a source for Soviet intelligence, how does Craig evaluate White's decision to lie to investigators and to the American public...
...In a footnote Craig notes that White told one story about his willingness to hire Communists to HUAC and another to the FBI and the grand jury...
...But even by Craig's own minimalist reading of what White gave the Soviets, it did harm American interests...
...He gently glides over White's lies to the FBI in an interview in which he denied knowing any Communists—even though his own brother-in-law was an open Party member—and delicately notes that in responding to questions about members of the Silvermaster network, White responded "with feigned forthrightness, but his answers were not entirely truthful...
...Their actions hurt the government but were not the decisive factor in enabling the Communists to seize power...
...To Craig, this was not subversion but part of his "grand negotiating strategy to obtain Soviet participation in post-war political and economic institutions at any price...
...BOOKS IN REVIZW 'Whitewashing Comrade White Treasonable Dots The Harry Dexter White Spy Case by R. Bruce Craig (University Press of Kansas, 496 pages, $34.95) Reviewed by Harvey Klehr FICIONADOS OF ESPIONAGE know Alger Hiss far better...
...Since Bentley's charge that White "placed" her in her position can't be proved, however, Craig sneers at Bentley's veracity...
...All that Craig will admit is that White was guilty of a "breach of confidence...
...58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 2004 BOOKS IN REVIEW testimony regarding Gold [Sonya] can be corroborated"), who worked at the Treasury Department...
...After army service in WWI, influenced by his wife Ann, he went into settlement work...
...S O MANY ADMISSIONS, so little willingness to face up to what White actually did...
...Unlike a number of writers—including the official historian of the IMF, James Boughton—who persist in proclaiming that the new evidence, primarily deciphered cables between Moscow and its intelligence officers serving in the United States, is either forged or unreliable, Craig is far too good a historian and far too sophisticated to engage in the equivalence of Holocaust denial...
...others like the structure of the IMF wound up serving American interests because the developing Cold War changed the environment in which they operated...
...At the San Francisco meeting creating the United Nations, White revealed the American negotiating strategy to a Soviet intelligence officer...
...Like Hiss, he would have had to explain how Chambers had obtained one of his handwritten documents filled with observations on a variety of issues...
...He complains that IMF officials removed a bust of White from headquarters and approvingly notes that "today the bust has been restored to its rightful place of honor...
...He denounces the congressional investigation that followed Brownell's charges for traducing White's memory and "his contributions as a high-ranking and loyal aide" to Morgenthau...
...In fact, Craig admits that White did help advance the careers of a number of his Communist friends...
...And, whether or not he was a fully recruited agent, White, considered a "trusted individual" by the Russians, was, Craig reluctantly concedes, worth 20 full-fledged agents...
...Likewise, Craig frequently suggests that Bentley made outlandish charges that could not be corroborated, such as her claims about the espionage activities of Sonya Gold ("few aspects of Bentley's • Unlike many of his friends and former colleagues also accused of espionage, he had not hidden behind the constitutional privilege against selfincrimination...
...Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are far more potent symbols in popular culture...
...Both he and his wife had an interest in the Soviet Union and Communism...
...Only two books on the White case have ever appeared, one a hagiographic defense by his brother...
...Although both Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers publicly identified him as a member of a Soviet network, White never became a household name...
...He did it, but was it so terrible or deserving of condemnation...
...White graduated from Stanford, worked for the Lafollette campaign in 1924, and earned a Ph.D...
...Craig also acknowledges that there is persuasive evidence that Elizabeth Bentley's story that White worked with Soviet intelligence during World War II is true...
...But he then admits that she did work on material Bentley claimed to have received from her, she and her husband both had ties to the CPUSA, she was acquainted with Silvermaster, and Venona and KGB files "demonstrate that Sonya and Bela Gold supplied data to the Silvermasters throughout 1944-1945...
...After a brief stint teaching at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, White moved to Washington in 1933...
...in economics from Harvard...
...Despite being filled with fascinating information and based on extensive and enterprising research into every conceivable archive (he successfully sued to force the release of previously sealed Grand Jury testimony), it is a deeply flawed and morally obtuse of scholarship Where historians once defended those accused of Soviet espionage by insisting on their innocence, Craig admits that Harry White was a Soviet source...
...SEPTEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR S9 BOOKS IN REVIEW messages detailing more valuable information that White provided...
...Unlike many of his friends and former colleagues also accused of espionage, he had not hidden behind the constitutional privilege against self-incrimination...
...in 1938 he became Director of Monetary Research and part of Morgenthau's inner circle...
...c1/2...
...the decision wound up costing the Treasury tens of millions of dollars when the Soviets took advantage of a flawed redemption policy and printed enormous stockpiles of money that flooded into the American zone...
...But Harry Dexter White was arguably the most important Soviet spy ever to serve in the American government...
...death within a few days marked him as a martyr to many liberals, a victim of the irresponsible and scurrilous accusations of treachery and disloyalty generated by liars, spread by fanatics like J. Edgar Hoover, and broadcast by partisan demagogues on congressional committees...
...Having argued that a high-ranking government official who turned over secret and important information to a foreign intelligence service over at least aten-year period, who met covertly with foreign agents, and who repeatedly lied to protect both himself and fellow agents working in his department was not a spy (in a footnote, Craig complains that "spy is a portmanteau word covering far too many different kinds of operatives to be useful"), Bruce Craig concludes that Harry Dexter White's was "a life fully and fruitfully lived...
...by the time he left government service in 1946, White was assistant secretary of the treasury...
...White did provide information to the Soviet Union, he admits, but he then deploys a series of justifications in order to present him as an admirable and decent man who served a higher good by spying...
...One man, even one as highly placed as White, could not determine American policy so wild charges about his responsibility made in the 1950s were often off the mark...
...And, he also lied—committed perjury—about his relationship with them...
...Craig is director of the National Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History, the governmental affairs arm of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and other scholarly groups...
...Unlike Hiss, White's close circle of friends included a number of Communists...
...At the Bretton Woods conference, he likewise met privately with KGB officers...
...Craig is convinced that White was a loyal American...
...But neither Truman's embarrassment nor subsequent congressional investigations that linked White with several programs that supposedly demonstrated how he had bent American policies to serve Soviet interests could focus attention on a dead spy...
...But, of course, White was damned not for his beliefs but his actions...
...Bright, energetic, and politically astute, by 1936 he was Assistant Director of the Division of Research and Statistics...
...During World War II he was Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau's most influential adviser with a hand in virtually every important decision the department made...
...He calls White's perjurious performance before HUAC "superb...
...Craig compares him to Harold Laski, Henry Wallace, and Harry Hopkins, all of whom were "later damned for their pro- Soviet beliefs...
...He agrees that White passed documents and provided oral summaries of both data and government thinking, that many of his friends and colleagues were Communist spies, and that White knew that they were also participating in Soviet espionage...
...His name resurfaced five years later when Eisenhower Attorney General Herbert Brownell charged that the Truman administration had ignored FBI warnings and appointed White to the board of the International Monetary Fund despite evidence that he was a Soviet agent...
...White, Sol Adler, and Frank Coe certainly succeeded in delaying gold shipments to Nationalist China during WWII...
...Craig denies that White deliberately hired and promoted spies or that he subverted American policy in the interests of the Soviet Union...
...The first new study since the release of previously classified American and Soviet-era documents is R. Bruce Craig's Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case...
...Craig acknowledges that White "characterized his friendship with members of the Silvermaster household as being less intimate than it really was...
...the IMF director's conference room" even though the evidence against him today is far more convincing and ironclad than ever before...
...How depressing that he defends perjury, lying, betrayal of superiors and the American public, and espionage on behalf of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union...
...Although there is no evidence either one ever joined the Communist Party, by 1935, Craig agrees, White was passing government documents to George Silverman who gave them to Whittaker Chambers...
...Moreover, he ignores the obvious fact that American counter-intelligence decrypted only a small portion of the Venona messages, so it is likely that there are numerous unbroken White told one story about his willingness to hire Communists to HUAC and another to the FBI and the grand jury...
...Returning to his New Hampshire home, he suffered a heart attack...
...Some of White's policy initiatives—a massive, virtually interest-free loan to the USSR, or the Morgenthau Plan to pastoralize Germany—never got off the ground or were eventually defeated...
...Although he grumbles that her statements to the FBI, testimony to Congress, and ghostwritten autobiography are filled with "inconsistencies and contradictions, if not outright lies," Craig acknowledges that Venona and KGB files released in the last decade corroborate some parts of her story against White...
...But, nonetheless, legally SEPTEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 57 BOOKS IN REVIE proving his guilt would have been very difficult since White's closest Communist contacts like Nathan Gregory Silvermaster and George Silverman never broke with Soviet intelligence...
...He first began providing assistance to the USSR in the 1930s shortly after joining the Roosevelt administration as a low-level economist...
...He admits that White "stretched" the truth when he protected Silvermaster during security probes...
...I ARRY DEXTER WHITE was born in Boston in 1892, seven years after his parents, Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants, arrived in America...
...Nevertheless, White and his fellow Communists did participate in the making of several decisions that either benefited the Soviet Union or harmed American interests...
...Had White lived a few more years, he undoubtedly would have faced indictment and trial for perjury...
...In keeping silent when questioned by the FBI, by grand jury prosecutors and by HUAC investigators" about the Communist ties of his subordinates, "White invoked and applied his own moral standards relating to personal loyalty, and made a conscious decision not to play into the hands of those who were out to destroy the Rooseveltian internationalist legacy...
...Unlike most of those named, he demanded to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he delivered an impassioned defense of liberal principles and indignantly denied the charges...
...Likewise, White was only one voice in the decision to transfer the printing plates for making German occupation currency available to the USSR...
...Apart from the inconvenient fact that White did not remain silent but lied, Craig's argument is that if White had told the truth reactionaries would have used his indiscretions to endanger world peace by destroying such institutions as the U.N.and IMF...
...He "was well aware of Silvermaster's reputation as a security risk and probably knew of his long-term CPUSA affiliation, but apparently he frankly didn't care...
...He admits that Bentley was accurate about those she names as spies (although he disputes her accuracy in the case of William Taylor...
...Based on the assumption that the information he was providing did not harm American interests" he felt free to share it with the NKVD...
...His Harvey Klehr is the Andrew W Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University...
...Craig is on firmer ground—but not entirely stable footing—when he disputes the charges that White successfully subverted American national interests in several policy decisions that redounded to the benefit of the Soviet Union...
...The ex-president angrily defended himself, insisting that he had merely been accommodating an FBI desire to keep White under surveillance, a claim that was quickly demonstrated to be untrue...
...While his father successfully built a small hardware chain, his early death forced Harry to quit college to enter the family business...
...In 1922, at the age of 30, he reentered college...
Vol. 37 • September 2004 • No. 7
