Harry Dexter White: the evolution of American foreign policy in the 1940s

© 1978 David BrandThe career of Harry Dexter White reflects in microcosm the evolution of U.S. foreign policy through the Roosevelt and Truman eras and helps to shed light on the problem of the origins of the Cold War. White was a Treasury official under Roosevelt. During the war he developed plans for the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.' He became America's first Executive Director of the Fund. But by the time the two institutions were established the political climate had changed: the institutions did not operate in the manner he had envisaged. White was no longer in the political mainstream and he was eventually called before the House Un-American Activities Committee on charges of espionage and spying for the Russians. Most of what has been written about White has not made any systematic attempt to analyse the wider implications of his fall from power. The implications are far reaching: White's career was inseparably tied to the foreign economic policy developed under Roosevelt. The course of his career mirrors the development and the fate of New Deal foreign policy. White's career progressed during the 1930's as the New Deal was increasingly forced to turn its attention to matters of foreign policy. His thinking typified the experimental and reformist spirit of the New Deal. During the war years, the period of White's greatest influence, his plans became the basis of Roosevelt's foreign economic policy. After the war, when the liberalism of the New Deal was replaced by the conservatism of the early Cold War era, White's political influence rapidly decreased as his vision of the post war world fell into disfavour. The trends in American foreign policy of this period set the course of the world's post war international relations