Harry Dexter White (October 9, 1892 – August 16, 1948) was an American economist, and a senior U.S. Treasury department official. He was the senior American official at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, and reportedly dominated the conference and imposed his vision of post-war financial institutions over the objections of John Maynard Keynes, the British representative. After the war, White was a major architect of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
In August 1948, White testified and defended his record to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Three days after testifying he died of a heart attack at his summer home in Fitzwilliam, NH. A number of sources, including the FBI and Soviet archives, indicate that he passed secret state information to the Soviet Union during World War II.
Read more about Harry Dexter White: Early Life, Office of Monetary Research, Treasury Department, Death, Venona Project
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“It is now many years that men have resorted to the forest for fuel and the materials of the arts: the New Englander and the New Hollander, the Parisian and the Celt, the farmer and Robin Hood, Goody Blake and Harry Gill; in most parts of the world, the prince and the peasant, the scholar and the savage, equally require still a few sticks from the forest to warm them and cook their food. Neither could I do without them.”
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“This man was very clever and quick to learn anything in his line. Our tent was of a kind new to him; but when he had once seen it pitched, it was surprising how quickly he would find and prepare the pole and forked stakes to pitch it with, cutting and placing them right the first time, though I am sure that the majority of white men would have blundered several times.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)