Harry Dexter White

Harry Dexter White was the seventh and youngest child of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants. As chief international economist at the US Treasury he was the senior American official at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944, which set the post-war economic order; he dominated the proceedings, and his design for the new institutions largely prevailed over that of John Maynard Keynes, the British representative and the other principal founder. Through Bretton Woods, White was a major architect of the International Monetary Fund and of the World Bank, and he became the Fund's first American executive director. Note: from 1948, and again in the Venona decrypts released decades later, he was accused of having passed information to Soviet intelligence. He denied it before Congress and continued to deny it until his death three days after testifying.