Gods of Deception, page 60
36
Crime Scene: Harry Dexter White
The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
—Albert Einstein, 1955
You know I live in a remarkable country, Allen, we can predict the future and understand the present perfectly, but the past … the past keeps changing every day.
—remark made to Allen Weinstein
in Moscow by a Soviet historian
OUT OF THE ten, including George Altmann, who had gathered at Volta Place that day in September 1937, five later died suddenly, unexpectedly, in middle age; of those five, only Harry Dexter White was the victim of heart attack—natural causes, of a sort. He and Harry Hopkins were also the only ones of the ten who had never been formal members of the American Communist Party. White preferred his role as an outsider, independent operator, fellow traveler, a friend and ally of the Soviet Union who seemingly made a specialty of deciding what was best for his patrons in Moscow. And so he was not subject to Party discipline. Which always annoyed his handler, Whittaker Chambers (who was forced to indulge White’s frivolous breaches of security), whom he only knew as Carl. It was this prickly independence that Altmann perfectly captured in the bespectacled cherubic face of a mild-mannered mustached intellectual (White’s secretary and Treasury colleagues often kidded him about the brush mustache, which resembled Hitler’s). While in the Justice Department mural, finished a year later, White’s face is thinner, harder, idealized, if not aglow with ideological certainty. There is nothing of the fragile ego and mercurial temperament detected by Chambers in their many meetings. But looks could be deceiving: White had a venomous temper and an overweening ambition, matched only by his faith that economic policy—the great lever and skyhook of civilization for any Marxist economist—could be used to shape a more just and equal world.
Sitting in that charmed circle at Volta Place, as an economic adviser at the Treasury under Henry Morgenthau, he knew that he and Harry Hopkins were the highest-ranking members of the government in the Volta Place group. Even if Alger Hiss and his feisty wife ruled the roost of dues-paying Communists at Volta Place on that fine September afternoon, White seemed to savor his independence and access to power. He was biding his time, slowly but surely packing the Treasury Department with his GRU acolytes, while the true levers of power hovered at his fingertips in the person of his boss, Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, a fellow Jew and Hyde Park crony of Roosevelt. Morgenthau, paradoxically or not, was the weakest, least experienced member of FDR’s cabinet, and yet he had the greatest sway over the president, with the possible exception of Harry Hopkins.
No one bathed in that sumptuous bamboo-filtered sunlight at Volta Place could have predicted that this Harvard Ph.D. by way of Stanford, from poor Eastern European Jewish roots, a brilliant economist, would eventually rise to the exalted position of assistant secretary at Treasury, while being served by a cabal of Soviet spies on his staff, allowing him to champion Operation Snow, and later go on to formulate the Breton Woods Agreement on international monetary policy, and later still plans for the IMF and World Bank. Henry Morgenthau, barely a secondrate intellect, had no idea—no clue, even as in the years to come he became increasingly reliant on White’s every recommendation, rubberstamping his policy papers (many with the backing of Lauchlin Currie and Harry Hopkins in the White House, Hiss at State, and at least seven other NKVD-GRU spies in the Treasury Department). It was White who first aligned, then guided the Treasury to near-sycophantic support of the interests of the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1946, all the while promoting Mao and the Chinese Communists over Chiang Kaishek and the Nationalists. In many respects, he outgunned Alger Hiss’s subterfuges at Yalta.
Not even Whittaker Chambers, who ran White like he ran Alger Hiss for Soviet military intelligence, ever grasped the full extent of damage to American interests caused by White and his confederates— the most damning, the most terrible proof of which was now contained in the file Weinstein had handed George, an excerpt from the as yet unpublished memoir of White’s NKVD handler, Vitalii Pavlov (who had replaced Iskhak Akhmerov in 1939, who’d replaced Chambers in 1937). As Chambers noted in Witness, perhaps he had just been looking for White’s motives in all the wrong places; and so he, too, missed the tragic train wreck of disaster from Pearl Harbor to the Morgenthau Plan, from the abandonment of Poland at Yalta and the monstrosity of human suffering that became Operation Keelhaul, to the three-billiondollar cash giveaway to the Soviets in postwar Germany, and, last but not least, Mao’s ultimate triumph.
When, the night after meeting with Donald Spier, George and Wendy read the translation of the Pavlov excerpt detailing White’s meeting with his new handler in May of 1941 at the Old Ebbitt Grill, their conception of that gathering at Volta Place began to shift once more, like a grainy home movie out of the thirties run backward, in which White’s face, as he sat next to his comrade and fellow Harvard economist and Treasury colleague Lauchlin Currie, took on a different cast of light, darker, insidious, not quite that pleasant afternoon at Volta Place of just days before.
They then began to see a harder intensity in the eyes and in the sallow round face of the man wearing a western-style bandanna in the mural, a Harry Dexter White seeming more petulant, proud, pushy, and perhaps skittish, depending on how well his boss, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, had been treating him that day or that week. White might have thought he was the smartest man in the room, but he knew that his power to influence was directly tied to the gullibility of Morgenthau (gentleman farmer and neighbor of their boss Franklin Roosevelt), who sometimes bridled when his in-house puppet master pulled the strings too abruptly. Like the others seated around him, White was besotted with Stalin and the latest Five-Year Plan, albeit he, like everyone else in that charmed circle, had never been to the Soviet Union.
When White returned to his summer home in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, eleven years later, a dying man after downing a bottle of digitalis on the train from Boston, barely staggering onto the platform of the tiny Fitzwilliam station—he had been hounded in the previous weeks, first by the FBI and then by the NKVD—he may well have thought back to that pleasant afternoon at Volta Place, seated in the catbird seat, and wondered how it had all come to this: how a Soviet asset of immeasurable worth at the highest pinnacle of the American government, who had conspired to further the ends of Moscow Center at every turning, could have been abandoned at the end. Lying in bed for two days in his idyllic summer home with Mount Monadnock a stalwart presence beyond the window, he might at least have taken some comfort at how coolly he’d played his hand back in May of 1941 at his first lunch meeting with Vitalii Pavlov across the street from Treasury at the Old Ebbitt Grill. How he’d put to memory the orders from Stalin to encourage an ill-prepared United States to risk war with Japan as if the plan had simply reflected his own thinking. And then calmly paid for lunch.
Ever the lone wolf, when dying painfully of heart failure in his bed at his summer home in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, White must have taken solace that he’d served his untutored masters well, including his triumphant organizing of the Breton Woods Conference in 1944 at the Mount Washington Hotel, also in his beloved New Hampshire. And how, even as the FBI closed in, he’d brazened it out to the end, managing at the eleventh hour to still obtain Truman’s appointment as the first director of the IMF in the spring of 1946, although he resigned a year later, with no warning or explanation to anyone. He’d withstood criticism, lashing out in petulant indignation to the press and later to HUAC: How dare ex-spies and Communists like Whittaker Chambers or the “Red Queen,” Elizabeth Bentley, accuse a man of his exalted stature, stellar reputation, and accomplishments of common-as-dishwater spying? (This plea, a reputational defense, was not unlike that used by Alger Hiss in his two trials.) And so, just three days before his death, he topped off his public career with a grandstanding display of patriotic rhetoric for the press in a HUAC hearing in August 1948. With brave, patriotic words, he delivered a ringing endorsement of liberal democracy and the American way, a speech that all would remember, and so left a stirring impression, a self-righteous clarion call recalled by many for decades, confirming that his sudden death just three days later was that of a righteous soul hounded to his grave by false accusations of treason, laid low by lies from smarmy creatures like Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, ex-Communists, who, in turn, released McCarthy and the Red-baiters from their fetid dens.
When confronted by then Congressman Richard Nixon with a photo of Whittaker Chambers later in this histrionic public hearing, White suddenly realized that his accuser was, in fact, his old GRU handler from the thirties, from Volta Place days, the man he’d only known as Carl, who had traveled all the way to his summer home in Fitzwilliam for his brilliant paper on reform of Soviet monetary policy. This was the man who’d warned him on the street outside the Treasury building in 1939 that if he didn’t break with the GRU apparatus he, Carl, with the Russian accent so beloved of Alger Hiss, would be forced to expose him. At that terrible instant, Nixon’s face screwed up in an inscrutable grin: White—probably fingering the bottle of digitalis he carried in his vest pocket—knew he was done for.
He would be dead three days later: sudden, mysterious, tragic. Returning from Washington and the HUAC investigation the following day to his summer home in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, White either died by his own hand—racked by nervous anxiety and exhaustion—by overdosing himself with digitalis or by the intervention of a Soviet hit team that might have forced his shaking hand. According to the attending doctor, who did a cardiogram, White’s heart was in bad shape and showed all the signs of a severe heart condition. The local doctor was unaware of the circumstances of White’s return, the anxiety and fear of exposure that had marked his last days and months. So neither this doctor nor his colleague who wrote the death certificate bothered with a coroner’s examination or a toxicology report. White’s brother-in-law, a member of the Communist underground, arranged for the body to be spirited across the state line to Massachusetts in the middle of the night (where cremation did not have to be included in the instructions of the deceased’s will), where it was cremated, and his ashes buried.
Harry White, Quizzed in Probe of Spy Ring, Dies Suddenly
FITZWILLIAM, N.H. (AP) Aug. 17, 1948—Harry Dexter White, 56, former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury, who this past week denied he was a member of an “elite” group in the Communist apparatus in Washington, died yesterday at his summer home.
A heart attack, suffered Saturday, only a few hours after his return from Washington, caused his death, Dr. George S. Emerson said.
White testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee that the accusations of Mr. Whittaker Chambers and Miss Elizabeth T. Bentley were “unqualifiedly false.”
Miss Bentley had testified July 31 that through White’s high Treasury position he had helped Communist agents by pushing certain government employees toward key positions where they would have access to secret information.
Hiss arrived a bit perturbed … He was upset for two reasons, he said. He had to contact a friend at the Harvard Club, with whom he had a 6 p.m. appointment, and he had just learned of the sudden death by heart attack of his friend Harry Dexter White, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, whom we had questioned four days earlier on the charges of Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley that he had been a part of the stated Red conspiracy.
“I would like the record to show,” Hiss said, after being placed under oath, “that on my way downtown I learned from the press of the death of Harry White, which came as a great shock to me. I am not sure that I feel in the best possible mood for testimony.”
—Robert Stripling, chief investigator, House Committee on
Un-American Activities, August, 17, 1948
“Chambers is an enemy of the republic, a blasphemer of Christ, a disbeliever in God, with no respect either for matrimony or motherhood … he believes in nothing … and as to the intimacies between the Hisses and Chamberses—incredible! Take just one instance, the visit to Harry Dexter White’s summer home. They motor four hundred miles from Washington to Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, so they can sit in the car while Whittaker Chambers goes down and talks to a dead man, a man now dead, and they cannot refute him, and then go to see ‘She Stoops to Conquer.’ If a man ever stooped to conquer, Chambers has.”
—Lloyd Paul Stryker, lead attorney for the defense in the first
Hiss trial, in his closing argument before the jury, July 6, 1949
They spent some time walking—“casing the joint,” Wendy said, and laughed not very convincingly—the rutted gravel and dirt farm road bordered by woods thickened with clotted patches of glaucous rhododendrons. They were both reeling from the implications of the Pavlov excerpt they’d read in their motel room the night before. The road served as an entrance drive to what had, once upon a time, been the Whites’ summer residence. George left the Tahoe parked on the state road, concerned about trespassing in Live Free or Die New Hampshire. They were trying to elucidate the images of Whittaker Chambers and Alger and Priscilla Hiss arriving at Harry Dexter White’s summer home in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, in August 1937 as described in Witness, and further detailed in Chambers’s testimony, both in discovery and at the trial (fortified with transcripts and other telling details provided them by Allen Weinstein). If they hadn’t been so nervous, they might have even enjoyed the upright pitch pine and tightly clustered dun-leafed oaks, with the near-shorn maples forming the understory of most brilliant color, enlivened by fan-shaped slivers of silver birch.
Emerging from the shadowy woodlot, the dirt and gravel road continued in a semicircle to a modest red farmhouse on a rise set amid rolling green lawns bordered by more distant overgrown pastures and frost-shorn cornfields. The house looked to be all of one floor—perhaps also having a room or two in the attic—with a single brick chimney, all of it conforming to the black-and-white photo in the pages of a Life magazine article of November 23, 1953, which Weinstein had provided. Except now, two young girls—one blond, one dark-haired—in jeans and down vests played on a rope swing hung from the massive bough of an oak off to the side of what looked to be a newer two-car garage addition. The trunk of the oak, as in the Life photograph, was still girdled with a band of rusted metal. It was chilly, though a warming trend was in the offing, and the girls’ breath was just visible. Brooding gray clouds overhead were touched by chinks of brassy sunlight on their underbellies. Blood orange maple leaves covered the grass in blowing, shifting shoals, lapping crescents of taller unmowed grass beyond the lawn, where stone walls corralled even more leaves in slanting piles like shingle against a breakwater. In the middle distance, more crumbled fieldstone walls bobbed across untended pastures choked with high-bush blueberry, thus the name Blueberry Hill. Wendy cast longing looks toward the horizon, where a mottled olive-gray Mount Monadnock presided like royalty over the North Country. Closer at hand, to the rear of the house, was a duck pond—just as Chambers had described it—flat and gunmetal gray, verging on icy stillness, but still animated, at least to an artist’s eye, by a red Adirondack chair strategically angled on its grassy slope to take in the rugged Monadnock.
“I hope you aren’t planning for me to go knock on their front door,” she said. “Just in case the Whites are still in.”
“I thought you were really into all this—places, what with all your Proustian sensibility. What do we call it: the White house, or home? A little off, I mean the political association, the color …” He shrugged. checking the Life photo from 1953 showing white clapboard and continuing in a jocular tone. “The usage conjures ambiguous meanings … for a red house.”
“What would you prefer? Let’s stick to Blueberry Hill, like out of a kid’s book. Besides, you’re our expert stargazer. What reports from Epsilon Reticuli?”
“I think knocking on the door would make us look ridiculous, morbid even. After all, this is our fourth—what do we call it?—crime scene. Sites of suspicious deaths, suicides, murders. What do your literary antennae tell you?”
“Lewisburg makes five,” she said, correcting him. “What do you find most disturbing about Remington’s murder?”
“The perfection of its ambiguity—doubts, if not fear, instilled in both traitors and pursuers alike—the FBI and CIA. The long memory … bet it even scares you.”
“Do you think the Judge is lying about Remington, too, since they both spent three years working on the War Production Board?”
“You’ll get your chance to wheedle that out of him tomorrow. It was a big organization; their paths didn’t necessarily have to cross.”
She turned on him with a crinkle of pain in the compressed corners of her eyes. “The thing that really bothers me is Remington’s funeral service, when his first wife and two children were a no-show. That’s monstrous, that a mother would deliberately leave such an empty void in her two children’s lives.”
“His first wife was an ex-Communist—hell, she sold him out to the FBI, testified in court he’d paid dues and turned over papers to Elizabeth Bentley. She’d hardly be welcome—if she wasn’t already in hiding.”
