Harry Dexter White (October 29, 1892 – August 16, 1948) was a senior U.S. Treasury department official. Working closely with the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr., he helped set American financial policy toward the Allies of World War II. He was later accused of espionage by passing information to the Soviet Union. He was a senior American official at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that established the postwar economic order. He dominated the conference, and his vision of post-war financial institutions mostly prevailed over those of John Maynard Keynes, the British representative who was the other main founder. Through Bretton Woods, White was a major architect of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. White was accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviet Union, which he adamantly denied. He was never a Communist party member, but he had frequent contacts with Soviet officials as part of his duties at the Treasury. Revelations about those contacts and about dubious activities of a few of his friends and colleagues, including through decoded and now declassified Soviet cables intercepted in the Venona Project, added to the suspicions surrounding him. Background Harry Dexter White was born on October 29, 1892, in Boston, Massachusetts, the seventh and youngest child of Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, Jacob Weissnovitz (or Weit) and Sarah Magilewski, who had settled in the US in the 1880s. In 1917, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, and was commissioned as a First Lieutenant and served in France as head of Company H of the 302nd Infantry until the end of World War I. Aside from one term at Massachusetts Agricultural College (1911-12), he did not begin his university studies until age 29, first at Columbia University; then at Stanford University, where he earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in economics; and finally at Harvard University, where he taught for four years while studying for his Ph.D., which he completed in 1932 at 40 years of age. White then taught for two years at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin. His PhD dissertation won the David A. Wells Prize granted annually by the Harvard University Department of Economics. Harvard University Press published his Ph.D. thesis in 1933, as The French International Accounts, 1880–1913. Treasury Department In 1934, Jacob Viner, an economist working at the Treasury Department, offered White a position at the Treasury, which he accepted. Viner would receive an honorary degree from Lawrence