Versailles and prevent another worldwide depression. As head of the independently-funded Office of Monetary Research, White was able to hire staff without the normal civil service regulations or background enquiries. He probably was unaware that several of his hires were spies for the USSR. Morgenthau Plan According to Henry Morgenthau's son, White was the principal architect behind the Morgenthau Plan, designed to permanently weaken Germany's military capabilities. The Morgenthau postwar plan, as authored by White, was to take all industry out of Germany, eliminate its armed forces, and convert the country into an agricultural community, in the process eliminating most of Germany's economy and its ability to start another war. A version of the plan, limited to turning Germany into "a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character", was signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944. However, someone in White's department with access to details of the plan leaked it to the press, and White himself provided an advance copy to Soviet intelligence. Public protests forced Roosevelt to publicly and partially pull back. The Nazis and Joseph Goebbels used the Morgenthau Plan as a propaganda coup to encourage their troops and citizens to fight on. General Omar Bradley, among others, noticed "a near-miraculous revitalization of the German army." In the end Morgenthau still did manage to influence the resulting occupation policy. Bretton Woods conference White was the senior American official at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, and reportedly dominated the conference and imposed his vision over the objections of John Maynard Keynes, the British representative. Numerous economic historians have concluded that White and the powerful U.S. delegation were wrong in dismissing Keynes's innovative proposal for a new international unit of currency (the "Bancor") made up of foreign exchange reserves held by central banks. Benn Steil, in 2013, argued that since 1971, experts have been disillusioned with the 1944 framework. Eric Helleiner, in 2014, argued that the main goal of the United States was to promote international development as an investment in peace, to open the world for cheap imports, and to create new markets for American exports. He argues that policy-makers and analysts from the Southern hemisphere increasingly denounced the Bretton Woods system as "a Northern-dominated arrangement that was ill-suited to their state-led development strategies." After the war, White was closely involved with setting up