Harry White and the American Creed by James M. Boughton;

Author:James M. Boughton;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Attack Begins behind the Curtain, 1945

Prosecutor to Elizabeth Bentley: “You never met Harry White?” Bentley: “No, I didn’t.”

—Grand jury transcript, April 1948

WHILE HARRY WHITE WAS occupied with disparate tasks for the U.S. Treasury, refugees from the Communist underground were invoking his name in secret meetings with the FBI and other government agencies. Thus began a campaign that ultimately would severely damage his posthumous reputation.

March 1945: Whittaker Chambers Makes a Vague Accusation

Jay Vivian Chambers, who went by many names in the course of his life but was most commonly known as Whittaker, was a onetime member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) who renounced his former activities and became a fervent crusader against Communism. He would eventually become an iconic hero to anti-Communist fanatics because of the sensationalism of the charges he raised against Alger Hiss, Harry White, and many others.1 The line between truth and fiction in the stories he spun is never clear, and much of what he claimed is impossible to verify.

Chambers testified multiple times under oath that he left the Communist Party at the end of 1937. In the fall of 1948, however, that dating conflicted with his claim that he had received classified documents from Alger Hiss in the spring of 1938. He then changed his testimony to say that he had left in April 1938.2 After leaving the party, he began informing on former colleagues and acquaintances, both those whom he knew to have been Communists and those whom he had met around the margins of activities involving the party or its members. He first took his story to Adolf A. Berle Jr., the assistant secretary of state dealing with internal security, in September 1939. Meeting at Berle’s home, Chambers ran through a list of names of government officials whom he believed to be party members or engaged in espionage. Some of those names would later be among the most prominent people attacked during the McCarthy era and beyond for alleged links to Communism. One person whom Chambers did not name to Berle was Harry Dexter White.3

Although Chambers was subsequently interviewed on several occasions by officials from the State Department, the FBI, and other agencies, the first time he ever mentioned White’s name was some five and a half years later, in March 1945. By this time, hysteria about Communism was rising in the United States, and the State Department was undertaking to investigate reports of Communists in the federal government. The department’s chief security officer, Raymond Murphy, interviewed Chambers on March 20. After naming several other people who he claimed were important figures in “the underground” in the period 1934–37, Chambers mentioned Harry White. Murphy’s notes on the meeting read: “Harry White of the Treasury was described as a member at large but rather timid. He put on as assistants in the Treasury Glaser a member of the underground group and an Adler or Odler another party member. The two Coe brothers, also party members, were also put on by White.

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