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  • Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case
  • Robert Alan Goldberg
Treasonable Doubt: The Harry Dexter White Spy Case. By R. Bruce Craig (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2004) 436 pp. $34.95

In terms of American historiography, the Cold War has replaced Reconstruction as a dark and bloody ground. With great effort and often much passion, historians have staked out the subject and covered its many dimensions. Not only have the key players been studied; so too has the impact of McCarthyism on Hollywood, labor unions, foreign policy, political parties, civil liberties, and universities, among many other topics. The intensity of interest and feeling has yet to subside after fifty years. For many inside and outside of the academic world, the immediate postwar years were a time of struggle for the moral high ground. The issues and personalities of that period became mobilizing symbols and myths that still animate the memories of both left- and right-wing America.

Craig's Treasonable Doubt enters the debate about the loyalties of Harry Dexter White, who rose in his twelve years of government service (1934 to 1946) to become Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and played a major role in the founding of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Craig is painstaking in his intensive review of the sources, which include White's personal papers, government records, FBI files, federal grand-jury testimony, House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee materials, interviews with key surviving players, and the Verona File—the intercepted and decrypted cable transmission from Soviet agents in the United States to their superiors in Moscow. Playing the historian as detective rather than defense attorney, he evaluates the charges against White and hopes to offer insights about how the American political and judicial system operates in times of crisis.

Craig makes a convincing argument that White did not subvert American foreign policy to Russian ends. If involved in decision making, White followed the lead of his American superiors with regard to the Morgenthau Plan for Germany, loans to the Soviet Union, the occupation currency-issue in Germany, and aid to Nationalist China. Nor did he help create the International Monetary Fund to aid and abet the economic interests of Moscow.

Yet, as Craig indicates, White had multiple loyalties. He was an [End Page 156] American who sympathized with communism and the interests of the Soviet Union. To realize his "utopian vision of world peace," he worked to ensure continued American-Soviet cooperation (275). Unlike many who shared his vision, White pursued this task through espionage, conveying government secrets to the Soviet underground in the United States for an extended period of time. When confronted, White lied about his activities and the hidden allegiances of his communist friends and fellow workers.

Carefully argued and well researched, Treasonable Doubt is an important addition to the literature. Yet, the book has shortcomings. The author's discussion of White's motivation is too brief and superficial. Surely there were other Americans strongly attracted to progressive politics and New Deal activism who did not step over the line into treason. Craig's definition of terms causes confusion. Although he maintains that White did not subvert policy to pro-Soviet positions, he repeatedly describes his subject as an "agent of influence," as an individual engaged in policy subversion. Only toward the end of the book does Craig lose his balance. He shifts the argument in White's favor by denying that the assistant secretary played a "major role" in the Soviet underground (269). On the last page, Craig's measured tone becomes special pleading and even raises the specter of an apologist. Despite Joseph Stalin's contention about breaking eggs to make an omelette, the end does not justify the means.

Robert Alan Goldberg
University of Utah
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