Hayek. A Life 1899–1950

Abstract

A very able and devoted public servant, carrying an immense burden of responsibility and initiative, of high integrity and of clear-sighted idealistic international purpose, genuinely intending to do his best for the world. Moreover, his over-powering will combined with the fact that he has constructive ideas mean that he does get things done, which few else here do’ (179). At the conclusion of the Atlantic City negotiations which preceded the Bretton Woods Conference, Keynes wrote that White ‘has proved an altogether admirable chairman. His kindness to me personally has been extreme. And behind the scenes he has always been out to find a way of agreement except when his own political difficulties stood in the way’ (180). Keynes, in fact, lobbied for White to be nominated as the inaugural Managing Director of the IMF (347). There are fewer extant comments by White about Keynes. Roy Harrod, Keynes’s biographer, claimed that White ‘revered Keynes as the greatest living economist’ (177). In May 1944, just prior to the conference at Bretton Woods, Roosevelt, who had met Keynes in 1934 and 1941, asked White if Keynes was being ‘friendly’; White replied that ‘Keynes was an extremely able and tough negotiator with, of course, a thorough understanding of the problems that confronted us, but when not negotiating or discussing points of differences... he was quite friendly’ (178). White took Keynes to a baseball game in Washington, and to a volleyball game played between the US and Soviet delegations at Bretton Woods. When he heard of Keynes’s death in 1946, White wrote urgently to Keynes’s widow expressing his ‘deep personal loss’. Harry Dexter White was a brilliant policy adviser and public servant, the promoter of the most acclaimed economic conference ever staged, but whose reputation was impugned on the basis of ‘tainted’ evidence. James Broughton deserves praise for telling objectively the story of one of the twentieth century’s heroes. As for his alleged disloyalty to his country, White informed the House Un-American Activities Committee on 13 August 1948, three days before he died, that ‘My creed is the American Creed’ (320).