Word: trumanism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Harry Dexter White boiled up in the nation's headlines, touching off the sharpest political controversy since the 1952 elections. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, in a Chicago speech last week, revived the charges that White, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and an important policymaker of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations, was a spy for Russia. Brownell added a new and serious accusation: President Truman had promoted White after the White House had received two written FBI reports saying that White...
...Brownell charge, Harry Truman reacted promptly-perhaps hastily. He said: "I know nothing about any such FBI report ... As soon as we found out White was disloyal, we fired him." At the White House, Press Secretary James Hagerty refuted from the record Truman's statement that White had been fired. White resigned, and got a laudatory letter from President Truman. When this was put up to Truman, he said: "White was fired by resignation...
Party Orders. Before the Brownell speech, neither Truman nor any other leader of his Administration had ever publicly suggested that White was fired, or that they believed him to be disloyal. In fact, White, who died on Aug. 16, 1948, apparently of a heart attack, three days after being questioned by the House Un-American Activities Committee, has been considered in pro-Truman quarters as an innocent martyr to "witch hunters...
Sincere Regret. In reviving the case, Brownell said that the FBI in December 1945 sent to President Truman, through his aide, Brigadier General Harry Vaughan, a written report saying that former Communist Elizabeth Bentley had said that White was spying for the Russians. The next month Truman promoted White to executive director for the U.S. in the International Monetary Fund...
...next day a Senate committee recommended White's confirmation, and the day after, the Senate, in ignorance of the reports, confirmed him in his job with the Monetary Fund. On April 30, White's last day at the Treasury, President Truman wrote White accepting the resignation "with regret," saying: ". . . You will have increased opportunity for the exercise of your wide knowledge and expertness in a field which is of utmost importance to world peace and security . . . In your new position, you will add distinction to your already distinguished career...