If, as many of his detractors say, President Obama is a Marxist, then he would not be the first to come out of Harvard. “Almost the entire membership identified as belonging to the first Ware cell came out of the Harvard Law School: Alger Hiss, Nathan Witt, Lee Pressman, John Alt and Henry H. Collins, Jr., Harry Dexter White and Lauchlin Currie were teachers as well as students at Harvard,” James Burnham wrote in Web of Subversion, published in 1954.
Actually, White and Currie were economists at Harvard, the former a beneficiary of the one-way outreach of another economist there—Frank W. Tausig. “Harry White, using the prestige of Harvard, secured a position in the United States Treasury Department until he became the chief financial policy maker for the United States,” the Veritas Foundation reported in 1960. “He repaid Tausig, Harvard University and his country be becoming a Soviet espionage agent, diverting our financial power to serve Soviet interests.”
“Harry White was at the same time dubbed as America’s chief Keynesian economist by none other than John Maynard Keynes himself.” The Veritas Foundation was founded by Harvard alumni.
“Lauchlin Currie, another Keynesian economics instructor at Harvard, used the prestige of his position to secure an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board,” Veritas reported. “After being accused of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union, Currie removed himself from our shores and exiled himself in Columbia, South America, ‘well outside the national jurisdiction of the United States government.’”
It should be noted, as well, that John Reed, immortalized in the Warren Beatty biopic Reds was also a Harvard grad, of the class of 1910.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org.