While Keynes was born into a family of cultured upper-middle-class intellectuals and educated at Eton and King's College, Cambridge, White was the youngest son of a Lithuanian immigrant who made a modest living in the Boston hardware and crockery business. After an undistinguished spell at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, White spent several years working in his father's stores before deciding, at the age of 30, to try his hand at an academic career. 

He won a place at Stanford, took a PhD at Harvard and became an economics professor at a small college in Wisconsin. Then, in 1934, came his big break. He was invited to Washington to work on a study of US banking legislation, and this was the start of a civil service career which led to his appointment as a key adviser to the Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau. White's speciality was the world economy. 

Morgenthau himself was no economist but had the great asset of being on intimate terms with the president, Franklin Roosevelt. FDR was happy to leave the conduct of international economic policy to his family friend (much to the annoyance of the State Department), and Morgenthau, in turn, delegated most of the thinking about policy, and its implementation, to White.

White had "a coherent vision of an internationalised New Deal" — that is, a system in which governments, led by the US, would, through judicious intervention, ensure currency stability and prevent the beggar-thy-neighbour policies that had led to the Great Depression. But there was another side to White which was unknown to his superiors.