Michael Straight was an American economist, editor, publisher, spy, and author. He was a former magazine publisher who described in a political memoir After Long Silence (1983) his lingering involvement with Soviet spies whom he had first met when they were all students at Cambridge University.
Background
Michael Straight was born in New York on September 1, 1916, the youngest child of Willard Straight, a senior investment banker with J.P. Morgan, and Dorothy Payne Whitney Straight, the daughter of former Secretary of the Navy William C. Whitney and an heiress, philanthropist and social reformer. Their elder two children were Whitney, who became a racing-car driver and head of British Overseas Airway Corporation, and Beatrice, who became a distinguished actress.
Willard Straight died of septic pneumonia in 1918, while serving in World War II with the American forces in France. In 1925, Dorothy Straight married British educationist Leonard Knight Elmhirst, who founded Dartington Hall school in Devon.
Education
In 1926 Dorothy Straight brought Michael to England to be educated at Dartington School in Devon - a community based on Utopian principles that she had founded with her second husband. Brought up on the progressive teachings of Dartington, Straight traveled in India, took part in a Pittsburgh steel strike, and danced in a ballet company sponsored by his mother - before spending a year at the London School of Economics. In 1934, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study economics. He earned a master's degree there in 1937. While at Cambridge University he became friends with John Cornford, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt.
In 1937 Michael Straight submitted to recruitment by a member of the Apostles, Anthony Blunt - for what was described to him as work for the Comintern. Soon, he was assigned the cover name "Nigel." The game plan was for Straight to return to the United States and get himself employed. From the very beginning, Moscow operatives had no illusions about their new recruit.
Straight returned to the United States later in August of 1937. He moved from Cambridge to Washington he worked as an economist for the Department of State and was also a writer for the Department of Interior. He continued to pursue both politics and his stratospheric social life, sharing a house with Joseph Alsop, drafting speeches for and dining with the Roosevelts, and writing his analytic memorandums, some of which he passed on to Soviet intelligence.
In 1940, Straight returned to the State Department and then became Washington correspondent for The New Republic, which his mother still financed. He assumed the magazine's editorship in 1941 and shifted its stance from neutrality toward Europe to support for fighting Hitler and Fascism.
He served in the Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1945, a period when he learned to fly a B-17 but to his disappointment was stationed the whole while in the American Midwest. In 1946 he returned to The New Republic and became its publisher, remaining in that post until 1956. He enlisted Henry A. Wallace as the magazine's editor until Wallace, the left-leaning former vice president, became the Progressive Party's presidential candidate in 1948. Straight shifted editorial policy to a position opposing Stalinism and supporting the Marshall Plan. Yet he fought Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's brand of anti-Communism, publishing a book critical of both the senator and Communism, Trial by Television (1954).
After his mother's withdrawal of support of the magazine, he enlisted new patrons and gradually ended his connection, reverting to his youthful interest in the arts. He turned to novel writing, publishing Carrington (1960) and A Very Small Remnant (1963), both westerns that received respectful reviews, as well as Happy and Hopeless (1979), a love story set in the Kennedy administration that he published himself. His memoir On Green Spring Farm: The Life and Times of One Family in Fairfax County, Va., 1942 to 1966 was published in 2004.
In 1969 he decided to accept a post as deputy chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, to avoid the inevitable background check he confessed his earlier Communist associations. This eventually led to the revelation that Anthony Blunt, an English government official, was spying for the Soviets.
Michael Straight was a prominent government official, writer, and publisher of the New Republic. He gained notoriety when he admitted that early in his life he had been a low-level agent for the Soviet Union.
At Trinity Straight was attracted to socialism and radical politics. He became close friends with left-wing students and soon joined the British Communist Party cell at Trinity and made a trip to Leningrad. He also joined a secretive circle known as the Apostles, which included students who would become known decades later as members of the "Cambridge Five" espionage group working for the Soviet Union.
Straight had a change of heart about his earlier association with the Communist Party, writing against both Communism and McCarthyism in his 1954 book Trial by Television.
Membership
Michael was president of Amnesty International from 1968 to 1971.
Amnesty International
,
United States
Connections
In September 1939 Michael married Belinda Crompton, a child psychiatrist. They had five children, David, Michael, Susan Straight, Dina Krosnick, and Dorothy Straight. The couple divorced in 1969, and in May 1974 Straight married Nina Gore Auchincloss Steers, a half-sister of Gore Vidal and stepsister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. They subsequently divorced. In 1998 he married Katharine Gould, a child psychiatrist.
