THE IMPERFECT SPY Michael Straight, 1916-2004

Yawn. On to the next page. Straight was a mediocre editor of the family mag, The New Republic, and it’s doubtful whether anyone other than fellow arts bureaucrats wants to read of his service as Deputy Assistant Associate Whatever at the National Endowment for the Arts. Michael Whitney Straight led a long, comfortable, undistinguished life as the sort of chap who turns up in the index of other people’s biographies as the third fellow on the left in the picture of the committee meeting or the wedding party or the mixed doubles. He was related by blood or marriage to everyone from the Vanderbilts to Jackie Onassis. When he returned to America from Cambridge University in 1937, he was in need of career advice and so looked up an old family friend, President Roosevelt.

But the only distinguishing feature of his lethargic progress through the American establishment is that Michael Straight was a Soviet spy.

At this point, wherever he is now, Mr Straight is no doubt objecting, as he did to The London Review Of Books in 1995:

Whatever gets you through the night. But he was a spy accepted and used by the Soviet NKVD, at the same time as he was a speechwriter for President Roosevelt. He lived with his secret for almost half-a-century until outed by Britain’s Daily Mail in 1981. And once his past was known it seemed at least partially to explain why a man born with all the right connections had made so little of them. Straight was the American end of Britain’s “Cambridge Spies”, to use the title of last year’s very appreciative BBC drama about them. They were recruited by the Soviets at university in the 1930s and came close in the Fifties to gaining control of Her Majesty’s Secret Service. When it all began to unravel, the first to defect were Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, followed by the so-called “Third Man”, Kim Philby, after which there was a Fourth Man, Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, and possibly a Fifth, Sir Roger Hollis, Director of MI5. And then there was Michael Straight, who wasn’t the Sixth, Seventh or Eighth Man so much as the Straight Man – not so much in the sense that the others were mostly homosexual, but in that he was a dull stick among a coterie of flamboyant, hard-living, hard-drinking, supremely confident clubby Englishmen. In 1935, Straight and Blunt (which sounds like a spoof spy team) were among a group of Cambridge “idealists” on pilgrimage to Moscow. “Do I look like a proletarian?” he asked an acquaintance, anxious to fit in. “No,” came the reply. “You look like a millionaire pretending to be a proletarian.”

And so he did. One day he’d be out on the street selling copies of The Daily Worker, the next off to ski at Klosters. His father had died in the Great War, and his mother was a goofy Whitney heiress who took him off to England to serve as an early guinea-pig in the “progressive” school she helped found: light on arithmetic and spelling, heavy on Freudian psychology and unisex showers. The Thirties was the heyday of the Stalinist toff, the languid upper-middle-class Englishman for whom, after public (ie, private) school, the rigors of Bolshevism were a breeze. Straight was the American aristocracy’s contribution to the cause and frankly not a success. Blunt was a frightful snob who adored the Royal Family his entire life and saw no contradiction between fawning on his Sovereign and betraying her. With Straight, it was all more tortured: Arnold Deutsch, who helped run the Cambridge spies for Moscow, despised the rich American. “He sometimes behaves like a child in his romanticism,” he reported. “He thinks he is working for the Comintern” – ie, just doing a little freelance PR for the cause, not spying for dark men in the shadows. “He must be left in this delusion for a while.”

He was an insecure man who wanted to be part of the gang, but never quite was. Almost three decades on, in 1963, offered a post at what would become the NEA and convinced he wouldn’t withstand a background check, he finally went to the FBI and then MI5 and spilled the beans on Blunt. “We always wondered how long it would be before you turned us in,” drawled Sir Anthony, bored by his least impressive protégé even in Straight’s moment of “courage”.

But it took a while. In 1937, Blunt gave Straight his “assignment”: return to America, get an important job, and feed information to Moscow. Straight was “reluctant”, but in the end agreed. Eleanor Roosevelt got him into the State Department, and he started supplying his Soviet contact with, he insisted, nothing more than copies of the briefing papers he wrote. No “hard information”. Certainly nothing useful. The small lies we tell ourselves in our darkest moments shrivel in even the faintest light. His most plausible defence was that he was as half-hearted about spying as about everything else – as William Safire wrote, “no purpose or passion guided his double-life”.

Meanwhile, Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt advanced rapidly to the point where Philby was on the shortlist to succeed as “C”, the head of the Secret Service, and Maclean could conceivably have become British Ambassador in Washington, and Burgess is said by some to have leaked the information that led to the slaughter of General Macarthur’s men at the Yalu River in Korea in 1950. Had Straight come clean in, say, 1942, many lives would have been saved. “I needed one beckoning word or gesture to lead me on,” wrote Straight. “Without it I lacked the resolution to carry my impulse through.” So he dithered for 26 years.

He was 66 when it all came out, and his response was a memoir, After Long Silence, that his old pals, guzzling Scotch at their retirement dachas in Moscow, must have roared their heads off at. As pitiful apologias go, it’s in a class with the more recent book by Sarah, Duchess of York, attempting to explain how she ended up naked on the front page of The Sun having her toes sucked, but without the mitigating factor of being written by a child of the Age of Victimhood. Straight knew he was a weak man. One can forgive the metaphorical flourishes – “Caught up in the current of history and carried out of my depth” – more easily than what now reads like an early Oprah audition: his upbringing not only burdened him with a sense of guilt but left him with “a deep-seated need to love and to be loved.”

When he was an infant, Joseph Conrad popped round to the family townhouse on Fifth Avenue. Young Michael was upstairs in the nursery, but looking back on that day he liked to think that downstairs Conrad was reading from Under Western Eyes, the story of Razumov, the young student whose loyalty and then betrayal of an older friend costs him his soul. If he has to go down in history as a double-agent, he’d prefer not to be a spy “in the accepted usage” but something a little more literary. The comparison is itself an act of self-flattery of the kind that got poor old Razumov into trouble when he’s called in by the authorities:

Razumov smiled without bitterness. The renewed sense of his intellectual superiority sustained him in the hour of danger. He said a little disdainfully:

‘I know I am but a reed. But I beg you to allow me the superiority of the thinking reed over the unthinking forces that are about to crush him out of existence.’

That’s how the agonized prose of the memoir feels, like a Victorian ham actor laying it on with a trowel, sustained by a misguided sense of his intellectual superiority. In 1948, with a condescension some of his successors at The New Republic may find vaguely familiar, Straight had dismissed Truman as a man who had “a known difficulty in understanding the printed word”. Not, I think, as much difficulty as Straight had for over a quarter-century in understanding the plain meaning of who he was and what he’d done. Underneath his carefully cultivated mask, Blunt was blunt. Straight was never straight, especially with himself.

In the end, most of his obituarists took him at his own estimation: the “reluctant” spy. What does “reluctant” mean? He did as he was ordered, but, unlike Philby and Blunt, he didn’t have much fun? As Conrad wrote, “Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.” The Atlantic Monthly, March 2004

~ Read Mark's "Post Mortem" column every month in the print edition of The Atlantic Monthly. This month Mark writes about Jack Paar, America's retiring celebrity - on sale now.

Straight, the Soviet spy, was indeed a homosexual. He was, for a brief period, the lover of Blunt who recuited him into the espionage game.

Straight died at 87 without punishment for his crimes. He was a cowardly and treasonous member of the American super-rich establishment of his time. He was a friend of John F. Kennedy and was even appointed Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1969 to 1977. He continued to be accepted by the liberal establishment even after he reluctantly came in from the cold.

During the Cold War, the "old school" climate among both the American and British elite and upper classes was so strong it precluded the very notion that their pampered, effiminate sons could ever betray their countries.

May the traitors Michael Straight, Philbin, Burgess, etal rest in pieces.

Leni

Of all the books that I have read about that era and the Cambridge 5 I could never figure how Michael Straight, fit Blunt and Burgess buggered them all and all were productive spies. There is something missing.

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