Michael Straight Dies at Age 87

"Michael Straight, Who Wrote of Connection to Spy Ring, Dies at 87"

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, NY Times, January 5, 2004

Michael Straight, the patrician former magazine publisher who described in a political memoir his lingering involvement with Soviet spies whom he had first met when they were all students at Cambridge University, died yesterday at home in Chicago. He was 87 and also had a home on Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts.The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Arthur Mahon, his lawyer.

In a life of rubbing shoulders with the privileged, Mr. Straight went through a series of identities, from Communist during his student days at Trinity College, Cambridge, to reluctant Soviet agent in New Deal Washington to liberal anti-Communist during the cold war. He also went through a series of jobs, including economist at the State Department, editor and publisher of The New Republic magazine and, in the Nixon and Ford administrations, deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

He confessed all in his memoir, "After Long Silence" (1983), citing his hesitancy to spy when ordered to do so in 1937 by Anthony Blunt, then a young Cambridge don, and insisting that upon taking a job with the State Department under Roosevelt, the only papers he passed to the Soviet agent he knew as Michael Green were political and economic analyses written by himself.

He added that in 1951, a decade after he had turned against the Communist Party, apparently over his objections to the Nazi-Soviet pact, he ran into Guy Burgess, once his fellow student at Cambridge, on a Washington street corner and assumed he must be running a spy ring out of the nearby British Embassy. He said he warned Burgess to stop and go home or he would expose him. Shortly after, Burgess defected to the Soviet Union with his colleague and lover, Donald Maclean.

Mr. Straight's own exposure came finally in 1963 when he was offered a top arts post in the Kennedy Administration. Fearing a background check, he went to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a special assistant to the president, who in turn directed him to the Justice Department. His talks with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and British intelligence led to the unmasking of Blunt, by then knighted and the curator of Queen Elizabeth's art collection. Mr. Straight turned down the Kennedy Administration post, although some years later he took the position of deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Although avowedly written as an apology and explanation, "After Long Silence" was not greeted with great sympathy. Critics on the right accused Mr. Straight of confessing to the F.B.I. only to clear his career path and speculated whether blowing the whistle sooner might not have saved lives. Gentler reviewers acknowledged the book's well-meaning thoughtfulness but accused the author of sentimentality and narcissism. Mr. Straight himself wondered in the book why his life had not added up to more.