Michael Whitney Straight

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Michael Whitney Straight, (September 1, 1916 – January 4, 2004) was an American magazine publisher, novelist, patron of the arts, and a member of the prominent Whitney family.

Born in New York City, Michael Straight was the son of Willard Dickerman Straight and Dorothy Payne Whitney. Straight was educated at Lincoln School in New York City and after his mother's remarriage, in England at his family's Dartington Hall followed by studies at the London School of Economics.

While a student at Cambridge University in the mid-1930s, Straight became a Communist Party member and a part of an intellectual secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles. Straight worked for the Soviet Union, as part of a spy ring whose members included Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, and KGB recruiter Anthony Blunt. A document from Soviet archives of a report Blunt made in 1943 to the KGB states, " As you already know the actual recruits whom I took were Michael Straight". ^[1].

After returning to the United States in 1937, Straight worked as a speechwriter for President Franklin Roosevelt, and was on the payroll of the Department of the Interior. Beginning in 1938 Straight carried on a covert relationship with Iskhak Akhmerov, the KGB Illegal Rezident, or head of KGB Illegal operations. In 1940 Straight went to work in the Eastern Division of the U.S. State Department.

He served stateside in the United States Army Air Forces beginning in 1942 as a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot, and at war's end took over as publisher of his family-owned The New Republic magazine where he hired former U.S. Vice President and future Presidential candidate Henry A. Wallace as the magazine's editor. Straight left the magazine in 1956 and began writing novels.

However, in 1963, in response to an offer of government employment in Washington, DC, he faced a background check and decided to voluntarily inform family friend and Presidential special assistant, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. about his communist connections at Cambridge. This led directly to the exposure of Anthony Blunt as the recruiter of the Cambridge Five spy ring.

Straight later served as the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1969 to 1977. In 1988 he published "Nancy Hanks: An Intimate Portrait" that told the story of the second chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts with whom he had worked.

In 1983, Michael Straight detailed his communist activities in a memoir titled After Long Silence. (ISBN 0-393-01729-X)

In 1939 he married Belinda Crompton of Wilton New Hampshire. His second wife was Nina G. Auchincloss Steers, a half-sister of the writer Gore Vidal and a stepsister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. His third wife was Katharine Gould, an art historian and social worker.

Michael Whitney Straight died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Chicago, Illinois, aged 87. He was survived by five children (with Belinda Crompton Straight): David Straight, Michael Straight Jr., Susan Straight, Diana Straight Krosnick (wife of cellist Joel Krosnick), and Dorothy Straight, as well as by his wife, Katharine Gould, and four grandchildren.

[edit] Notes

1 *Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives (London: HarperCollins, 1998; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pg., 130.

[edit] References

• Michael Straight, After Long Silence, New York: Norton, (1983)
• Nigel West and Oleg Tsarev, The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets at the Heart of the KGB Archives (London: HarperCollins, 1998; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pgs. 112, 116, 130, 133–134.
• Allen Weinstein, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, New York: Random House, (1997)
• Roland Perry,The Last Of The Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight, Da Capo Press (2005)
• Telegraph obituary.