"Last of the Cold War Spies: The Life of Michael Straight â The Only American in Britain's Cambridge Spy Ring,"
by Roland Perry
Da Capo Press, $27.50
By Arthur Herman
One great mystery remains about the Cold War: Why did Communism always find its fiercest supporters from society's upper class â the very class communism vowed to destroy? Why did so many intelligent, affluent people in America and the West embrace the greatest system for mass murder ever devised and devote themselves to undermining the freest societies ever created, namely their own? Inquiring minds want to know!
It's not just an historical question. Some are still at it today. Is it guilt? Or is it, as sociologist Daniel Bell argued, that their elite education underlines the shortcomings of democratic capitalist society, so that they learn to despise the very system that supports them? Or is it simply that, being raised to expect power and privilege, they are drawn to any ideology which, through the idea of the revolutionary vanguard, promises them both? (Maybe that's what appeals to Osama bin Laden, the billionaire's son.)
No life reveals more about these questions than that of Michael Straight. Born in 1916, his father was a Wall Street stockbroker and his mother was one of the wealthiest women in America. He was for years the powerful editor and publisher of the New Republic, which his family owned. Later, he became deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Slim, handsome and urbane, he was in every respect a pillar of the American intellectual establishment. Yet the whole time he was, according to Roland Perry, a secret Soviet agent.
The story of how this child of privilege became a revolutionary starts with the "progressive" school his mother and her second husband set up at Dartington in England in 1926, when Michael was 10. Situated on a magnificent 800-acre estate, it was the only coed boarding school in Britain. Its students heard free-thinking speakers such as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell and studied a curriculum liberally sprinkled with Marxist doctrine. A British madrassa? No wonder that seven of the 10 students in Straight's graduating class became members of the Communist Party, although Straight apparently was the only one who took the further step of becoming a KGB spy.
That happened in 1934, when he arrived at Cambridge University. On campus, he met another child of privilege, the brilliant and icy aesthete Anthony Blunt, who recruited him first for a clandestine trip to Stalin's Soviet Union and then into the most famous Soviet spy ring of them all. Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby all went on to weighty jobs in the British government and passed on sensitive information to their spymasters in the Kremlin. Philby ran the British equivalent of the CIA's Soviet desk, while another super-wealthy associate of their spy ring, Victor Rothschild, held various jobs in British counterintelligence alongside Blunt.
All this, or most of it, we know from Straight's own memoirs, "After Long Silence," published in 1983. The book was supposed to be Straight's effort to come clean about his hidden past. It included his assertion that he gradually lost contact with his notorious Cambridge classmates after coming to the United States and cut all his secret ties in 1941, before he became editor of the New Republic and one of America's formative voices on the liberal left.
Now Roland Perry claims that Straight remained a KGB agent at least until 1977, and lied about his covert relationship with Blunt and the others until his death in 2004. It is a plausible thesis; the problem is Perry can't offer definitive proof from any Soviet source. His accusation, which is based on interviews with former CIA and foreign intelligence officers, may be entirely correct â but until another researcher produces Soviet documentation, our final verdict has to be "case not proven."
Even so, "Last of the Cold War Spies" is fascinating and instructive. Returning to the United States to look for a job in the Roosevelt administration must have been a rude shock for Straight. At Cambridge, being a Communist spy made him part of a secret power elite. In Washington, he was a drop in the ocean. Literally dozens of Soviet agents had infiltrated nearly every department of the government. There were famous traitors like Alger Hiss, the rising young star in the State Department, as well as lesser-known ones such as Harry Dexter White, a pillar of the United States Treasury, and Lauchlin Currie, a special presidential assistant. There was also, of course, the little band of Soviet agents working on various aspects of the Manhattan Project.
Straight was keenly interested in politics; Blunt had recruited him because he knew his mother was a good friend of the Roosevelts. But after FDR politely refused to help him get a job in Washington, Straight drifted into the cultural field, first as editor of the New Republic, then as a novelist and finally as a bureaucrat for the NEA.
So even if he had remained an active spy, who or what did he have the power to betray? No one. Anyway, that job was already being done for him by the flocks of liberals and progressives in every field of American intellectual life. It must have been a surprising irony for his KGB spymasters to realize that what they had toiled for decades to achieve, to undermine faith in American capitalism and what used to be called "the American way of life," was being done effortlessly and painlessly by liberal academics, writers and artists of their own free will, from Harvard to Hollywood. And still is.
What was surprising to Moscow must have felt bitter to Straight. The man who had once envisioned himself as leading the revolutionary vanguard in America would, by 1980, be reduced to just one more voice in a progressive chorus that was starting to fade into the political wilderness. (It was Jimmy Carter, of all people, who finally removed Straight from the NEA). That bitterness came out in the verbal lashing Straight meted out to anyone who dared to doubt his own story about himself, or the version of the Cold War he had created in his mind.
In 1999, I published a book on Joe McCarthy and pointed out that one of Straight's former friends, Gustavo Duran, was a Stalinist agent during the Spanish Civil War. Straight wrote me a furious letter demanding proof of my charges. I obliged, and he responded by trying to have me fired from my teaching positions at George Mason University and the Smithsonian Institution. To their credit, my superiors never gave his complaints a moment's glance â not out of ideological sympathy with my book, certainly, but out of the clear realization that they were dealing with an angry old crank.
What a sad fate for a man who craved power all his life and sold his soul to get it. Straight had once dreamed of leading the proletarian masses to victory. He ended up being one more submission for the circular file.
Arthur Herman is the author, most recently, of "To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World." Sounds like that might be interesting, too. 
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