Last of the Cold War Spies (29 page)

Unfortunately for the bright new prospective candidate, others sowed those seeds of distrust and uncertainty. Laughlin called Straight back to Tammany Hall
⁴
and told him he had a call from the vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Oscar Ewing. He had been told that Straight had been a communist in England.

Straight felt a knot in his stomach, but he showed no outward reaction. His training with Burgess, Blunt, and Green had prepared him for such an eventuality. Instead, he tried to dismiss the statement as irrelevant and went into the well-rehearsed lines that he would use well into old age: it was in his youth. He was just a raw, impressionable kid. Communism was all the rage then. So many at the London School of Economics and Cambridge were “reds.” There was good reason. Europe was different. The fascist threat was real. . . .

Laughlin sympathized but said Straight couldn’t be supported without Ewing’s agreement, especially on a matter so important. An indignant Straight said he would see Ewing and straighten out the matter. Ewing was less sympathetic. Imagine, he suggested, what “Joe Baldwin de Turd” would do with that kind of information, no matter how distant and irrelevant it was. How would the reporters at the
Daily News
handle it if it were ever leaked to them?

Straight protested that he had long forgotten and buried his undergraduate, youthful views. Ewing was not swayed. The matter had to be cleared up before the party would endorse him. Straight wanted to know who said he was a communist. Ewing told him it was the financial columnist, Eliot Janeway. Straight was stunned. He knew Janeway and regarded him as a friend. Later, when alone, he rang Janeway, who had joined the British Communist Party in the early 1930s and was expelled for reasons unknown. He knew Straight had joined the U.K. Party. Straight asked him if he had been spreading stories about his communist youth. Janeway replied that the question was not who spread the story, but how Straight would respond to it. Straight asked how he should respond to it. Janeway said that was for him to decide.

The phone discussion ended. Straight had some thinking to do. He worried about just how much could be uncovered by probing reporters and jackal-like opposition politicians eager for a “red kill.” Better to back out now and perhaps wait for a more propitious moment to enter politics. With this reaction, and from the more liberal side of the spectrum at that, his known record was against him. Even a hint of the secret past now would extinguish any hope he had ever had of a political career.

After pumping himself up for the decision to run, this was a bitter, depressing realization, which at his age could mark a major turning point in his life. It was the shocking moment when his hopes and dreams about moving into big politics in the United States evaporated. The undermining by Janeway and Mike Ross—an English adviser to the CIO—as well as others was responsible. Straight rang Laughlin to tell him he would not be running against Baldwin.
⁵
The KGB had pinned him to the past like a butterfly in an entomologist’s lab. There was no thought of his fighting on and admitting his communist background. He had his family to think about: Bin had her career. Her sister was married to Gustavo Duran, who was under pressure. Joe McCarthy had named him as one of his top six enemies. Straight also used his sister Beatrice as an excuse for not coming clean. She was married to another KGB agent, Louis Dolivet. If he stepped forward, all his relatives and associates would suffer. The links to Blunt and Burgess would have been uncovered. Overriding all this was Straight’s continued agency for the KGB. He would be committing suicide figuratively and probably literally had he crossed his Kremlin masters this way and at this critical time. They were uneasy about his moves and motivations as it was, and there would have been some relief among the KGB hierarchy that his ambition to be a politician had been crushed. It
was not the time for a confession, which he might use as a last resort if he felt confident it could be part of a KGB disinformation campaign.

This was yet another occasion, if he needed a stimulus, to “admit,” even in a nondamaging partial sense, that he was somehow mixed up with the KGB. But once more the impulse, or need, was not there, as it had not been during the war.

Despite the serious problems associated with admitting he was a spy, there was also a little matter of pride. A major fear was what his ideological enemies would do with the juicy revelation that such an upmarket figure, and a member of the family that ran
The New Republic
, was a KGB agent. During 1945, the commencement of the Cold War, his confessional, the FBI, was a sieve. People such as McCarthy, for whom he had been gunning via
The New Republic
, would have received a leak. He would have loved it. Straight would have been the highest profile catch yet.

While the disqualification from running for high office sobered and deflated him, his next move demonstrated he had not lost his drive. It was one of the few options left. He rang Bruce Bliven at
The New Republic
and told him he was coming back to the magazine. Bliven’s feelings about this are not recorded. Straight felt that the magazine had reverted to its old ways in his absence. In an understatement that would seem arrogant but for the intent in his comment, Straight said he wanted to liven it up.

The FBI completed its debriefing of former communist network runner Elizabeth Bentley’s Silvermaster and other spy networks on November 30, 1945. In December, the KGB was informed about the extent of her revelations, which caused a crisis for some of its key personnel. These included Straight’s control, the “illegal” Michael Green, who was not protected by any diplomatic status. He had been unmasked by Bentley and would have to leave the United States. The KGB contacted its agents in the United States in January 1946 and warned them of the danger. It advised them “of what action to take to avoid being implicated.”
⁶

At about the same time, early in 1946, Straight began working on a special issue of
The New Republic
to mark the first anniversary of Roosevelt’s death. If he had to make his career at the magazine for the time being, he was not content to be just another editor anymore. Straight wished to take full control of an institution he considered was part of his birthright.

He could only hint at his plans to his family. He was aware that it would be a major step for Dorothy to allow him, a relative neophyte in the business of journalism, to take over from the professionals that had run the little liberal flagship since 1914. He knew she would be concerned about the reaction to the bumptious son of the owner directing the old hands, some of whom had been around the magazine for three decades. But his plans had ramifications for the family and its financial structures created in 1936 to run Dorothy’s fortune, which then stood at $45 million. Dorothy had set up several trusts to avoid heavy tax burdens and to settle equitably on her five children. One trust was the William C. Whitney Foundation, which was to be directed by her American children— Whitney, Michael, and Beatrice—to make charitable gifts out of its U.S. base in New York. This donated to several communist front groups, among others. A second trust was the Elm Grant Trust, which was to be under the direction of her English children, Ruth and William. It too was to make charitable gifts from its U.K. base at Dartington. A third trust, known as the Royal Trust Company of Canada, was the biggest of all. It covered money “given” to her children as a principal lump sum, which could not be touched by any of them. They received annual incomes from investments of that principal sum, which they could spend as they saw fit. However, it also covered the running of the family’s American publications,
The New Republic
,
Antiques
magazine and other assets.
The New Republic
had bumbled along for thirty years, and the small losses it made, if any, were covered by the success of
Antiques
. If Straight became too ambitious and led the magazine to running up bigger losses, it could affect the incomes of each of the children. A complication was found in the relationship between Straight and the 41-year-old American lawyer, Milton Rose, a trustee who oversaw how that principal sum was invested and how the interest generated was distributed. If Straight were to influence Rose, and it were to the detriment of the others, then their relationship could be seen by Straight’s siblings as a conflict of interest.

Rose and Straight, now 29, landed at Southampton on May 3, 1946, and drove through the New Forest to Dartington. It was Straight’s first trip to England and his old home in nearly a decade—a third of his life—and it was an exciting if not nostalgic time for him. A war-battered United Kingdom had thrown out its wartime heroic leader Winston Churchill in an election in mid-1945 and had turned to Labour, led by Clement Atlee, for the immediate postwar recovery. It had implemented socialist measures, such as nationalization of the Bank of England, coal, electrical power, railroads, road transport, inland waterways, docks, and harbors. Labour continued war legislation for agriculture, guaranteeing prices and markets, and implemented the “welfare state” with a dramatic extension of the state’s services. Such unprecedented socialist measures quickened the heartbeat of communists, who now felt that the step toward a Marxist government was closer than ever.

Straight enjoyed the atmosphere in a country where ideological demarcation between political parties was clear and where Marxist-approved concepts such as nationalization were acceptable, as compared to the United States, where they were not. In the United Kingdom, nearly half the workforce was state employed, which made dependence on government much more the norm. In the United States, much less of a “nanny state” mentality prevailed. Only one-fifth of workers had some form of government employment.

Straight found that even in the microcosm of Dartington, communism seemed to have a foothold. Cells had grown up in the school and were tolerated by the staff.
⁷
The network of communists he had grown up with were still in some way connected with the place. His friend Michael Young, who had been in charge of the Labour Party’s research during the war, had been a frequent visitor.