Last of the Cold War Spies (45 page)

The cataclysmic upheaval in Britain that Young had hoped for fervently as a student had been reduced twenty years later to creative yet unconvincing science-fiction. This last part of the book was taken less seriously than the rest by all critics, while the treatise as a whole made Young’s reputation as a sociological thinker.

While
The Rise of Meritocracy
was being received by a wide range of criticism (mainly positive) that created much discussion in the United Kingdom, Straight, in early 1959, was finishing a draft of
Carrington
with the help of editors at Alfred A. Knopf. The publisher had decided to publish the book despite the inconsistent standard of the writing. Knopf disliked Straight’s philosophizing.
¹⁴

Carrington
’s reviews in early 1960 were generally good and seemed to endorse Knopf ’s assessment of Straight’s potential to become a successful novelist. The
Chicago Star
and
Newsweek
called it “an American Classic.” The
Chicago Daily News
said it was “a virtuoso performance, vivid, brilliant, overwhelming and profoundly moving,” while
The New York Times
saw it as “a deeply moving tale . . . spare, poetic, and thrillingly timed.”

Such praise would normally have been a motivation to go on. But Straight would have no reason, beyond a curiosity or perhaps a vanity, to proceed. His excuse for not capitalizing on this impressive start was that he didn’t see himself as a novelist, charting a course over a lifetime.
Carrington
had been a metaphor for his
New Republic
years when he wished he had been doing something else. His book writing interlude was similar and transient. Again, the two demons that had torn him when he wanted to run for politics in 1946 were still there. One part of him craved the public fame and the glory of the successful writer, while his main occupation of spying restricted him as before.

Straight decided to go on with a second book, but without the true creative writer’s desire, and without strong support from his publisher. The project would again be a cover for spying, the most dangerous and daring assignment he had yet undertaken.

Early in President Kennedy’s administration, the United States decided that there could not be any sanctuary from the hydrogen bomb that the Russians had now developed. Kennedy sanctioned the building of a massive blast- and shock-protected military headquarters well below Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. It was to be the biggest such installation ever built. It would house the US-Canadian North American Air Defense Command (NORAD). Part of its operation would be to warn (later by satellite) allies, particularly the United Kingdom, of a nuclear missile attack by the Russians.

When Vladimir Barkovsky was informed by his Pentagon agents of this development, he wasted no time in dispatching Straight to map and photograph the entire area where the military site was to be located. It would now have to be top priority for disabling and destroying in the event of a nuclear encounter.

S
traight’s new assignment meant he had to find some historical base for a second novel so that he could repeat his cover. It had to be set in Colorado’s mountains somewhere in the vicinity of the proposed mighty military bunker. It took him no time at all to settle on another massacre story that occurred in 1864 at Sand Creek, some 15 miles south of Cheyenne Mountain. Sand Creek was about 10 miles north of the town of Chivington on State Highway 90.

While his mission was more specific, the story was much harder to create. He decided to base it not on Chivington, a fanatical army colonel who massacred the American Indians, but a friendlier, warmer character discovered by Agnes Wright Spring, the head of the Colorado State Historical Society. She researched the files surrounding the massacre and came up with a manuscript written by Ned Wynkoop, a young follower of Chivington’s who once fought, then sided with the Indians. Wynkoop felt betrayed by Chivington when the Indians were slaughtered. This was more like the image Straight wished to explore.

Wynkoop then was the good guy Straight could build something around. He had his manuscript, which would be more than useful. He rented a car and drove south to Colorado Springs to see another author who was writing a book about Wynkoop’s wife and her two sisters. Then
it was on to Sand Creek, where Chivington had led the massacre of defenseless Indians. Straight took out his camera and notebook. He had his route to book two, titled
A Very Small Remnant
. This title was in reference, Straight claimed, to the minority who have been willing to die for their beliefs. They had saved what was “best” in their society by resisting the abuse of authority. Straight no doubt had in mind liberals like himself and, for instance, fighters for civil rights.

Thus he began his second big mission for Barkovsky in gathering detail about the area in which the military bunker would be built. It meant that when it was constructed in the early 1960s, the KGB had all the intelligence it wanted concerning the area. Should there be a nuclear encounter, the Soviet military had plans to destroy the bunker and its surrounds.

Soon after finding his way to make the cover story work, he had a flirtation with
Carrington
’s being made into a film. An agent from Famous Artists Incorporated met Straight and in the time-honored tradition of Hollywood told him how to make it more marketable for the movies. Straight wasn’t impressed. Then his publisher urged him to write a contemporary fiction.

Knopf was mystified by Straight’s need to set another book in a particular, remote point on the map in the West and then make it viable by finding a historical story to work around it. The publisher saw the author’s capacity at handling characterization as something that could be worked up into a real skill. Knopf felt it was squandered by a writer with no real background in the West, who did not have a natural feel for its rhythms. Straight had huge sensitivity to the major issues of the day and the hub of world political power in Washington. Why wouldn’t he focus on the contemporary, the publishers wished to know. It would be more salable to a big reading public, rather than competing in a saturated market dominated by Western writers since the war.

Straight didn’t think he could attempt to do it. What he didn’t say was that he wouldn’t ever bother. In effect, his front for espionage operations had worked too well. But that was better than not being convincing at all.

A perfect opportunity for a great novel of the time may have been presented by the 1960 election battle between Richard Nixon and Jack
Kennedy. Straight knew the characters well from his socializing and connections in the capital, particularly Kennedy and his wife Jackie. Straight was a year older than Kennedy and three years younger than Nixon. These other two had run for the Eightieth Congress in January 1947, at the time Straight’s bid was thwarted. In effect, the two candidates were where Straight would love to have been in 1960, and where he may have been but for being educated in England and not the United States in the 1930s. If passion counted in creating characters, he had plenty of it for these two. He had an intense dislike for them both. Nixon represented all that a concerned liberal would be expected to detest. His political opportunism, right-wing views, not to mention his five-o’clock shadow, made him a target nearly as superb as Joseph McCarthy.

Kennedy was different. He was a liberal Democrat from a rich, privileged, and educated background similar to that of Straight. Perhaps this was the source of antagonism. He would have been envious of Kennedy, having measured himself against him on the occasions they met, such as at the Steers/Auchincloss wedding. Yet in 1960, they were worlds apart. Straight, by ignoring his publisher, was doing everything to ensure that he would become at best a minor novelist, and in a field unrelated to his career expertise in big-time politics. Kennedy, at the same time, was wearing the liberal banner and leading the faithful in the actual thrust of political battle.

Straight kept his antipathy to Kennedy to himself while happily sniping at Nixon.

The new year, 1961, began with a renewed hope for world peace with a young, handsome couple in the White House. Yet Kennedy’s pronouncements during the election, and his actions in the Oval Office, were at least as precipitate in the Cold War as those of his predecessor.

Straight kept abreast of major issues despite his seclusion from Washington, D.C., while he labored over his second novel. For instance, he kept in contact with Leo Szilard, who informed him on developments in nuclear weapons. This way he could keep his reports to the KGB up-to-date.

Contacts like Szilard were a minor distraction—perhaps a dip into the hard, practical issues that he no doubt missed tackling at
The New Republic
. Yet they did not take him far from the new novel. It was his priority as he spent a 1961 summer break at a holiday home at Chilmark on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, across Nantucket Sound from the Kennedy compound at Hyannisport. He was there with some of his five children, including 3-year-old Dorothy, who had been born in 1958. It seemed he couldn’t hide from the public fascination with the new president and his glamorous wife Jackie, as rumors circulated at Martha’s Vineyard suggested that they were going to use the hill on Straight’s property for a heliport.
¹

Straight completed
A Very Small Remnant
in the summer of 1962 and felt drained by it, despite it being a novella at just 158 pages. It was such a struggle to fabricate the book around the area near Cheyenne Mountain that he was exhausted. In the autumn he began a short, chaste relationship with “Rachel” while his marriage to Bin deteriorated.
²
If he had been serious about writing, and using his personal experiences, he could have really tested himself with reflections on this episode. But the inclination and need for a cover of book-size dimensions was not there anymore. His third novel, aptly named
Happy and Hopeless
, could also have been called
Woeful and Empty
.

In the story, the main male character explains that he has been faithful to his wife, which was always going to limit the dramatic possibilities. He did not want to hurt her as he had hurt a previous partner, who was “dark like a gypsy,” which was Straight’s description of Margaret Barr, the dancer at Dartington.

The story drew much from Straight’s own life, but didn’t have the force, drive, or shape of his first two novels. There was none of the previous verve or desire for writing it. Hence its lackluster feel, despite the usual accomplished dialogue. His only apparent motivation was to record, even in veiled fictional terms, something hidden within him, or a turning point in his life.

Happy and Hopeless
was described on the book cover as “the joyous encounter of a failed playwright and an army officer’s wife, both needing to love and be loved, both bound by forces they only dimly understand.”

The setting was Washington in the Kennedy years. The subject was what Freud called “the concurrent or opposing action of the two primal instincts—Eros and the death-instinct.”

The main character, the playwright Julian, turns up at a parents’ night at his children’s school to deliver a clever address—“In Praise of Defeat.” He meets another parent, Catherine Carter, wife of an army colonel. They become friends; they carry on like a couple destined to become lovers. But love is unrequited. Julian is torn by a tragic secret that he can’t relate to Catherine or anyone—and certainly not to the reader. No doubt Straight here was dwelling on his agency for the KGB.

Was “Catherine” inspired by Jackie Kennedy? There were some clear similarities between them. Their children were at the same school and were friends. Julian and Catherine bumped into each other picking them up, as did Straight and Jackie. “Catherine” was an art buff living in the capital and married to a colonel, who was not unlike the president, who was the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. The Straight-Jackie relationship (similar to the Julian-Catherine nonaffair) was platonic, according to her stepsister Nina, although there was a strong mutual attraction. The two couples—the real and the fictional—vacationed in the same place.