Michael Straight, the patrician former magazine publisher who described in a political memoir his involvement with Soviet spies whom he met as a student at Cambridge University, died Sunday at home in Chicago. He was 87.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Arthur Mahon, his lawyer.
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. Mr. Straight said that, upon taking a job with the State Department under President Franklin Roosevelt, the only papers he passed to the Soviet agent he knew as Michael Green were political and economic analyses he wrote.
Mr. Straight’s exposure came in 1963 when he was offered a top arts post in the Kennedy administration.
Fearing a background check, he went to Arthur Schlesinger, a special assistant to the president, who 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 II’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 Straight of confessing to the FBI only to clear his career path and speculated whether blowing the whistle sooner might not have saved lives. Straight wondered in the book why his life had not added up to more.
Going to Cambridge in 1934, he became a member of the circle around John Maynard Keynes, socialized with young radical patricians like himself and joined the Communist Party, he said in his memoir, mostly in sympathy with its Popular Front objectives of supporting democrat governments against the rising tide of Nazism.
In 1940 Mr. Straight returned to the State Department and then became Washington correspondent for The New Republic. He assumed the magazine’s editorship in 1941. He served in the Army Air Forces from 1942 to 1945. In 1946 he returned to The New Republic and became its publisher, remaining in that post until 1956.
From 1969 to 1977 he was deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
