by Roland Perry
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.
Just as Julian was seeing Catherine in and around Washington, D.C., Straight was seeing a lot of Jackie in and out of the White House. Most likely, the fictional “Catherine” was an amalgam of Jackie and “Rachel”— the recent nonsexual dalliance in his life.3
Straight arranged for a portrait of President James Monroe to be “loaned” to the White House, which Jackie redecorated. Both the Kennedys liked it and appreciated the gesture. Jackie had it reframed and placed it with six other presidential portraits in the Blue Room of the White House.
Straight was after a job in the Kennedy administration, almost with the same intensity he showed when he rushed to get back into the Roosevelt administration to monitor Krivitsky. This “gift” would have helped his new quest enormously. His mother-in-law had engineered the efforts of a close friend of hers, Senator Paul Douglas, to seek a job for Straight in the arts in government. Jackie also would have been most helpful. She liked Straight, knew of his aesthetic interests, and would have had a great deal of influence over the president concerning the appointment.4
This close proximity to the U.S. president at a critical juncture in history must have been a tantalizing prospect for the Kremlin. Straight had the First Lady’s ear. He mixed in the right circles. It didn’t matter that he was not quite on the president’s A-list of friends, acquaintances, and advisers. He knew a lot and had endless contacts. His secret KGB links also made him, at the very least, a contentious figure with such easy access to the center of power in the United States.
And at this point he wanted to get closer, in a very similar way to his rush to rejoin the State Department to help the KGB track and liquidate Walter Krivitsky. Senator Douglas, unaware of Straight’s espionage activity, went to the White House three times on Straight’s behalf in 1963. This was a most persistent effort on behalf of someone who alleged he didn’t know was interceding for him. While waiting to see if he would get in, Straight drifted into 1963.
Kim Philby had had enough of British intelligence interrogations by early 1963. His latest inquisitor, MI6’s Nicholas Elliott, had returned to London from Beirut, where Philby was working as a journalist, on January 17 with Philby’s “confession.” This was nothing more than a false declaration about when he f
inished working for the KGB (he said 1945 when he was still an operative) and names of fellow spies and double agents, who were later found to be innocent. Yet it was the end of a long road of questioning by MI5, MI6, and even his masters in Moscow, who early in his career had been uncertain if he were a British intelligence plant. Philby was drained from it all and in the throes of a breakdown. It was time to run, so on January 23, he fled to Moscow. The news was greeted with some relief at MI5 and MI6 headquarters.
The damage control from the huge publicity to follow would be easier to handle than if he had decided to return to London to confess and face more questioning. Yet it still left other members of the ring, such as Blunt, the Rothschilds, Cairncross, Long, Straight, and others, extremely vulnerable.
23
FIRST IN . . .
The defector, Anatoli Golitsyn, had led U.S. intelligence a merry dance in the fifteen months since he had left the KGB and fled west in late December 1961. Some believed his tale that Soviet intelligence was on a vast mission of disinformation with agents and other defectors. Others did not. By March 1963, it was time for him to be debriefed by British intelligence, which was in turmoil after Kim Philby’s defection to Russia two months earlier. Some MI5 officers were in a vengeful mood after nearly two decades of failed operations against the KGB, which they attributed to moles inside their organization. Golitsyn played to their fears and helped precipitate a witch-hunt. He did, however, provide some leads, which in view of Philby’s departure, seemed to MI5 investigators to be credible.
Golitsyn spoke of a Cambridge ring of five KGB agents. Three— Philby, Burgess, and Maclean—were known. Anthony Blunt was, to MI5 agents Peter Wright and Arthur Martin, “almost certainly” the Fourth Man.1 He had been suspected since 1951, when Burgess and Maclean defected. But due to his connections inside intelligence, government, and most important Buckingham Palace, Blunt had not been interrogated with any intent or ferocity. His proximity to the reigning monarch, it was understood inside intelligence, afforded him special consideration. He had been questioned, and had managed to field queries with ease, even at times disdain. Yet the combination of the Philby defection and Golitsyn’s information had put the focus on Blunt. He was feeling the pressure.
Another relevant factor was the condition of Burgess in Moscow. A recent visitor to his hospital bedside was his old Cambridge friend, Whitney Straight, in Russia on business for Rolls Royce. Whitney had reported back to MI6 and people who knew Burgess that he was very ill and did not have long to live. This put Blunt’s long-term resistance to British intelligence probes in a different perspective. He had held off admitting any connection to the KGB in the hope that Burgess, his close friend and former lover, would one day return to the United Kingdom. Now that that was an impossibility, Blunt felt no further urge to be loyal. In the hope of ending the pressure on him, he was prepared to give a “selective” confession. This, in effect, would be misleading and send British intelligence on false trails for more than twenty years.
Always implicit in dealing with Blunt was his protection because of his links to the royal family. Blunt had been a trouble-shooter for Queen Elizabeth when the Duke of Edinburgh almost became embroiled in the Profumo Affair, a sex and spy scandal. This involved society osteopath Stephen Ward, who introduced an 18-year-old showgirl, Christine Keeler, to both British minister for war John Profumo and Soviet GRU officer Eugene Ivanov. Ward was an artist who sketched prominent society figures and the aristocracy. The Duke of Edinburgh had sat for him. The resultant drawings were put on show in a Mayfair gallery. Michael Adeane, the queen’s private secretary, asked Blunt to purchase all the portraits. Blunt did the job on the first day of the exhibition, thus saving the royals great embarrassment.
The Queen was further beholden to him because of his judicious purchase for her and other members of the family fine artworks by classic and modern artists. His guidance had increased the wealth of individual royals and the institution. Blunt had made the royal collection more accessible to the public in the 1950s, thus helping in a small way to increase the popularity of the monarchy. He was also one of the queen mother’s favorites, especially as he was always available for parlor games, such as charades, after dinner at Buckingham Palace. Blunt, it was said, played a superb elephant.
Intertwined with these special factors was the most important reason for Blunt’s protection: his special assignments for George VI, during 1945 to 1947, when he stole and recovered documents showing the Duke of Windsor (the former King Edward VIII) and his wife Wallis Simpson had collaborated with Hitler and the Nazis. This mission saved the House of Windsor from ignominy and possible dissolution. In 1963, revelations of the traitorous activity of Edward and Mrs. Simpson would still be a threat to the Windsors.
Straight visited Dartington in April 1963—his third trip inside a year— in which he met up with Michael Young and others. While in London, he stayed at 42 Upper Brook Street. It was a short walk from Blunt’s flat in Portman Square.
The odds are that these two now mature intriguers would have met, using their long-time skills at avoiding the watchers from MI5. The topic of Golitsyn, which was presently hot within British intelligence circles, would have been discussed. Perhaps this was the time when they decided—at the next propitious moment—to make a deceptive confession.
Straight believed that Golitsyn had something on him and Blunt. It was highly likely that this caused both spies to consider jumping in first before any Golitsyn revelations were put in front of them. If so, Straight and Blunt would be in damage control and able to manage any accusations.
Regardless of how they reacted to Golitsyn, the game was almost up for several members of the Cambridge ring in this momentous, watershed year. It was a matter of who jumped into the open first and why. Members of the ring, even before exposure within intelligence, would already be thinking about disinformation.
The family in the United Kingdom was fearful about Richard Nixon having joined Milton Rose’s New York law firm, which had looked after the family business and trusts for thirty years. For more than a decade, Nixon had been billed by liberals and communists as a dangerous right-winger.
But Straight shocked the family. He did not express anger or disappointment. He was not worried about Nixon. Straight expected Nixon to go back to politics and that his foray into law—his original profession— would be short-lived, especially with the 1964 presidential elections a little more than a year away.2
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., President Kennedy’s special assistant, and August Hecksher, his consultant to the arts, asked Straight if he would like to be chairman of the Fine Arts commission. He made some unconvincing noises about starting his third novel. His second, A Very Small Remnant, which was published at this time (May 1963), had received good reviews, he told Hecksher, which was true. The London Times Literary Supplement said it “recalls [Herman] Melville, and Mr. Straight can stand the comparison.” Time wrote that the story “has the ring of truth, both artistic and actual.” Straight claimed that he was encouraged to try again, so he rejected the White House offer.
However, he had no intention of going on with a career as a novelist (apart from a future work, which he saw as therapeutic), despite publisher Knopf’s encouraging words. The writing cover had served its purpose. The espionage activity had given him a chance to explore if he had any real skills as an author. The challenge and the cover were over—for the moment.
Early in June 1963, Kennedy created the Advisory Council on the Arts, which consisted of a chairman, the heads of several federal agencies, and thirty private citizens. Straight was one of the thirty whom Kennedy had himself selected after consulting Jackie. Next to his name in red pencil was the word “Collector” and a presidential tick. Straight was happy with this appointment;3 it required little time and effort. Then came the next creation, the body that would actually administer the new agency, the National Endowment for the Arts. Straight was offered the chairmanship of this and the advisory council by B
ill Walton, the new chairman of the Arts Commission. He had once worked as head of the Washington office of The New Republic and knew Straight well.
Walton told him he was the right person for the job. He was a “damned good” novelist, respected in the arts community and with many friends in congress. He predicted that he and Kennedy would get along well because of their similar backgrounds. Straight asked Walton what Kennedy thought about the appointment. He was all for it.
Straight was attracted to the position. The chairman would have the final say on who would get what in the way of federal government arts funding. There would be some power associated with it. He would have influence with a wide range of groups, from the trustees of the Metropolitan Opera to black militants, and, as Straight characterized it, from egomaniac conductors to unintelligible poets.4 The chairman would have to know how to handle congress and the press to slip through his choices for funding. Straight was tempted by the opportunities that such a position would afford. He could hand money to anyone he wished, including groups that fitted his own philosophy and ideology.
Straight was given a night to think it over. He met Walton the next day and went through the job specification in more detail. Straight asked how long he had to finally consider the offer. Walton said no longer than a few days.