Michael Straight (1 September 1916 – 4 January 2004) was an American KGB spy whose confession to the US and British governments in 1964 led to the downfall of the Cambridge Five's recruiter Anthony Blunt.
Biography[]
Michael Straight was born in New York City, New York on 1 September 1916, the son of an investment banker who died during Straight's infancy; he was the maternal grandson of Secretary of the Navy William Collins Whitney and the great-grandson of US Senator Henry B. Payne. After his mother remarried to a British philanthropist, they moved to Dartington Hall in Dartington, Devon, England, and Straight attended the London School of Economics. During his studies at the University of Cambridge in the mid-1930s, he became secretly involved with the Communist Party of Great Britain, and he was briefly the lover of CPGB recruiter Anthony Blunt. In 1937, he returned to the United States and became a speechwriter for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He became a State Department employee and founded The New Republic after serving in the US Air Force during World War II, hiring former Vice President Henry A. Wallace to serve as editor. In 1956, he left the magazine and began writing novels. In 1963, during his application for a government job, Straight was intimidated by the prospect of a background check, and he decided to disclose his communist affiliations at Cambridge. This exposed Blunt as the Cambridge spy ring's recruiter, leading to his downfall. Straight went on to serve as deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 1969 to 1977, and he died in Chicago in 2004 at the age of 87.