Last of the Cold War Spies (33 page)

H
enry Wallace’s slow political death as presidential candidate of the doomed Progressive Party through 1948, and the near collapse of
The New Republic
, meant Straight had little time to dwell on his disappointment. While Roosevelt had been in the White House and Wallace had a chance to be there, he had been close to the political action with a heady sense of his own potency and the ambition that some day, somehow he could force his way to the White House too. But now with those two links gone, the dream evaporated. Instead of a sensational ride to taking up a probable appointment in a new administration in November, Straight was left with a squeaky-voiced magazine with sales plummeting to less than 20,000 a week and massive debts that could only be met by milking the family trust. His enterprise had been a failure. The paper’s market of disenchanted liberal democrats and fellow thinkers had been too tiny to sustain an expanded business.

Straight had not set out to make
The New Republic
’s success his career aim. It became an expensive platform for his aspirations in politics. Previous experiences would indicate that he would jump ship, but this time he could not. He had to shrink the magazine and see if he could at least keep it alive enough to sell off in the short term. While these significant adjustments were being planned in front of a disgruntled staff, the show had to
go on through the year. The readers had to be handled delicately to maintain some credibility and sales.

Straight accordingly wrote a fence-sitting editorial on January 19, 1948, about the third party, which finished with a pessimistic note about its chances of providing a winning contender on November 2.
¹
In February, the new Progressive Party headed by Wallace took a severe blow with a coup in Czechoslovakia. Before the upheaval and communist takeover, that country had been held up by U.S. liberals as an example of communist and noncommunist forces working harmoniously. Such peaceful models were now viewed as fanciful. Russia, it seemed, had resumed its prewar long-range plans for world conquest. Wallace responded at a press conference by saying that the communists had acted in “self-defense to prevent a rightist coup.”
²
He and his advisers had miscalculated. Not even the leftist, or even more gullible, reporters accepted his explanation. His support base for the presidency dropped from 11 percent in January to 6 percent after his pronouncement. Half of his supporters found him lacking credibility.

In the middle of this disillusioning time for Straight, or perhaps because of it, his private life was unsettled. Bin, pregnant with their third child, contracted tuberculosis and had to leave medical school to recuperate and wait for the birth. Straight seemed to be taking out some of his personal and professional frustrations on the president when on April 5 he wrote an editorial, which started on the magazine’s cover. It was headed “TRUMAN SHOULD QUIT.”
³
The editorial said that the president had neither the “vision nor the strength that leadership demands.” A month later, Wallace decided he needed to take a drastic measure to reconstruct his melting credibility. In a speech to another full house at Madison Square Garden, and now against advice, he delivered, belatedly, that forgotten “open letter” to Stalin. Only
The New York Times
took it seriously. It would have been consigned to the waste-paper basket of gimmicky campaign rhetoric had it not been for the surprise response by Stalin himself. He broadcast his reply, declaring that the letter constituted a “good and fruitful” basis for discussion between the two nations. Wallace was elated; Truman wasn’t, so he didn’t respond and left criticism to congressional
members. Congress again called for Wallace to be charged under the Logan Act for unofficially dealing with a foreign power.

The president didn’t trust the two new pen-pals in about equal measure. Stalin was stalling for time as his scientists worked untold hours constructing a bomb they could detonate and while his spies stole another mountain of data about the development of the next generation of nuclear weapons. His timing, however, was odd. Had Stalin received the letter when Wallace was editor at
The New Republic
and Straight was still his key strategist, it would have made some sense. But to reply to Wallace when he had cut himself adrift from a meaningful power base in the election perhaps indicated that the Soviet leader was simply attempting to stir the political pot in the United States. There was always the off chance that U.S. Communist Party leaders had convinced their bosses in the Kremlin that Wallace actually had some chance of victory. Whatever the reason, the correspondence had little or no impact as the nation began to focus midyear on the main parties’ candidates.

The election year heightened key issues in the nation, and congressmen with ambitions began to ride some of them hard. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) increased the pressure in its investigation into espionage, which was always sure to gain headlines as the Cold War set in. Prominent witnesses called were Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers, former communists who were now prepared to name names. Bentley had been connected to the Silvermaster ring, and she listed thirty American agents. This led to eleven State Department officials being dismissed or allowed to resign as a result of her revelations. Two well-known New Dealers, Harry Dexter White and Laughlin Currie, were said to have cooperated in her work. The officials had been exposed in secret to a grand jury in New York, but HUAC made Bentley go through the testimony again. The officials she named refused to discuss the allegations in front of HUAC. Then Chambers provided more public exposure when he claimed seventy-five U.S. government officials were agents. He named eight. Alger Hiss was the only one who disputed the claim.

Straight claimed he was baffled by the accusation against Hiss, who appeared so cautious, proper, and self-seeking. Hiss had left the State Department and was then president of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. Straight phoned him on the morning Chambers’s allegations were made and asked him what the story was all about.
⁴

According to Straight, Hiss claimed to be confused about his being named. Straight claimed that he was “suspicious” about Hiss’s being calm and assured, as if he had prepared himself for being unmasked, much the way Straight himself would. Apparently hysteria and nervousness were clues to innocence. But this was humbug on Straight’s part. He knew of Hiss’s Soviet intelligence links. Straight also alleged he sensed that Chambers was telling the truth.
⁵
But again, in reality he knew all too well.

His own distress centered on a worry that he would be dragged into the public arena with HUAC. Straight feared his name would appear somewhere—in a committee report or from the mouth of a caught spy in the know about him. From 1948 to 1950 he braced himself for a reporter’s call. He claimed to be haunted by a sense of guilt that was exacerbated by photographs of those named as spies in the papers—people with whom he shared some of the agony.
⁶

His fears may have been unfounded. He kept himself clear of the major communist rings in Washington and reported directly to Russian controls. Unless one of them was caught and confessed, which was unlikely, he would never be exposed. He had become an expert in tradecraft and had not been spotted by FBI agents meeting any Russians. Straight’s ring was based in England, not the United States, and he was a member of the U.K. Communist Party. His card was tucked away in a desk drawer at Dartington Hall. If ever asked if he “was now or ever had been a member of the Communist Party,” he could easily say “no” with the U.S. party in mind. As a last resort, he could invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify, as others had. Straight could protect himself also by buying the best legal defense available.

In addition, his convoluted writing style allowed him to avoid incriminating himself with direct stances on issues.
The New Republic
was read by all the HUAC members looking for clues to communist activity. Straight characterized those members in his autobiography as an unsavory bunch. Martin Dies was given to casual cruelties, John Rankin was a fanatical racist, and J. Parnell Thomas was a small-time crook.
⁷
Only Richard M. Nixon escaped malevolent description in Straight’s memoirs (perhaps because he owed him his employment during the Nixon administration). Straight had unfavorable things to say about Nixon in private and to the family. But for public consumption and with Nixon able to
read his words, all Straight would say was that Nixon was just another Republican candidate who clawed his way into congress by accusing his opponents of following the communist party line.

Straight’s articles shifted just enough to give him an intellectual alibi should he receive the dreaded call and have to front the committee. His signed editorials still attempted to resonate with the rational sounds of an unbiased liberal, who always managed to support at least part of the communist position. But he now recognized a few facts that in the past would have been ignored. In one article about the 1948 coup in Prague, “There Are Great Fears,” Straight wrote that the communist seizure of power “has been followed by the creation of a police state.”
⁸
In another piece, “Trial by Congress,” he attacked HUAC for being unconstitutional and for its infringement of civil rights. He defended Laughlin Currie and minimized the evidence against the Silvermaster ring. Showing a wobbly if not staggering logic, he noted: “The Bentley Testimony, if true, indicates that the Russians may have got by espionage what the British and our other allies got by sitting at a table in meetings of the Combined Chiefs of Staff and other inter-allied boards.” This may have been a debatable point during the war in 1944 when the Russians were allies. But it was now 1948.

He added: “The testimony of Chambers, if true, demonstrates that certain government officials in the early thirties exercised their constitutional right to be simultaneously members of the government and members of the communist party.” Again, this was misleading. Chambers named many agents who were active until exposed in 1948. The dual membership argument was irrelevant. Regardless of their affiliations, no officials had the right to be espionage agents. The article tripped on in this tacit deflection from his own secret past. Then incongruously, Straight did an about-face with a solitary begrudging line: “In general we believe that the outline of Elizabeth Bentley’s story is largely accurate. . . .”
⁹

These little out clauses would be useful, along with his claim to being a middle-of-the-roader in his work with the AVC, should he appear before a congressional hearing. He could claim too that he had fired Wallace as publisher at
The New Republic
because he had been taken over by communists in his bid for the presidency. Straight had even convinced his parents that he was above entanglement with the extreme left in the Progressive Party campaign. But despite his fears and perpetual “guilt,” Straight did not hear from anyone from HUAC, and 1948 rolled on.