Last of the Cold War Spies (2 page)

M
ichael Whitney Straight’s potentially rich destiny was prepared long before he was born on September 1, 1916. His maternal great-grandfather, Henry B. Payne, a lawyer from Ohio, set a pattern early in the nineteenth century by making a fortune from railroads and becoming a state senator. He yearned to be president and sought that high office for two decades before giving up at age 77. This penchant for, and circumstance of, money, political power, and ambition carried to the next generation when Payne’s vivacious daughter Flora married another lawyer, Yale-educated William Collins Whitney. With Flora’s money and eventually his own, the cool and charming Whitney was touted as a presidential candidate, and he remained a pivotal force in the Democratic Party. Although he refused endorsement himself, no one could be elected as party candidate without his support.

Whitney divided his time between New York and Washington and decided there was more challenge in business and joining the robber baron class. This would ensure power for his lifetime and succeeding generations far beyond one person’s short reign of Oval Office influence.

With this power came inevitable corruption, especially in dealing with the New York-based Metropolitan Street Railway Company. He used his legal knowledge to create an intricate corporate monster. It allowed him
to act like a businessman who responds to bankruptcy on the horizon by transferring property to his wife. This was done on a grand scale after Whitney and his partners watered down the company’s stock by recapitalizing, speculating in it, cornering, and dumping it. When the Metropolitan did collapse in 1908, Whitney and partners had long since milked it dry. Many American investors were left with nothing.

Whitney died in 1904 and so missed the opprobrium heaped on his partners. Yet, judging on his own power and influence, had he lived he would have been hardly touched. There were pious hearings at which Whitney’s partners mumbled admissions about “considerable stockjobbing and stock-watering.” There were no prosecutions or convictions. Lawsuits were threatened but from small investors without the legal clout to have effect. In the end not even a scapegoat was found.

Whitney’s daughter Dorothy (Michael Straight’s mother) was born in Washington in 1887. She was twenty-one years old when the scandal of the Metropolitan became public in 1908. It was on the front page of
The
New York Times
for months, and she was very much aware of it. Dorothy was too bright, sensitive, and religious not to be touched by the ramifications of the way the family fortune had been acquired. She took on the guilt of her father’s fiscal follies. Apart from her moral nature she grew into her teens aware of social issues at a time of reform in the United States. The first great trustbuster, Republican Theodore Roosevelt, was elected president in 1904. Across the Atlantic, England produced a liberal reform government two years later. Roosevelt became a good friend. Dorothy was drawn into campaigns to end corruption in city government.

A handsome woman, she could not avoid the perils of being an heiress. American as much as European society was awash with predators who would have settled for a woman worth a mere $100,000, let alone Dorothy’s $7 million. The suitors came in droves. If they failed to notice her concern for poverty or her aid to immigrants during the great wave of the time, these eligible empty shells were shown the door. Her mental checklist of compatibility was longer than any other rich woman’s in the United States. Even if he appeared to pass every test, there was another hurdle that would test a man’s mettle. Dorothy was six when her mother died, which made her an orphan in her mid-teens. Her closest relationship had been formed with a worldly English governess, Beatrice Bend. She was Dorothy’s adviser, educator, elder sister equivalent, friend, and
replacement parent. The man that was able to lure her away from such an emotional bond as Miss Bend would have to have radiant qualities.

That man was Willard Dickerman Straight, seven years Dorothy’s senior and like her an orphan. Willard’s father, Henry, a state school natural sciences teacher, died of tuberculosis when Willard was five. His mother, Emma, also a teacher, contracted the ubiquitous disease after a year in Tokyo. She died in 1890, leaving Willard without parents at age ten.

He was fortunate to be adopted by Dr. Elvire Ranier, one of the few women physicians in the United States. But the comfort and security was not enough to counter the anxiety felt by a sensitive, intelligent child. His two major constants in life had been taken from him. Young Willard developed a temper and was willful and incorrigible at school. Ranier countered with discipline. This only exacerbated the boy’s personality problem. He was expelled from school. His foster mother sent him off as a high school junior to Bordentown Military Academy in New Jersey. The school made him.

He reveled in the soldierly regimens, which took his mind off his personal tragedy and tempered his temperament. His self-confidence built and stabilized enough to give his keen intellect a freer run. He averaged more than ninety in his grades and considered a military career via West Point. Willard’s love of drawing and design—he had been a sketcher ever since he could hold a crayon—overrode his desire to lead. He entered Cornell University to study architecture. The more liberated atmosphere drew out other traits in the former problem child. He proved an exceptional student, capable leader, and inspired writer of humor and literature, while never putting down the sketching easel. Willard played the guitar and had a fair tenor voice.

He graduated in 1901, and his ambition and adventurous spirit helped him accept a job in China in the Imperial Maritime Customs Service on a respectable $750 a year. The organization was an arrogant colonial set-up that collected China’s customs revenues and remained independent of Chinese control. The position served Willard by allowing him to demonstrate his linguistic gifts, learning Mandarin. The Customs Service also showed him bureaucracy of any kind was not for him. He jumped at an opportunity in 1904 to become a Reuters and Associated Press correspondent in the Russo-Japanese War. Five years after leaving Bordentown Academy, he was back on a militaristic track.

He was sent first to Tokyo. His diary claimed a torment of choice between admitted selfish ambition and artistic idealism. Willard desired to make his name in high places and money along the way. He could not see himself as the penniless bohemian. Willard knew that there was “too much ambition in my cosmos to let the schemer be driven out by my better nature, hence much tribulation and many an unhappy hour, and uneasy time, for I am not true to myself.”
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This mild agony and self-effacement did not cloud his move up the ladder to the choking altitude he aspired to reach. He was, usefully, proJapanese as they strove to take Manchuria and Korea. In Tokyo Willard found himself socializing with Edwin V. Morgan, 40, scion of the wealthy upstate New York family. Describing the handsome correspondent, sixteen years his junior, Morgan noted that Willard was “tall, slim, with reddish-brown hair, of unusual frankness and charm of manner, perfectly at ease.”

At the end of the Russo-Japanese War, Morgan hired him as his private secretary with the rank of vice-consul at Seoul. Young Willard was now on an escalator rather than a ladder. This led him for the first time into the company of a social circle that excited him; the visiting Alice Roosevelt (daughter of Theodore) and the diminutive E. H. Harriman and his family were among them. Harriman may or may not have been in the robber baron class, but he certainly played with the new toys and inventions of their kind of business, especially trains. His $70 million fortune came from controlling the Union Pacific Railroad and the Pacific Mail steamship line spanning the Pacific. He dazzled Willard by airing his ambition to create a round-the-world transportation system. Harriman wanted to hook up the Trans-Siberian Railway (from which he would lease rights) with a steamship line from the Baltic to New York.

Willard found Harriman’s beautiful, bright, and pampered daughter Mary very much to his liking. Even the most guileless of young men could have seen the advantages of marrying into such a family. However, there was no rush; indeed, to have pushed would have been folly. He could hardly have kept her in the luxury to which she had become accustomed, at least not yet.

When Japan demonstrated it was running Korea rather than giving it independence, the place for a legation was Tokyo, not Seoul, which was closed. Willard, now 25, was offered a job with Morgan in Cuba. He took it, despite his love for Asia.

In the summer of 1906, he received a summons to Washington from President Roosevelt, who had heard good things of the young man from both his daughter Alice and especially Harriman. Known as the “Little Giant of Wall Street,” Harriman needed someone in place in China to complete his dream of that global transport network. Who better than bright-eyed and brilliant Willard, who spoke Chinese and who made it clear that he wished to be fluent in the language of big business. He was posted as consul to Manchuria in the thriving industrial city of Mukden, the once-Tartar capital 500 miles northeast of Beijing. He made a success of it despite his tendency to fits of depression when his work became a matter of persistence and determination. He would often consider bailing out for a more lucrative position. Yet he stayed based in Mukden. Harriman even urged for his appointment as minister to China, but it was impractical. He was only 27 years old. Such a posting would have caused rebellion among the old guard at the U.S. State Department, who relied on seniority for advancement rather than ability.

While Harriman looked for a promotion for Willard in his work, he demoted him in his private life by preventing his marriage to Mary. The reasons boiled down to the fact that Willard didn’t have the right pedigree or wealth. Coupled with that was Harriman’s need for Willard to be in place in China and to concentrate on the job. Marriage into the family might have made the manipulation of Willard’s talents in China more difficult.

Neither Mary nor Willard appeared shattered by the break. He was soon dancing attendance on Katherine Elkins in Washington, another daughter of immense wealth. Her father was coal and industrial mogul Stephen Benton Elkins, a Republican senator from West Virginia and a former secretary of war in the Harrison administration. Then there was one Dorothy Whitney with whom he dined and played tennis on Long Island at the banker Edwin Morgan’s.

In 1909, the State Department decided on so-called dollar diplomacy in China by encouraging private American bankers to take part in a $25 million loan to China, which the British, French, and Germans were then negotiating for the construction of the Hukuang railways. The New York bankers chosen—known as the American group—were managed by J. P. Morgan & Company and included Kuhn, Loeb & Company; the First National Bank; and the National City Bank.

They needed a representative in China. Willard was approached. At 29, he resigned from the State Department. He saw the possibilities if he
could succeed in negotiating with the Chinese to accept the loan. It would be tough: the Chinese wanted the easiest terms. The European partners in the loan would push for harsh penalties from the Americans for their late entry.

As he faced his greatest challenge, Willard’s personality continued to impress everyone. He could be mixing with elderly bankers and diplomats one moment and then move to a group of young employees at the legation. He would pick up a guitar and entertain with improvised, amusing lines from literature.

It was this breadth of character and style that impressed Dorothy. If he had been all banker, she would have been uninterested. Coincidentally or otherwise, she arrived in Beijing on a world trip and was feted like a royal. One of those assigned to her was Willard. Their early delicate diary entries were noncommittal but agreeable about each other. For instance, Dorothy’s November 5, 1909, entry read: “Such gorgeous days. Mr. Straight took us this morning to the drum tower, which we climbed for the beautiful view.”
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On November 11, Willard sang and played guitar for her and wrote: “Record breaker. Beautiful day, lunch at Wan Chow Sze—ride along the Jade Canal afterwards. A little music then another fireside talk with DW.” It was gentile code for falling in love.

By the last night after a fortnight in each other’s company, November 13, Willard, who referred to her as “the Princess” in his diary, was out of code and transcribing his feelings: “It was hard not to ask her to stay on and live there (at the bankers’ compound). . . . Quiet dinner and a little choking at the throat, I think.”

A similarly smitten Dorothy noted: “Our last evening—it is so sad.”

Willard’s post-Dorothy entries showed him depressed and miserable without her. The romance blossomed in correspondence as he demonstrated his wit and literary skills. After six months, they met in Milan at the Hotel de Ville in May 1910. He proposed. She demurred and then rejected him. It created a dilemma for Willard, but he could not dwell on it, for he had to press forward with the Chinese loan. He took a train to Paris, where his task was to reach agreement with the Europeans, which he did. The letters between him and Dorothy continued despite the setback, and they began to cover the ground that had troubled her. He explained away Mary Harriman and fretted about Dorothy learning of his fleeting affection for Katherine Elkins. He didn’t wish to be seen as a
gold-digger. Yet his chasing of only heiresses set him up to be branded this way by the inevitable relationship breakers in the chattering class of New York and Washington.