Free Last of the Cold War Spies by Roland Perry Page B

Blunt. This sugar-coated his closeness to the two leading Soviet spies and recruiters at the university. The family knew Whitney was a true-blue conservative, and Dorothy and Leonard would have assumed that Burgess was probably conservative and most likely harmless. Blunt’s profession would have seemed also to be nonthreatening and on the surface, apolitical. 3
    By this stage Burgess was cultivating right-wing groups and was using Whitney for introductions to influential conservative figures. The views of Whitney, the playboy sports enthusiast, weren’t in accord with the rest of the family. He had no time for radical politics. A fellow rich racing-car fanatic, Victor Rothschild, had first introduced Burgess to Whitney in 1934.
    Still Dorothy was worried. Implanted in her mind was the 1919 message about Straight from her dead husband Willard via the Maryland medium: he will have a very deep mind and he will have to be taught to meet problems of all kinds. Furthermore, Tagore had spent May and Juneof 1935 at Dartington and had refreshed her strong spiritual feelings. It was time to dispatch someone like him to her son to assess the situation. She sent her close friend Gerald Heard, a philosopher with spiritual interests.
    He wrote to Straight and said he was coming to Cambridge in November. He was invited to lunch. Straight knew his mother’s concerns and was a step ahead of her. He invited Cornford to the lunch, having forewarned him of Dorothy’s worries. There was small talk for an hour before dictatorship was discussed. 4 Heard tried to draw Cornford out on his Marxist views, but he was evasive. The philosopher asked him if he really believed that any individual was wise enough or good enough to hold unchallenged authority, even for an hour.
    Cornford gave an irrelevant light answer to this allusion to Stalin by saying that the communist movement had put the fear of God into the bourgeoisie. Heard reported back to Dorothy, and her fears were lessened. Straight decided he would invite Burgess and Blunt to Dartington as soon as his second-year exams were over so they could allay any further concerns. He knew Burgess, with his capacity for charm and intellectual brilliance, had already become the Rothschild family’s financial adviser. (Dorothy was not in need of financial advising, for she was in the process in the winter of 1935–1936 of giving up her American citizenship and creating a tax-free family trust, which incorporated all her American properties, including Westbury and The New Republic .) Blunt, too, could impress, not so much with his charm but more with his manners and erudition on art.
    Meanwhile on campus, Straight coasted with his studies and threw himself into communist politics, working with Dobb planning demonstrations and parades and even some mornings selling The Daily Worker . He jumped on political platforms wherever he could and railed against fascism, one day in demanding sanctions against Italy in response to Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia, the next in questioning actions of the Nazis in Germany, the following week in opposing Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.
    A contemporary of Straight’s characterized him at this time in the book Anthony Blunt, His Lives by Miranda Carter:
    So compelling was his personality that I was swept along in his wake. He was very left-wing. He was very wealthy. He was English and American. He was handsome, gifted, versatile, precocious, virile. What on earth was he not? He played squash with one of the Sitwells . . . and he loved the masses. How could any of us resist this dynamic combination of playboy and Sir Galahad? The hunger marchers were made to march through Cambridge and we were to entertain them. I can see now the shuffling column taking a wrong turn in the direction of Midsummer Common . . . and being headed off by our hero, leaping along with all the agility with which he had once danced the part of the Dominant Male Principle in the