 Straight's parents, heiress Dorothy Payne Whitney and Willard Dickerman Straight, had co-founded "The New Republic" as financial backers to Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann in 1914.Straight attended Dartington Hall, then the London School of Economics before going to Trinity College at Cambridge in 1934, where "he became a member of the circle around John Maynard Keynes, socialized with young radical patricians like himself and joined the Communist Party...mostly in sympathy with its Popular Front objectives of supporting democrat governments against the rising tide of Nazism.