One family — but not just any family: one of America’s first families, whose lives were intimately and indelibly intertwined with the basic fabric of this country. Powerful but altruisic, artistic yet activist, a family whose story is the history of mid-twentieth-century America.
"On Green Spring Farm" is a memoir — a series of short anecdotal vignettes, based on journal entries — chronicling two decades of our American history. Unifying the tales is the ever-present backdrop of what is now known as Green Spring Gardens Park, a public garden and Manor House in Virginia. The stories range from the back-room politics of Democratic campaigns for Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson and the founding of the American Veterans Committee, to Jackie Kennedy’s "appropriation" of a family portrait of James Monroe to beautify her White House — all interspersed with colloquial family tales of pets, vacations, illnesses, theatricals and hair-raising misadventures in small aircraft.
"On Green Spring Farm" provides a window onto another time and place, through which we witness history as experienced by one unusual family. Evocative, charming, funny, rousing and thought-provoking: a Samuel Pepys for our time.
Michael Straight was born in 1916. He was educated at Dartington Hall in Great Britain and was a student of Harold Laski at the London School of Economics and John Maynard Keynes at Cambridge University. The son of Willard Straight who, with his wife Dorothy, was a founder of The New Republic, Straight is the grandson of William C. Whitney, the Wall Street financier, philanthropist and Secretary of the Navy under Cleveland.
During his Washington-based career, Straight held posts in economics at the State Department, and was ghostwriter for members of the Roosevelt Cabinet. He was also Washington editor and later Publisher and Editor of The New Republic. Straight participated in the early planning of the National Endowment for the Arts, of which he was Deputy Chairman from 1969–1978.
His previous publications include Make This the Last War: The Future of the United Nations; Trial by Television: the Army–McCarthy Hearings; the novels Carrington, A Very Small Remnant, and Happy and Hopeless; the play Caravaggio; and memoirs Twigs for an Eagle’s Nest, (about the National Endowment for the Arts), Nancy Hanks: An Intimate Portrait, After Long Silence, and For Noah.
