Lewis Strauss

Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss ( ; January 31, 1896January 21, 1974) was an American government official, businessman, philanthropist, and naval officer. He was one of the original members of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1946 and he served as the commission's chairman in the 1950s. Strauss was a major figure in the development of nuclear weapons after World War II, nuclear energy policy, and nuclear power in the United States. Their parents were Jewish emigrants from Germany and Austria who came to the United States in the 1830s and 1840s and settled in Virginia. His family moved to Richmond, Virginia, and he grew up and attended public schools there. which later disqualified him from normal military service.

By the time he finally graduated from high school, his family's business had experienced a downturn during the Recession of 1913–1914. In order to help out, He was quite successful in his sales efforts;

Career

World War I

thumb|American food administrators in 1918: Hoover is on the far left, Strauss third from left

Strauss's mother encouraged him to perform public or humanitarian service. It was 1917; World War I was continuing to devastate parts of Europe and Herbert Hoover had become a symbol of humanitarian altruism by way of heading the Commission for Relief in Belgium. or May 1917, but the latter seems more likely.)

Hoover became chief of the United States Food Administration. Acting on behalf of a nearly destitute diplomatic representative of Finland, Rudolf Holsti, whom he met in Paris, Strauss persuaded Hoover to urge President Woodrow Wilson to recognize Finland's independence from Russia.

Besides the U.S. food relief organization, Strauss worked with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) to relieve the suffering of Jewish refugees, who were often neglected by other bodies. Strauss acted as a liaison between Hoover's organization and JDC workers in a number of Central and Eastern European countries. Getting news in April 1919 of the Pinsk massacre, during the Polish–Soviet War, in which 35 Jews meeting to discuss the distribution of American relief aid were summarily executed by the Polish Army in the belief that they were Bolshevik conspirators, Strauss pressed the case to Hoover that a forceful response must be made to the Polish government. Hoover spoke to Polish Prime Minister Ignacy Jan Paderewski and demanded a fair investigation, but Strauss saw Paderewski as an anti-Semite who believed that all Jews were Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks were Jews. After a while, the situation for Jews in Poland did (temporarily) improve.

Strauss had grown up in Virginia, in a culture that venerated Southern military heroes of the "War Between the States", but a tour he took in summer 1918 to the devastated battlefields of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood disabused him of any romantic illusions about the glory of warfare. Similarly, his exposure to effects of Communism in 1919, as manifested in the Polish–Soviet War, led to a powerful and lifelong anti-Communist sentiment.

Investment banker, marriage and family

At the JDC, Strauss came to the attention of Felix M. Warburg, a JDC leader who was a partner in the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in New York City, and Harriet Loewentstein, a JDC European head who was an accountant at the bank. In addition Hoover had introduced Strauss to Mortimer Schiff, another partner at Kuhn Loeb, By 1926 his yearly compensation from the firm had reached $75,000 () and by the next year, $120,000 (). Born in 1903, she was the daughter of Jerome J. Hanauer, Strauss again worked for the this-time-successful campaign of Hoover in the United States presidential election, 1928, and was a member from Virginia that year of the Republican National Committee. He also was committed to protecting the reputation of President Hoover; in 1930, on behalf of the White House, he conspired with two naval intelligence officers to illegally break into the office of a Tammany Hall follower in New York who was thought to hold documents that would be damaging to Hoover.

During the 1930s, following Hoover's re-election defeat by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States presidential election, 1932, Strauss was a strong opponent of the New Deal. He shared this antipathy with Hoover, who increasingly adopted an ideologically conservative, anti-New Deal viewpoint in the years following his defeat.

Strauss was active in Kuhn Loeb until 1941, although he resented restrictions imposed on investment banking by regulators in the Roosevelt administration and derived less enjoyment from the business. Nonetheless, in his role as an investment banker Strauss had become vastly wealthy, and given his humble original circumstances he has been considered a self-made millionaire and a Horatio Alger tale. Due to his lack of higher education, Strauss has also been characterized as an autodidact.

Lay religious activities

A proudly religious man, Strauss became a leader in Jewish causes and organizations. In 1933 he was a member of the executive committee of the American Jewish Committee. He was active in the Jewish Agricultural Society, Strauss attended a London conference of concerned Jews later that year on behalf of the American Jewish Committee, but the conference fell apart over the issue of Zionism. The bill had considerable popular support, but eventually failed to move forward in Congress due to opposition from the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and other immigration restrictionists.

At the same time, Strauss joined with Hoover and Bernard Baruch in supporting the establishment of a refugee state in Africa as a safe haven for all persecuted people, not just Jews, and pledged ten percent of his wealth towards it. This effort too failed to materialize. Still another scheme that involved Strauss concerned an international corporation, the Coordinating Foundation, that would be set up to effectively pay Germany an immense ransom in exchange for their allowing Jews to emigrate; that too did not happen. Strauss received many individual requests for help, but often was unable to.

Strauss was president of Congregation Emanu-El of New York, the largest such in New York City, for a decade, from 1938 to 1948. He had first joined the board of trustees of the temple in 1929, when the congregation was absorbing the merger of Temple Beth-El.

Strauss succeeded in Washington's social and political circles despite that environment being notoriously anti-Semitic at the time. He wanted to go into intelligence but was blocked, reportedly because the Director of Naval Intelligence, U.S. Navy was prejudiced against Jews and because Strauss's contributions to B'nai B'rith had aroused suspicion on the part of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and others in the U.S. intelligence community. and was assigned as a Staff Assistant to the Chief at the Bureau of Ordnance, where he helped organize and manage Navy munitions work. Strauss and his wife moved to Washington, D.C., Strauss organized a morale-boosting effort to award "E for Excellence" awards to plants doing a good job of making war materials. (Strauss's biographer has depicted Strauss as also helping to investigate the notorious failures of U.S. torpedoes during the war and coordinate development of the very secret and highly successful anti-aircraft VT (proximity) fuse; however histories of these efforts do not indicate that Strauss played a significant role.)

When James V. Forrestal succeeded Frank Knox as Secretary of the Navy in May 1944, he employed Strauss as his special assistant. In conjunction with Senator Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, Strauss established the Office of Naval Research, which kept scientific research of naval matters under control of the Navy rather than civilian or academic organizations. Strauss's contributions were recognized by the Navy and by 1945 he was serving on the Army-Navy Munitions Board,

Earlier during the war, Strauss was promoted to commander, then by November 1943 was a captain. He rose in rank and influence due to a combination of his intelligence, personal energy, and ability to find favor in higher places. A proposed promotion for Strauss in 1944 to rear admiral did not happen at the time due to a variety of factors, including that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had disliked Strauss for years, going back to an incident at an Inner Circle event in 1932, and blocked the move. Roosevelt's death changed matters, as his successor, Harry S. Truman, had no negative feelings about Strauss. In July 1945 Strauss was promoted to commodore. Then in November 1945, after the war, Strauss was promoted to rear admiral by Truman.

The promotion to flag rank was unusual for a member of the reserve, and as such,

Introduction to atomic energy

Strauss's mother died of cancer in 1935, and his father of the same disease in 1937. That and his early interest in physics led Strauss to establish a fund in their names, the Lewis and Rosa Strauss Memorial Fund, for physics research that could lead to better radiation treatment for cancer patients. The fund supported the refugee German physicist Arno Brasch, who was working on producing artificial radioactive material with bursts of X-rays. Brasch's work was based on previous work with Leo Szilard, who saw in this work a possible means to developing an atomic chain reaction. Szilard already had foreseen that this could lead to an atomic bomb. Szilard persuaded Strauss to support him and Brasch in building a "surge generator". Strauss ultimately provided tens of thousands of dollars to this venture.

Through Szilard, Strauss met other nuclear physicists, such as Ernest Lawrence. Strauss talked to scientists who had left Nazi Germany and learned about atom-related experiments that had taken place there. In February 1940, Szilard asked him to fund the acquisition of some radium, but Strauss refused, as he had already spent a large sum.

Strauss had no further direct involvement with atomic energy developments during the war. Indeed, he was frustrated by Harvey Hollister Bundy, his colleague from the Food Administration days, who kept Strauss away from information regarding the Manhattan Project. At the end of the war, when the first atomic bombs were ready for use, Strauss advocated to Forrestal dropping one on a symbolic target, such as a Japanese cedar grove near Nikkō, Tochigi, as a warning shot. In subsequent years Strauss would say in interviews, "I did my best to prevent it. The Japanese were defeated before the bomb was used." His recommendation contributed to the decision to hold the mid-1946 Operation Crossroads tests, the first since the war, at Bikini Atoll.

Atomic Energy Commission member

thumb|right|The five original commissioners of the AEC in 1947; Strauss is rightmost

In 1947, the United States transferred control of atomic research from the U.S. Army to civilian authority under the newly created Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). In October 1946, in advance of the commission actually coming into being, Strauss was named by President Truman as one of the first five Commissioners, with David E. Lilienthal as the chairman. Strauss had been recommended for a position on the body by Vice Admiral Paul Frederick Foster, a long-time friend for whom Strauss earlier had provided contacts in the business world (and who had subsequently helped Strauss get his active duty assignment). In their initial discussion about the appointment, Strauss noted to the New Deal-supporting Truman that "I am a black Hoover Republican." Strauss, who briefly had returned to work at Kuhn Loeb after the war, now exited the firm altogether in order to comply with AEC regulations.

One of Strauss's first actions on the AEC was to urge his fellow commissioners to set up the capability to monitor foreign atomic activity via atmospheric testing. In particular, he saw that WB-29 Superfortress aircraft equipped with radiological tests could run regular "sniffer" flights to monitor the upper atmosphere and detect any atomic tests by the Soviet Union. Other people in government and science, including physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, argued that the radiological approach would not work, but Strauss and the newly formed United States Air Force continued regardless. While Strauss was not the only person who had been urging long-range detection capabilities,

Strauss believed in a fundamental premise of the Cold War: that the Soviet Union was determined on a course of world domination. As such, he believed in having a more powerful nuclear force than the Soviets and in maintaining secrecy about U.S. nuclear activities. During the U.S. presidential election of 1948, Strauss tried to convince the Republican Party nominee, Thomas E. Dewey, of the dangers of sharing atomic information with Britain, and, after Dewey lost, Strauss tried to convince President Truman of the same. Following the revelations about the British physicist Klaus Fuchs's espionage for the Soviet Union and the appointment of the former Marxist John Strachey as Secretary of State for War in the British Cabinet, Strauss argued that the Modus Vivendi should be suspended completely, but no other commissioner wanted to go to that extreme.

Strauss was known for his psychological rigidity; one of his fellow commissioners reportedly said, "If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you're just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor."

thumb|right|Strauss (left) along with Senators Brien McMahon and John Bricker in early 1950

The first atomic-bomb test by the Soviet Union in August 1949 came earlier than expected by Americans, and, over the next several months, there was an intense debate within the U.S. government, military, and scientific communities regarding whether to proceed with development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, then known as "the Super". Strauss urged for the United States to move immediately to develop it, In particular, Strauss was unswayed by moral arguments against going forward, seeing no real difference between using it and the atomic bomb or the boosted fission weapon that some opponents of the Super were advocating as an alternative. When Strauss was rebuffed by the other commissioners, he went to National Security Council executive secretary Sidney Souers in order to bring the matter to President Truman directly. It was as a consequence of this meeting that Truman first learned (when Souers informed him) that such a thing as a hydrogen bomb could exist. In a memorandum urging development of the Super that he sent to President Truman on November 25, 1949, the pious Strauss expressed no doubt about what the Soviets would do, writing that "a government of atheists is not likely to be dissuaded from producing the weapon on 'moral' grounds."

On January 31, 1950, Truman announced his decision to go forward with hydrogen-bomb development. However, by the time that the decision was made, Strauss was one of an increasingly large coalition of military and government figures, and a few scientists, who strongly felt that development of the new weapon was essential to U.S. security in the face of a hostile, nuclear-capable, ideological enemy. Thus, in the absence of Strauss's action, the same decision almost surely would have been reached. In any case, when the decision was announced, Strauss, considering that he had accomplished as much as he could in his role as commissioner, submitted his resignation that same day. Within the administration, there was some consideration given to Strauss being named chairman of the AEC to replace the departing Lilienthal, but Strauss was considered too polarizing a figure. The last day for Strauss during this first stint of his on the commission was April 15, 1950. <!-- Glennon as successor - cite https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4105.pdf -->

Financial analyst

Beginning in June 1950, Strauss became a financial adviser to the Rockefeller brothers, where his charter was to participate in decisions regarding projects, financing, and investing. For them, he assisted in the founding of, and served on the first board for, the Population Council. He was also involved in the negotiations with Columbia University that led to a sale and leasing back of real estate associated with part of Rockefeller Center.

During this time, Strauss continued to take an interest in atomic affairs; as did other former members of the AEC, he had a consulting arrangement with the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy and was active in making his opinion known on various matters. These included his dissatisfaction with the speed at which research and development into actually making a working hydrogen device was taking place.

In the 1952 U.S. presidential election, Strauss originally supported Robert A. Taft, his friend from the Hoover days, for the Republican Party nomination. Once Dwight D. Eisenhower secured the nomination, however, Strauss contributed substantial monies towards Eisenhower's campaign.

While Strauss had initially opposed Eisenhower's push for Operation Candor, his view and the administration's goals both evolved, and he endorsed the "Atoms for Peace" program, which Eisenhower announced in December 1953. Strauss was now one of the best-known advocates of atomic energy for many purposes. In part, he celebrated the promise of peaceful use of atomic energy as part of a conscious effort to divert attention away from the dangers of nuclear warfare. Nevertheless, Strauss, like Eisenhower, did sincerely believe in and hope for the potential of peaceful uses. In 1955 Strauss helped arrange the U.S. participation in the first international conference on peaceful uses of atomic energy, held in Geneva. Strauss held Soviet capabilities in high regard, saying after the conference that "in the realm of pure science the Soviets had astonished us by their achievements ... [the Russians] could be described in no sense as technically backward."

thumb|Eisenhower signing a modification of the Atomic Energy Act in 1954; Strauss is seated on the far right

Strauss was involved in finding the site and industry partners for the start of construction, in 1954, of the first dedicated U.S. atomic electric power plant, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania; it would eventually go on-line in 1957. While Shippingport was a joint government-commercial collaboration, Strauss advocated for private industry taking on the development of nuclear power plants on its own. Strauss made public remarks in 1954 predicting that atomic power would make electricity "too cheap to meter". Regarded as fanciful even at the time, the quote is now seen as damaging to the industry's credibility. Strauss was possibly referring to Project Sherwood, a secret program to develop power from hydrogen fusion, rather the commonly-believed uranium fission reactors. Indeed, on the run-up to a 1958 Geneva conference on atomic power, Strauss offered substantial funding to three laboratories for fusion power research. Voices began to be heard advocating for a ban or limitation on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. internally within the administration, Strauss was dismissive of the matter and even speculated that the Fukuryū Maru was part of a Communist scheme. However, Strauss also contributed to public fears when, during a March 1954 press conference, he made an impromptu remark that a single Soviet H-bomb could destroy the New York metropolitan area. This statement was heard overseas as well and served to add to what UK Minister of Defence Harold Macmillan termed a "panic" over the subject. The AEC had commissioned the Project SUNSHINE report in 1953 to ascertain the impact of radioactive fallout, generated from repeated nuclear detonations of greater and greater yield, on the world's population.

Internal debate ensued over the next several years within the Eisenhower administration over the possibility of an atmospheric test ban with the Soviet Union, with some in favor of trying to arrange one, but Strauss was always one of those implacably opposed. Strauss would continue to minimize the dangers of Bravo fallout to the islanders of the atolls, insisting in his 1962 memoirs that they had been under "continuous and competent medical supervision" and that follow-up tests showed them to be in "excellent health [and] their blood counts were approximately normal". Others in the AEC were equally cavalier. In fact, AEC scientists had seen the islanders as a valuable laboratory case of human exposure. and the U.S. government engaged in a series of reevaluations of the health of the islanders, and relocation and economic packages to compensate them, over the next several decades. Strauss and others in the AEC were also dismissive of the dangers Americans faced who were downwind of the Nevada Test Site. and Strauss and the AEC also doubted that the problem was as severe as some others in the administration maintained. During 1956, Harold Stassen, who had been chosen by Eisenhower to lead an effort on disarmanent policy, focused on making nonprofileration a key goal of the United States, including proposals to halt not just testing but also the continued expansion of the U.S. fissionable material stockpile. Eisenhower was at least partially receptive to the proposals, but Strauss argued that nuclear materials production could not be stopped yet and that testing could never be halted completely.

The Sputnik crisis of 1957 led Eisenhower to create the President's Science Advisory Committee. Once that body was in place, Eisenhower began to directly receive a broader selection of scientific information; Strauss lost his ability to control scientists' access to the president and his influence within the administration began to recede. While Strauss had maintained his hostility towards Anglo-American cooperation on nuclear matters since becoming AEC chairman, Sputnik gave impetus to renewed cooperation on this front. Strauss visited Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to give a message from Eisenhower to this effect, and subsequent talks and hearings resulted in the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement coming into place.

As AEC chairman, Strauss was informed regarding U.S. intelligence findings on the Dimona reactor in Israel. He met with Ernst David Bergmann, chairman of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and a key early force in the Israeli nuclear program (and years later would help Bergmann get a visiting fellowship in the United States). While Strauss's thoughts on the Israeli effort to develop nuclear weapons are not documented, his wife later said that he would have been in favor of Israel being able to defend itself.

Strauss and Oppenheimer

During his terms as an AEC commissioner, Strauss became hostile to Oppenheimer, the physicist who had been director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project and who, after the war, became a celebrated public figure and remained in influential positions in atomic energy.

In 1947, Strauss, a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, presented Oppenheimer with the institute's offer to be its director. Strauss, a conservative Republican, had little in common with Oppenheimer, a liberal who had had Communist associations. Oppenheimer subsequently was a leading opponent of moving ahead with the hydrogen bomb and proposed a national security strategy based on atomic weapons and continental defense; Strauss wanted the development of thermonuclear weapons and a doctrine of deterrence.

In addition, Strauss disliked Oppenheimer on a variety of personal grounds. Starting in 1947, Strauss had been in a dispute with the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of senior atomic scientists, which Oppenheimer chaired and which reported to the AEC, over whether exporting radioisotopes for medical purposes was a risk to U.S. security, from which the scientists on the GAC developed a poor image of Strauss. Then during a public hearing in 1949, Oppenheimer had given a mocking answer to a point Strauss had raised on the subject, a humiliation that Strauss did not forget. Strauss was also offended that Oppenheimer had engaged in adulterous relations. Oppenheimer held a highest-level Q clearance, and was one of the most respected figures in atomic science, briefing the President and the National Security Council on several occasions. Oppenheimer's AEC consultancy, and the clearance that went with it, had just been renewed for another year by Gordon Dean, the outgoing chairman of the AEC; it would extend through June 30, 1954.

Strauss's misgivings about Oppenheimer went beyond dislike and disagreement. He had become aware of Oppenheimer's former Communist affiliations before World War II and had begun to think that Oppenheimer might even be a Soviet spy. For instance, Strauss was suspicious of Oppenheimer's tendency to downplay Soviet capabilities. In 1953, Oppenheimer stated in the July edition of Foreign Affairs that he believed the Soviets were "about four years behind" in nuclear weapons development. The United States had exploded the first thermonuclear device the previous year; however, only a month after Oppenheimer made his proclamation, in August 1953, the Soviet Union declared that it had tested its own fusion-based bomb, which U.S. sensors identified as a boosted fission weapon. Strauss was not alone in having his doubts; a number of other officials in Washington also suspected that Oppenheimer might be a security risk. The director readily did so; the tracking uncovered no evidence of disloyalty but that Oppenheimer had lied to Strauss about his reason for taking a trip to Washington (Oppenheimer met a journalist but had told Strauss that he had visited the White House). Strauss's suspicions increased further with the discovery that in 1948 and 1949 Oppenheimer had tried to stop the long-range airborne detection system that Strauss had championed and that had worked in discovering the Soviet Union's first atomic weapon test. At first Strauss moved cautiously, even heading off an attack on Oppenheimer by Senator Joseph McCarthy,

Oppenheimer security hearing

In November 1953, William L. Borden, the former executive director of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote a letter to the FBI alleging that "more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union." According to the book American Prometheus, Strauss collaborated and aided Borden in making the allegations against Oppenheimer. This action set into motion a chain of events. On December 3, 1953, Eisenhower, after consulting with Strauss and others, ordered a "blank wall" between Oppenheimer and all areas of government. On December 21, Strauss told Oppenheimer that his security clearance had been suspended, pending resolution of a series of charges outlined in a letter from Kenneth D. Nichols, general manager of the AEC. Rather than resign, Oppenheimer requested a hearing. Upon Strauss's request, FBI director Hoover ordered full surveillance on Oppenheimer and his attorneys, including tapping of phones; these wiretaps were illegal.

The hearing was held in April and May 1954, before an AEC Personnel Security Board. Strauss selected the three-man board, headed by Gordon Gray. He also picked the person who would lead the case against Oppenheimer, the trial attorney Roger Robb. Strauss had access to the FBI's information on Oppenheimer, including his conversations with his lawyers, which was used to prepare counterarguments against those lawyers in advance.

At the hearing, many top scientists, as well as government and military figures, testified on Oppenheimer's behalf.

Oppenheimer, however, admitted that he had previously lied to a military counterintelligence officer about a conversation his friend Haakon Chevalier had with him about passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. He also admitted that he had stayed with Chevalier only the previous December. Leslie Groves, the former director of the Manhattan Project, testified that under the stricter security criteria in effect in 1954, he "would not clear Dr. Oppenheimer today".

At the conclusion of the hearings, Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked by a 2–1 vote of the board. They unanimously cleared Oppenheimer of disloyalty, but a majority found that 20 of the 24 charges were either true or substantially true and that Oppenheimer would represent a security risk. Then on June 29, 1954, the AEC upheld the findings of the Personnel Security Board, by a 4–1 decision, with Strauss writing the majority opinion. In that opinion, Strauss stressed Oppenheimer's "defects of character", "falsehoods, evasions and misrepresentations", and past associations with Communists and people close to Communists as the primary reasons for his determination. He did not comment on Oppenheimer's loyalty.

Oppenheimer was thus stripped of his clearance: one day before it would have expired, and seven months after it had been suspended on the orders of the president.

The successor agency to the AEC later ruled that the hearing was "a flawed process that violated the Commission's own regulations." The loss of his security clearance ended Oppenheimer's role in government and policy. Oppenheimer returned to his directorship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, but Strauss, who was still on the board of trustees there, attempted to have him dismissed. However, in October 1954, the board voted to keep Oppenheimer on. In the years that followed, Strauss still hoped to remove Oppenheimer, but never got the votes on the board he needed.

In the wake of the AEC decision, public opinion and most scientists were firmly against Strauss. Nearly 500 of the scientists at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory signed a petition saying "this poorly founded decision ... will make it increasingly difficult to obtain adequate scientific talent in our defense laboratories." Strauss responded by first sending a letter to the petitioners saying that they were not trying to quash the expression of professional opinions &ndash; "We certainly do not want 'yes men' in the employ of the Atomic Energy Commission" &ndash; and followed that with a July 1954 visit to the laboratory to try to mollify the scientists.

In 2022, Jennifer Granholm, the United States Secretary of Energy – head of the successor organization to the AEC – vacated the 1954 revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance. Her decision was not based on revisiting the merits of the case against Oppenheimer, but rather on the flawed processes in the hearings that had violated the AEC's own regulations. Historian Alex Wellerstein states that Strauss had been a major culprit in those process violations.

Secretary of Commerce nomination

thumb|President Eisenhower lays the cornerstone of the new AEC building in Germantown, Maryland, in 1957 as AEC chairman Strauss (right) observes

Strauss's term as Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) chair completed at the end of June 1958. but Strauss feared the Senate would reject or at least subject him to ferocious questioning. Besides the Oppenheimer affair, he had clashed with Senate Democrats on several major issues, including his autocratic nature as AEC chair and his secretive handling of the Dixon–Yates contract. That contract involved a supply of electrical power in Tennessee without going through the Tennessee Valley Authority and Strauss had embarked on discussions about the idea without informing his fellow commissioners. The plan itself was controversial and eventually became a losing issue for Republicans in the 1954 U.S. midterm elections. By the end of the 1950s, Strauss had garnered the reputation, as a Time magazine profile put it, of being "one of the nation's ablest and thorniest public figures". Eisenhower also asked if Strauss would consider succeeding John Foster Dulles (who was ill) as Secretary of State but Strauss did not want to preempt Undersecretary Christian Herter, who was a good friend. Strauss took office via a recess appointment, Indeed, at the time the previous thirteen nominees for this Cabinet position had won Senate confirmation in an average of eight days. Due to a long-running feud between the two, Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico took up the cause of preventing Strauss's confirmation by the Senate. Anderson found an ally in Senator Gale W. McGee on the Senate Commerce Committee, which had jurisdiction over Strauss's confirmation. Strauss attempted to reach Truman through an intermediary to rescue the situation but was rebuffed and felt bitter at the lack of support. A group of scientists who were still upset over the role Strauss had played in the Oppenheimer hearings lobbied against confirmation, playing upon the pronunciation of their target's name by calling themselves the Last Straws Committee.

After sixteen days of hearings the Senate Commerce Committee recommended Strauss's confirmation to the full Senate by a vote of 9–8. with a Time cover story calling it "one of the biggest, bitterest, and in many ways most unseemly confirmation fights in Senate history". On June 19, 1959, just after midnight, the Strauss nomination failed by a vote 46–49. Voting for Strauss were 15 Democrats and 31 Republicans, voting against him were 47 Democrats and 2 Republicans.

It marked only the eighth instance in U.S. history in which a Cabinet appointee had failed to be confirmed by the Senate and would be the last one until John Tower in 1989. President Eisenhower, who had invested both personal and professional capital in the nomination of Strauss,

Final years

thumb|right|Strauss speaking at the dedication of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in 1962

The Commerce defeat effectively ended Strauss's government career. Strauss himself was hurt by the rejection and, never fully getting over it, tended to brood over events past.

Strauss published his memoir, Men and Decisions, in 1962. The book sold well, spending fifteen weeks on the New York Times Best Seller for non-fiction and rising as high as number five on that list. The general view of historians is that the memoir was self-serving. Strauss assisted in the organizing of support for the Barry Goldwater 1964 presidential campaign.

During his retirement Strauss devoted time to philanthropic activities He helped arrange a no-interest loan to fund a congregation building for the Los Alamos Jewish Center. where he engaged in cattle breeding and raised prized Black Angus. A book he was working on about Herbert Hoover was never completed. Strauss died of it on January 21, 1974, at his home, the Brandy Rock Farm in Brandy Station, Virginia. He is buried in Richmond Hebrew Cemetery along with more than sixty other family members.

Alice Hanauer Strauss lived until 2004, when she died at age 101 in Brandy Station.

Legacy

The Oppenheimer matter quickly became a cause célèbre, with Strauss frequently being cast in the role of villain. This was an image that would persist in both the near term and the long term. Strauss had his defenders as well, who saw the hero and villain roles as being reversed. Strauss, however, had been prominent in Jewish causes and organizations throughout his life, and this charge was implausible. Indeed, Strauss's papers take up seventy-six boxes in the archives of the American Jewish Historical Society; the executive director of that organization has remarked that, "I'm not gonna say he is a member of more Jewish organizations than any historical figure I've ever seen, but he's up there."

Strauss's personality was not simply categorized; a mid-1950s interviewer, political scientist Warner R. Schilling, found him bland and courteous in one session but prickly and temperamental in a second session.

At the start of his 1962 memoir, Strauss states his belief that "the right to live in the social order established [at the American founding] is so priceless a privilege that no sacrifice to preserve it is too great." In it, Pfau criticizes Strauss's conduct in the Oppenheimer affair, but presents it as the acts of a man with integrity who felt compelled to do what was necessary to protect the nation. Historian Barton J. Bernstein disagrees with this approach, saying that the framework is too generous and that Pfau errs in "seeing Strauss as a man of great integrity (Strauss's own claim) rather than as a man who used such claims to conceal sleazy behavior." In particular, Young looked at the publication during 1953 and 1954 of a popular magazine article and book that promoted a highly distorted notion that the hydrogen bomb project had been unreasonably stalled, both before Truman's decision and after, by a small group of American scientists working against the national interest; also that Strauss was one of the heroes who had overcome this cabal's efforts. Young points to circumstantial archival evidence that Strauss was behind both publications and may well have given classified information to the book authors involved (James R. Shepley and Clay Blair Jr.). Historian Priscilla Johnson McMillan has identified archival evidence which suggests to some degree that Strauss was in collusion with Borden, the former congressional staff member whose letter had triggered the Oppenheimer security hearing. McMillan also argues that following that letter, Strauss was likely behind Eisenhower's "blank wall" directive to separate Oppenheimer from nuclear secrets.

Oppenheimer biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin state that Strauss's decision to publish the transcript of the Oppenheimer security hearing even though witnesses had been promised their testimony would remain secret, rebounded against him in the long run, as the transcript showed how the hearing had taken the form of an inquisition.

In 2023, Bernstein stated that evidence developed in the prior two decades that Oppenheimer had been a secret member of the Communist Party partially vindicated Strauss. "Strauss was devious, thin-skinned, mean-spirited, and even vicious in helping to do in Robert Oppenheimer. But on some important matters—in even somewhat suspecting Oppenheimer’s political past—Strauss was not unreasonable."

Awards and honors

For his European relief work during and after World War I, Strauss was decorated by six nations. He received a similar medal from Poland. At the war's end he received an Oak Leaf Cluster—Army in lieu of a second such award, for his work in coordinating procurement processes. A Gold Star—Navy in lieu of a third award was given in 1947, for his work during and after the war as a special assistant to the Navy secretary and on joint Army–Navy industrial mobilization boards.

Strauss received a number of honorary degrees during his lifetime; indeed his advocates during the Secretary of Commerce confirmation hearings gave twenty-three as the number of colleges and universities that had awarded him such honors. These include, among others, an Honorary LL.D. from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1944, a Doctor of Humane Letters from Case Institute of Technology in 1948,

a Doctor of Laws from Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1956, a Doctor of Science from the University of Toledo in 1957,

and a Doctor of Science from Union College in 1958.

Strauss served on boards of directors for several corporations, one of which was the United States Rubber Company. He was a founding trustee of Eisenhower College, for which he had assisted in planning and raising funds. In 1955, Strauss received a silver plaque from the Men's Club of Temple Emanu-El for "distinguished service"; President Eisenhower sent a message to the ceremony saying the honor was well-deserved.

The cover of Time magazine featured Strauss twice. The first was in 1953 when he was AEC chair and the nuclear arms race was underway, and the second was in 1959 during his Secretary of Commerce confirmation process.

In media

Strauss is played by Phil Brown in the 1980 BBC miniseries Oppenheimer, and by Robert Downey Jr. in Christopher Nolan's 2023 film Oppenheimer. Downey received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal.

See also

• Unsuccessful nominations to the Cabinet of the United States

Writings

• Strauss, Lewis L. Men and Decisions (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1962).

Bibliography

References

External links

• Lewis L. Strauss Papers at the Hoover Presidential Library, link no longer given
• "Lewis Strauss and Robert Oppenheimer", blog entry at the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum
• Annotated bibliography for Lewis Strauss from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues
• Guide to the Papers of Admiral Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss (1896–1974) at the American Jewish Historical Society, New York.
• Full text of "too cheap to meter" speech, at Nuclear Regulatory Commission site
• Dwight D. Eisenhower, Remarks on Presentation of the Medal of Freedom to Lewis L. Strauss, at The American Presidency Project site

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