Lewis Strauss

Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss (; January 31, 1896 – January 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.

Raised in Richmond, Virginia, Strauss became an assistant to Herbert Hoover as part of the Commission for Relief in Belgium during World War I and the American Relief Administration after that. Strauss then worked as an investment banker at Kuhn, Loeb & Co. during the 1920s and 1930s, where he amassed considerable wealth. As a member of the executive committee of the American Jewish Committee and several other Jewish organizations in the 1930s, Strauss made several attempts to change U.S. policy in order to accept more refugees from Nazi Germany but was unsuccessful. He also came to know and fund some of the research of refugee nuclear physicist Leo Szilard. During World War II, Strauss served as an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and rose to the rank of rear admiral due to his work in the Bureau of Ordnance in managing and rewarding plants engaged in production of munitions.

As a founding commissioner with the AEC during the early years of the Cold War, Strauss emphasized the need to protect U.S. atomic secrets and to monitor and stay ahead of atomic developments within the Soviet Union. Accordingly, he was a strong proponent of developing the hydrogen bomb. During his stint as chairman of the AEC, Strauss urged the development of peaceful uses of atomic energy, and he predicted that atomic power would make electricity "too cheap to meter". At the same time, he downplayed the possible health effects of radioactive fallout such as that experienced by Pacific Islanders following the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test.

Strauss was the driving force behind physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing, held in April and May 1954 before an AEC Personnel Security Board, in which Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's nomination of Strauss to become U.S. secretary of commerce resulted in a prolonged, public political battle in 1959 where Strauss was not confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

Strauss was born in Charleston, West Virginia, the son of Lewis Strauss, a successful shoe wholesaler, and his wife Rosa (née Lichtenstein)Fa. Their parents were émigrés of German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish origins 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. At the age of ten, he lost much of the vision in his right eye in a rock fight, which later disqualified him from normal military service.

Having developed an amateur's knowledge from reading textbooks, Strauss planned to study physics. He was on track to be valedictorian of his class at John Marshall High School, which would have entitled him to a scholarship to the University of Virginia, but typhoid fever in his senior year made him unable to take final exams or graduate with his classmates.

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, Strauss decided to work as a traveling shoe salesman for his father's company. In his spare time, Strauss studied his Jewish heritage. He was quite successful in his sales efforts; over the next three years, he saved $20,000 (equivalent to $503,000 in 2025): enough money to cover college tuition now that the scholarship offer was no longer in effect.

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. Accordingly, Strauss took the train to Washington, D.C., and talked his way into serving without pay as an assistant to Hoover. (Strauss and his biographer differ on whether this happened in February or May 1917, but the latter seems more likely.)

Hoover became chief of the United States Food Administration. Strauss worked well and soon was promoted to Hoover's private secretary and confidant. In that position he made powerful contacts that would serve him later on. One such contact he made was with attorney Harvey Hollister Bundy. Another was with Robert A. Taft, a counsel for the Food Administration.

Following the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Hoover became head of the post-war American Relief Administration, headquartered in Paris, and Strauss joined him there once more as his private secretary. 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.

The Commerce defeat effectively ended Strauss's government career. The numerous enemies that Strauss had made during his career took some pleasure from the turn of events. 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. At the time, Time magazine's review said it "may now remind readers of [Strauss's] many real accomplishments before they were obscured by political rows." 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.

The tie between Herbert Hoover and Strauss remained strong throughout the years; in 1962 Hoover wrote in a letter to Strauss: "Of all the men who have come into my orbit in life, you are the one who has my greatest affections, and I will not try to specify the many reasons, evidences or occasions." Strauss assisted in the organizing of support for the Barry Goldwater 1964 presidential campaign. He also remained on good terms with President Eisenhower and for several years in the 1960s Eisenhower and Strauss advocated construction of a nuclear-powered, regional desalination facility in the Middle East that would benefit both Israel and its Arab neighbors but the plan never found sufficient Congressional support to move forward.

During his retirement Strauss devoted time to philanthropic activities and to the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Alliance Israélite Universelle. He helped arrange a no-interest loan to fund a congregation building for the Los Alamos Jewish Center. He lived on a 2,000-acre (800 ha) farm, where he engaged in cattle breeding and raised prized Black Angus. A book he was working on about Herbert Hoover was never completed.

After battling lymphosarcoma for three years, Strauss died of it on January 21, 1974, at his home, the Brandy Rock Farm in Brandy Station, Virginia. His funeral was held in New York at Temple Emanu-El and there was also a memorial service held in the capital at Washington Hebrew Congregation. He is buried in Richmond Hebrew Cemetery along with more than sixty other family members.

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. Such polarized assessments followed Strauss for much of his career.

Even such matters as the unusual, Southern-based pronunciation of his surname could be perceived as a puzzling artificiality. In a 1997 essay in the New York Times Book Review commenting on the Oppenheimer matter, literary critic Alfred Kazin claimed Strauss "pronounced his own name 'Straws' to make himself sound less Jewish". 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. As Alden Whitman's front-page obituary of Strauss for the New York Times stated,

For about a dozen years at the outset of the atomic age Lewis Strauss, an urbane but sometimes thorny former banker with a gifted amateur's knowledge of physics, was a key figure in the shaping of United States thermonuclear policy. ... In the years of his mightiest influence in Washington, the owlish‐faced Mr. Strauss puzzled most observers. He was, on the one hand, a sociable person who enjoyed dinner parties and who was adept at prestidigitation; and, on the other hand, he gave the impression of intellectual arrogance. He could be warm-hearted yet seem at times like a stuffed shirt. He could make friends yet create antagonisms.

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." This sentiment became the basis of the title of, and the interpretative framework for, No Sacrifice Too Great, historian Richard Pfau's 1984 authorized biography of Strauss. 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."

For his European relief work during and after World War I, Strauss was decorated by six nations. These honors included the Chevalier, Belgian Order of Leopold I, the First Class Commander of the White Rose of Finland, and the Chevalier, Star of Roumania. He received a similar medal from Poland. Per a biographical account presented in the Congressional Record, he was also awarded the Grand Officer level of the Legion of Honour of France.

Strauss, then with the rank of captain, was awarded a Legion of Merit by the Navy in September 1944 for his work on Navy requirements regarding contract termination and disposal of surplus property. 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. Finally in 1959 he received a Gold Star in lieu of a fourth award, this time for his work on atomic energy as it benefited the Navy as a source of power and ship propulsion. He also received the Navy Distinguished Service Medal.

On July 14, 1958, Strauss was presented with the Medal of Freedom, a civilian honor, by President Eisenhower. The award was for "exceptional meritorious service" in the interest of the national security in his efforts towards both military and peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

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,

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.

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