Who was Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s eternal enemy – 03/19/2024 – Science

In “Oppenheimer”, the film by director Christopher Nolan that won seven Oscar awards this year, we follow the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atomic bomb.

The film covers his years at university, his leadership of the famous Los Alamos laboratory until the decline of his career years later.

But on screen we also see a skilled politician, who whispers in the ears of US presidents about nuclear matters and repeatedly questions the intentions of Oppenheimer, whom he suspects of having communist sympathies.

This other character is Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey Jr., who won the Oscar for best supporting actor.

Strauss was, in real life, a man with great power and influence in Washington in the mid-20th century.

He strongly distrusted Oppenheimer. They were at opposite ideological poles and had disagreements over nuclear energy that mixed with personal disputes.

Between Oppenheimer, the scientist, and Strauss, the politician, a conflict persisted which, as we see in the film, ended up having a high cost for both.

But how did Strauss, a man who never attended university, acquire such power that he was placed alongside the presidents of the United States? And what role did he really play in Oppenheimer’s decline?

From shoe salesman to millionaire

Born into a Jewish family in West Virginia, Strauss grew up wanting to be a physicist.

Unlike Oppenheimer, who lived in an upscale area of ​​Manhattan and had an extensive art collection, Strauss’s family was experiencing financial difficulties.

When it was time for young Lewis to enter college, he ended up having to dedicate himself to his father’s shoe sales business for a few years, as the business was going from bad to worse.

At a very young age, he developed a great admiration for Herbert Hoover, a Republican politician who would become president of the United States years later.

So much so that he offered to be his assistant without asking for a penny in return when Hoover was head of the United States food administration agency, the Food Administration, during the First World War.

“It became clear that helping to feed the hungry and clothe the naked in Belgium and northern France was to contribute to history,” Strauss wrote in his memoirs.

The young man impressed Hoover and he ended up being his lifelong mentor.

According to Richard Pfau, his biographer, “Strauss rose to the top thanks to his skill, his ambition, his choice of the right company and wife, and the good fortune of starting out at a prosperous time.”

Strauss married Alice Hanauer, daughter of one of the partners at the investment bank where he worked.

At the same time, he remained close to Herbert Hoover, which is why he was part of his presidential campaigns in 1920, 1928 (when he won) and 1932.

Alliances and influence

Until the outbreak of World War II, Strauss alternated political life with a successful banking career, as well as making efforts to help Jewish communities under increasing attack in Europe.

In 1941, he entered active duty in the Army. From Washington, he helped manage munitions for the US Navy during the war.

During this period, his position and influence increased even further. He built alliances with people in high places, including President Harry Truman.

After his parents died from cancer, he decided to dedicate part of his time and money to developing treatments against the disease. This is how he came to the field of nuclear energy.

Nuclear career

Despite his interest in the area, he was relatively distant from the Manhattan project, which developed the first atomic bomb for the United States.

But little more than a year after the detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman appointed him as one of the commissioners of the newly created Atomic Energy Commission.

This was the entity that the United States created in the post-war period to transfer atomic energy research from military authorities to civil authorities.

On the commission, Strauss promoted a surveillance system that detected the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb test in 1949.

Faced with the realization that the USA had ceased to be the only country in the world with nuclear bombs, Strauss firmly defended the development of the hydrogen bomb, a thermonuclear weapon much more powerful than the atomic bomb.

It was then that Strauss met for the first time with J. Robert Oppenheimer, who had headed the laboratory responsible for building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

After the war, Oppenheimer became a popular figure: a technocrat with great credibility and, of course, an authoritative voice on the subject of nuclear weapons.

He was also a leading opponent of the hydrogen bomb. And he also defended a policy of transparency regarding the number of nuclear weapons that the United States possessed and their destructive capacity.

However, Strauss believed that such outspokenness could only benefit the Soviets.

As the film portrays, this discussion occurred at the same time that Strauss suspected Oppenheimer’s true intentions.

The distrust was fueled by the fact that several people close to Oppenheimer were members of the American Communist Party, including his brother and his wife.

“I am not a communist, but I have been a member of almost every Communist Front organization on the West Coast,” Oppenheimer himself wrote on a security form when he joined the Manhattan Project.

Strauss’ opinion on the hydrogen bomb was what ultimately convinced President Truman. In January 1950, the president announced his decision to continue with its development.

With this achievement, Strauss moved away from the world of power for a few years, but not long.

In the 1952 presidential campaign, he strongly supported Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower.

When Eisenhower came to power, he named him head of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Doublespeak

With Strauss’s help, Eisenhower attempted to calm American fears about the arms race by highlighting the potential peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

In December 1953, the then president gave a speech at the United Nations entitled “Atoms for Peace”.

In this context, Strauss was instrumental in the construction of Shippingport, the first nuclear power plant for peaceful purposes.

One of them resulted in radiological contamination of such an order that it left serious consequences for the health of the inhabitants of the nearby islands.

The commission led by Strauss initially tried to hide the effects of this contamination and he himself minimized the situation several times.

He also opposed any attempt to stop nuclear testing or ban nuclear energy research in order to prevent its proliferation.

Strauss vs. Oppenheimer

As head of the Atomic Energy Commission, Strauss continued his rivalry with Oppenheimer.

In fact, he made it a condition of accepting the position that the physicist be kept away from all confidential information on nuclear matters.

After a few months in office, Strauss asked the director of the FBI (the US federal police) to monitor Oppenheimer’s movements.

Shortly thereafter, William Borden, a World War II veteran who had also been director of the commission, sent a letter to the FBI stating: “J. Robert Oppenheimer is most likely an agent of the Soviet Union.”

According to journalists and historians Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Strauss and Borden secretly collaborated to make this accusation.

“Borden would do the dirty work and Strauss would give him access to the information he needed,” they explain in the book “American Prometheus”, a biography of Oppenheimer.

Then came Strauss’s final attack, depicted in Nolan’s film.

Oppenheimer was subjected to a hearing to confirm or revoke his security clearances, given Borden’s allegations.

The security clearance was essential for Oppenheimer to continue working as an advisor in Washington’s power circles.

The scientist had to present records of his meetings and connections before a security board of the Atomic Energy Commission, made up of three members, all appointed by Strauss.

The head of the commission also chose the lawyer who handled the case against Oppenheimer and had access to information the FBI had on the father of the atomic bomb, according to historian Richard Rhodes.

The hearing concluded that Oppenheimer could be a risk to national security.

That was the end of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s position of respect and influence in the USA.

Strauss himself wrote the council’s conclusions, in which he emphasized Oppenheimer’s “defects of character” and his past associations with communists.

The council’s decision was heavily criticized by the scientific community at the time.

Many decades later, in 2022, the US Department of Energy concluded that the procedure violated the commission’s own regulations.

“Over time, more evidence has emerged of the bias and unfairness of the process Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to,” wrote Joe Biden’s Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm.

The Senate’s ‘no’

In 1958, President Eisenhower decided to give Strauss the position of White House Secretary of Commerce.

To be appointed to the position, Strauss had to be approved by the Senate.

What used to be a mere formality became the Eisenhower administration’s most important fight in Congress.

The Senate spent more than three months reviewing the nomination. Strauss’s tenure at the Atomic Energy Commission earned him many enemies in Washington, who opposed his selection for the new position.

Finally, the Senate decided on a surprising “no” — an episode that, for some historians, inaugurated a new phase in the relationship between Congress and the White House that still remains.

“This is the second most shameful day in the history of the Senate,” Eisenhower said of the decision at the time.

It was a humiliating defeat for Strauss and the end of his career.

He ended up marginalized from power and dedicated to philanthropic work.

Pfau, Strauss’s biographer, described him as an angry and reserved man who never backed down or apologized, regardless of the consequences.

Yet, in Pfau’s own words, it was he who “dominated American nuclear policy more than any other man in the formative years of the atomic age.”

After battling lymphoma for three years, Strauss died in 1974 at the age of 77.