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.
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hearing, held in April and May 1954 before an AEC Personnel Security Board, in which Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked.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.
Early life 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.Strauss, Men and Decisions, p. 1. 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,Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, p. 5. 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.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, p. 7.
By the time he finally graduated from high school, his family's business had experienced a downturn during the Recession of 1913–1914.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 7–9. 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.Baker, "A Slap at the 'Hidden-Hand Presidency'", p. 3. He was quite successful in his sales efforts; over the next three years, he saved $20,000 (): enough money to cover college tuition now that the scholarship offer was no longer in effect.Strauss, Men and Decisions, p. 3.
Career World War I
Strauss's mother encouraged him to perform public or humanitarian service.Bernstein, "Sacrifices and Decisions", p. 109. 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 FebruaryStrauss, Men and Decisions, p. 9. or May 1917, but the latter seems more likely.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 9–12, 256–257n21.)
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.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 16–18. 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.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 20–21.
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.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 16–18, 23–25. Strauss acted as a liaison between Hoover's organization and JDC workers in a number of Central and Eastern European countries.Wentling, "Herbert Hoover and American Jewish non-Zionists", p. 382. 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.Wentling, "Herbert Hoover and American Jewish non-Zionists", pp. 384–385. 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.Wentling, "Herbert Hoover and American Jewish non-Zionists", pp. 385–387. After a while, the situation for Jews in Poland did (temporarily) improve.Wentling, "Herbert Hoover and American Jewish non-Zionists", p. 389.Strauss, Men and Decisions, p. 25.
Strauss had grown up in Virginia, in a culture that venerated Southern military heroes of the "War Between the States",Strauss, Men and Decisions, p. vii. 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.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 15–16. 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.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 24–25, 84–85.
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.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 25–26. In addition Hoover had introduced Strauss to Mortimer Schiff, another partner at Kuhn Loeb, who interviewed Strauss in Paris and offered him a job. In so doing, Strauss turned down an offer to become comptroller for the newly forming League of Nations.
Strauss returned to the United States and started at Kuhn Loeb in 1919. As a result, he never did attend college, a fact that may have led to the perfectionist and defensive personality traits that he exhibited later in life.
Kuhn Loeb's major customers were railroads, and by the mid-1920s, Strauss was helping to arrange financing for new railroad terminal buildings in Cincinnati and Richmond and for the reorganizations of the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 29, 34–37. By 1926 his yearly compensation from the firm had reached $75,000 () and by the next year, $120,000 (). Subsequently, Strauss arranged the firm's financing for steel companies such as Inland Steel, Republic Steel, and Great Lakes Steel. He became a full partner in 1929, at which point he was making a million dollars a year, and he endured the Wall Street Crash of 1929 without significant financial damage. With the firm he helped bring to market Kodachrome film for Eastman Kodak and the Polaroid camera for Edwin H. Land.
On March 5, 1923, Strauss married Alice Hanauer in a ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York. Born in 1903, she was the daughter of Jerome J. Hanauer, who was one of the Kuhn Loeb partners. She was a New York native who had attended Vassar College and was a skilled equestrian and potter. The couple had two sons, one of whom did not survive early childhood. While in New York, they lived on Central Park West, then on the Upper East Side, and later on Central Park South.
Strauss had involvements in the New York City community. In particular, he was on the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera Company and later the Metropolitan Opera Association and was also on the boards of the American Relief Administration and the American Children's Fund. He was a member of American Bankers Association and New York State Chamber of Commerce.
Hoover was a candidate for the Republican Party nomination in the United States presidential election, 1920; Strauss campaigned for him and attended the 1920 Republican National Convention on his behalf, but Hoover failed to gain significant support.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 30–32. 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. Over several years, Strauss engaged in activities designed to strengthen the Republican Party in Virginia and the South overall.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 38–40, 47. 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.Bernstein, "Sacrifices and Decisions", p. 107.Pfau, No Sacrifice Too Great, pp. 41–42.
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.Bird and Sherwin, American Prometheus, pp. 361–362. He shared this antipathy with Hoover, who increasingly adopted an ideologically conservative, anti-New Deal viewpoint in the years following his defeat.