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Lewis Strauss

Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss (31 January 1896-21 January 1974) was the Republican United States Secretary of Commerce from 13 November 1958 to 19 June 1959, succeeding Sinclair Weeks and preceding Frederick H. Mueller.

Biography[]

Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss was born in Charleston, West Virginia in 1896, the son of Jewish parents from German and Austria. Strauss was raised in Richmond, Virginia, and he worked as a traveling shoe salesman for his father's company before serving as US Food Administration chief Herbert Hoover's private secretary during World War I. After the war, Strauss continued to work with Hoover and with food relief organizations, as well as aiding suffering Jewish refugees. Strauss became an investment banker with Kuhn, Loeb & Co. during the 1920s and 1930s, amassing considerable wealth, and he became an executive committeeman of the American Jewish Committee and unsuccessfully advocated for the acceptance of more refugees from Nazi Germany. Strauss served as a US Navy reserve officer during World War II, rising to the rank of rear admiral due to his work in the Bureau of Ordnance. After the war, he became a founding commissioner of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, supporting the protection of US atomic secrets and staying ahead of atomic developments within the Soviet Union. Strauss was a strong proponent of developing a hydrogen bomb to stay one step ahead of the USSR, and he also urged the development of peaceful uses of atomic energy, predicting that atomic power would make electricity "too cheap to meter." He also covered up the possible health effects of radioactive fallout, such as those experienced by Pacific islanders following the 1954 Bikini Atoll test.

Strauss made the acquaintance of J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1947 when he, as a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, made Oppenheimer the director of the institute. Strauss, a conservative Republican, grew worried that the progressive Oppenheimer had badmouthed him to Albert Einstein, and Oppenheimer, at a public hearing, mocked Strauss' concerns about the export of radioisotopes for medical purposes (which Strauss believed could lead to other countries acquiring nuclear secrets) by pointing out that scientists could even use the study of a sandwich to observe the functions of atoms, making the amateur physicist Strauss appear like a fool. Strauss, humiliated, handed Boris Pash's intelligence files on Oppenheimer's past communist associations to William L. Borden, who used the files to claim that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy; this resulted in the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing and the revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance by the Atomic Energy Commission, which Strauss chaired from 1953 to 1958.

Strauss went on to be appointed Secretary of Commerce by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in a recess appointment in November 1958, but the US Senate was strongly opposed to the ambitious Strauss, whose autocratic nature as AEC chair and secretive handling of a controversial energy contract in Tennessee damaged his reputation. At Strauss' confirmation hearings in 1959, physicist-turned-journalist David Hill, claiming to speak on behalf of the scientific community, revealed Strauss' private motives in sabotaging and discrediting Oppenheimer, and Strauss' nomination failed by a 49-46 vote in the first time since 1925 when a Cabinet appointee failed to be confirmed by the Senate. Strauss resigned from his recess appointment on 23 June 1959, and he retired to philanthropic pursuits and died on his ranch in Brandy Station, Virginia in 1974.

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