After helping to create the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer was immediately declared a national hero, as his nuclear-fission weapons helped end World War II. But, as Christopher Nolan’s new film explores, things quickly shifted for Oppenheimer. When he spoke out, questioning the future use of these bombs, he was discredited and put through inquiries set up only to tarnish his name.
As we learn in the film, one of the men behind destroying Oppenheimer’s reputation was Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey Jr. in a career-best performance. But who was Strauss, and what part did he play in Oppenheimer’s downfall?
The backstory
Strauss was born in 1896 in Charleston, West Virginia, and his parents were Jewish emigrants from Germany and Austria. As a boy, his plan was to study physics at university, but his father’s business suffered in a recession, so he was forced to become a shoe salesman instead.
When World War I broke out, he worked as an assistant to Herbert Hoover, who in 1917 became chief of the United States Food Administration. Strauss followed him as his personal assistant when Hoover became head of the post-war American Relief Administration.
After the war, he became a highly successful investment banker, and arranged financing for railroads, Kodachrome film and Polaroid camera, among many projects.
Nuclear work
Both of Strauss’ parents died of cancer, and it is said that this fact, alongside his enthusiasm for physics, led him into the field to make contacts with academics who were working on using radiation to treat the illness.
After working in the Navy’s Department of Ordnance to work on weapon production, in 1946, he became a member of the newly created Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), and was appointed this role by President Truman. He later became its chief commissioner.
After the Trinity nuclear bomb test in July 1945, the Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb in 1949, and Strauss was vocal in how America should prioritise the advancements of nuclear weapons and how the information should be kept secret from other nations. Strauss argued vigorously for a crash program to build a hydrogen bomb and is quoted as saying: “The time has now come for a quantum jump in our planning... We should now make an intensive effort to get ahead with the super.”
Oppenheimer and Strauss
In 1947, Strauss and Oppenheimer had already crossed paths, when Oppenheimer was heading up the Los Alamos laboratory, and Strauss then offered him a job as director at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
But the two men clashed on opinions. According to No Sacrifice Too Great: The Life of Lewis L. Strauss by Richard Pfau: “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 defence; Strauss wanted the development of thermonuclear weapons and a doctrine of deterrence…Oppenheimer supported a policy of openness regarding the numbers and capabilities of the atomic weapons in America's arsenal; Strauss believed that such unilateral frankness would benefit no one but Soviet military planners.”
The same year, the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of senior atomic scientists questioned Strauss over whether exporting radioisotopes for medical purposes was risking U.S. security. When there was a hearing for this issue in 1949, the pair had a run in, when Oppenheimer appeared to be mocking Strauss on the stand, which was apparently “a humiliation which Strauss would not forget.”
With a raging dislike for Oppenheimer and a paranoid notion that he might be a spy, Strauss pulled in a favour from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, to put surveillance on Oppenheimer. The surveillance didn’t reveal anything other than Oppenheimer had lied about meeting a journalist in Washington, rather than going to the White House.
Strauss then got word that Oppenheimer tried to dial back a long-range airborne detection system that Strauss had worked on, and Strauss doubled down on the tracking of his now rival. After speaking again with Hoover, Oppenheimer was tracked and his phone illegally bugged.
Pulling together enough information on Oppenheimer, Strauss was pivotal in a month-long AEC Personnel Security Board hearing in April 1954. The plan was to take down Oppenheimer; frame him as a communist (even though his wife and brother were no longer part of the communist party), as a potential spy, and to have him stripped of his access all areas security clearance.
It’s been suggested by the historian Priscilla Johnson McMillan that Strauss was in collusion with William L. Borden, who wrote a letter flagging up Oppenheimer to the White House, and which triggered the following security hearing, adding that: “Strauss was likely behind Eisenhower's ‘blank wall’ directive to separate Oppenheimer from nuclear secrets.”
According to Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes: “The hearings broke Oppenheimer's spirit and he was never the same person afterward.”
In 1958, Strauss arranged with Eisenhower to give him the position of Secretary of Commerce at the White House, however there was an outcry from the Senate. In 1959, after two months of hearings, the Senate rejected his nomination to be Secretary of Commerce, a humiliating defeat for Strauss.
In later life he moved back into philanthropic ventures, and he died, aged 78, in 1974.
