Lewis Strauss

Origins and early life

Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss was born in Charleston, West Virginia, on 31 January 1896 and grew up in Richmond, the son of Lewis Strauss, a shoe wholesaler, and of Rosa Lichtenstein, both from German and Austrian Jewish families.

Work and career

He gave up a place at university in 1917 to work unpaid as Herbert Hoover's private secretary, followed him through the relief of Belgium and the American Relief Administration, and spent the years after the war on Jewish relief in a ruined Europe. He then made a fortune at Kuhn, Loeb & Co., served in the naval reserve between the wars, ran ordnance work through the Second World War and came out of it a rear admiral.

For ten years from 1938 he was president of Congregation Emanu-El in New York, he worked for the American Jewish Committee, and after cancer took his mother and then his father in the nineteen-thirties he became a trustee of the Memorial Hospital for cancer in New York. He was one of the first commissioners of the Atomic Energy Commission, appointed in 1946, pressed harder than anyone for the hydrogen bomb, and as its chairman from 1953 built the Atoms for Peace programme that Eisenhower announced that December.

He also, in 1954, engineered the hearing that stripped J. Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance and ended his public life, a proceeding the United States Department of Energy formally vacated on 16 December 2022, finding that the Commission had broken its own rules and that the process had been biased and unfair. The Senate refused him as Eisenhower's Secretary of Commerce on 19 June 1959, forty-six votes to forty-nine, one of the very few Cabinet nominees ever rejected.

Later years

He died at Brandy Station, Virginia, on 21 January 1974, ten days short of seventy-eight; half a century later a film put his face in front of millions who had never heard of the Atomic Energy Commission.