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Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss ( STRAWZ; January 31, 1896 – January 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 chair 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 Oppenheimer's security clearance hearing, held in April and May 1954 before an AEC Personnel Security Board, in which physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance was revoked. As a result, Strauss has often been regarded as a villain in American history. 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 Rosa (née Lichtenstein) and Lewis Strauss, a successful shoe wholesaler. Their parents were Jewish emigrants from Germany and Austria who came to the United States in the 1830s and 1840s and settled in Virginia. 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, 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. By the time he finally graduated from high school, his family's business had experienced a downturn during the Recession of 1913–1914. 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. He was quite successful in his sales efforts; over the next three years, he saved $20,000 (equivalent to $476,000 in 2023): enough money to cover college tuition now that the scholarship offer was no longer in effect. Career World War I Strauss's mother encouraged him to perform public or humanitarian service. 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 February or May 1917, but the latter seems more likely.) 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. 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. 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. Strauss acted as a liaison between Hoover's organization and JDC workers in a number of Central and Eastern European countries. 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. 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. After a while, the situation for Jews in Poland did (temporarily) improve. Strauss had grown up in Virginia, in a culture that venerated Southern military heroes of the "War Between the States", 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. 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. 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. In addition Hoover had introduced Strauss to Mortimer Schiff, another partner at Kuhn Loeb, who interview.... Discover the Dwight R Kuhn popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Dwight R Kuhn books.