Lewis Strauss was a financier and government official from the United States who served as Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Strauss was born in the West Virginia town of Charleston.
Strauss worked for Food Administrator Herbert Hoover during World War I. This included working from Paris on the distribution of 27 million tons of food following the 1918 Armistice.
Strauss went to work for the investment bank Kuhn, Loeb after the war. He eventually joined the company and became a self-made millionaire.
Strauss built a reputation for intelligence, business acumen, and integrity, which served him well in his postwar career as an investment banker.
During WWII, his work in the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance earned him the rank of rear admiral.
Strauss was intolerant of dissent and inept at negotiating. He saw things in black and white terms. He dismissed evidence of long-term genetic dangers from radioactive fallout, but then insisted on more tests to develop a “clean” bomb.
Strauss became hostile to Oppenheimer, the physicist who had been director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project and who had become a celebrated public figure and remained influential in atomic energy after the war.
Mr. Strauss, a trustee of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, was, ironically, responsible for Dr. Oppenheimer’s appointment as director in 1947.
