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Harry Truman nominated Strauss to the first Atomic Energy Commission in 1946. From the first meeting, there were signs of the ideological struggle to come. Strauss's fellow commissioners were an Iowa editor, an atomic physicist, a former Securities & Exchange commissioner. The chairman was David Eli Lilienthal, known for his good and peaceful works at the Tennessee Valley Authority. The commission met in a time of hope and confusion—hope that Russia would agree to international control of atomic energy, confusion over moral questions raised by the bomb. Many of the scientists who had created the A-bomb were filled with paralyzing ethical doubts. They had wrested the bomb from the military and deposited it (under the McMahon Act) in the hands of the civilian AEC. Strauss stepped into this general atmosphere of baseless hope and emotional hand-wringing with a sense of purpose and humility: a devout Jew, he suggested that the first meeting begin with a silent prayer. Lilienthal agreed. But after that, Strauss and Lilienthal found themselves at the poles of arguments basic to U.S. security.
David Lilienthal had come into public life as a protégé of Wisconsin's Governor Phil La Follette. Franklin Roosevelt chose him to run TVA, and he fought and won most of TVA's bitter ideological battles. To the infant atomic energy program, this liberal background was invaluable because the atomic scientists trusted Lilienthal, and he was able to get them to stay on in the laboratory instead of following their urge to return to the campus. But Lilienthal was an idealist who rebelled inwardly at the job of making bombs, who traveled the land to deliver esoteric speeches lamenting secrecy, urging the public to be more curious about the atomic program.
"Take Off Your Coat." Lewis Strauss came to AEC along a quite different path. After graduating in 1913 from John Marshall High School in Richmond, he took to the road as a shoe drummer for his father's wholesale firm. By day he displayed his 14 trays of shoes, by night he read Ovid and Horace, studied law and physics.
One day in 1917, Strauss, at 21, left his job in the shoe firm and rode the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad to Washington. He hiked over to the Willard Hotel, where he buttonholed Herbert Hoover and asked for a job on Hoover's Belgian Relief Commission. "When can you go to work?" asked Hoover. "Right away," said Strauss. "Take off your coat," said Hoover.
By 1919, Hoover was director general of the Allied Supreme Economic Council, and Lewis Strauss was his personal secretary. The job whirled the Richmond shoe drummer into the world of Wilsonian diplomacy and European intrigue. It also brought him two contacts of lifetime importance: he 1) struck up a friendship with Robert Alphonso Taft, who was serving as assistant counsel for Hoover; 2) caught the eye of Hoover's visitor, Mortimer Schiff, millionaire member of the Wall Street investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.
In September 1919, at age 23, Strauss went to work for Kuhn, Loeb. There, between wars, he piloted the financing of dozens of major industrial projects, e.g., Great Lakes Steel, Kodachrome film, Studebaker Corp., married Alice Hanauer, the daughter of a Kuhn, Loeb partner, and wound up occupying the office of old Otto Kahn himself.