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Lewis Strauss was greying and considerably thinner in thatch when he headed back to Washington at the outbreak of World War II. A reserve lieutenant commander, he first took a berth in the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance. But both his business-world connections and his abilities were above his rank and billet. Fellow Wall Streeter Jim Forrestal installed Strauss on his staff as a special assistant.
Strauss irked regular Navy brass by his quiet wit, his lighthearted breaches of standard operating procedure, and his continual defense of the Navy reserves. But he came out of the war a well-decorated rear admiral (D.S.M., Legion of Merit with Gold Star and Oakleaf Cluster). His chairborne specialties: contract termination, the Navy's rejuvenated inspection system, the new Office of Naval Research, and the important new Interdepartmental Committee on Atomic Energy.
A Question of Observation. Early in his first term on Truman's Atomic Energy Commission, Strauss was shocked to discover that the U.S. had set up no system of detecting Russian atomic explosions. Detection involved no insoluble scientific problems; it was simply a question of manning observation posts around the world. Strauss argued his point before a meeting of AEC, but no action was taken on the ground that a detection system had not been budgeted for. Strauss turned to his friends in the Pentagon. They agreed to foot the bill if AEC would provide the technical apparatus and instruction. The detection system (consisting of a secret combination of methods including high-altitude patrols and seismographic checks) was rushed into operation by the fall of 1947, got a successful test run during the 1948 U.S. bomb tests at Eniwetok.
In most of his major 4-1 battles, Strauss had outside allies. Defense Secretary Forrestal was generally on his side. So were powerful members of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy; in fact, Strauss was frequently blamed for contributing to a succession of Joint Committee investigations of Lilienthal. Within the AEC staff, Strauss had one important friend who shared his fear that the U.S. was not enforcing atomic secrecy strictly enough. This friend was AEC's director of security, Rear Admiral John Gingrich.
Erasure by Telephone. One day in 1948, Navyman Gingrich came to Strauss in high excitement. One of AEC's top-ranking physicists, Dr. Cyril Smith, was in England for an atomic conference with British scientists. Gingrich had just come upon a copy of a letter from an AEC staffman authorizing Dr. Smith to discuss with the British "the basic metallurgy of plutonium." To Admiral Gingrich, and to Strauss, this meant that the U.S. was about to reveal a vital detail of the explosive material in the latest type of atomic bomb—a clear violation of the McMahon Act. Lilienthal and two other commissioners were out of town. Acting Chairman Sumner Pike refused to get excited. So Strauss rounded up Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg and Iowa's Bourke Hickenlooper, persuaded them to go to Forrestal. Forrestal. for his part, checked with his scientific consultant, .Dr. Vannevar Bush, then telephoned Pike that the Defense Department "regarded the conveyance of this information as extremely serious and to be halted if humanly possible."