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A vital key to Lewis Strauss's character is a perfectionism that still seems to nag him at an age when he might have become more mellowed. It shows in the studied elegance of his tailoring, in a precision of speech that comes natural to him from long habit but seems a bit affected to unfriendly ears, and above all in a fierce reluctance to admit his mistakes, no matter how human and understandable they may have been. Some of his perfectionism traces back to a sense of being an outsider. As a Jew, he has sometimes felt the wounding edges of anti-Semitism (and again last week, that ugly term popped up). For all his wealth (he is a millionaire) and intellect (even his enemies admit that he is brainy), Strauss seems unable to live down in his own mind an awareness that he never went to college and that he started out as a traveling shoe salesman.
"Colossal Effrontery." Son of a Virginia shoe jobber, Lewis Strauss (pronounced straws) was born in Charleston, W. Va., raised in Richmond. Chosen valedictorian of his high school class, he combined his two boyhood passions, physics and religion, in an address entitled "Science and Theology: A Reconciliation." "Fortunately," says Strauss, "this colossal effrontery has not survived."
Instead of accepting the scholarship offered to him by the University of Virginia, Strauss set out to sell shoes for the family firm, headed southward with volumes of Latin poetry—Virgil, Ovid, Horace—packed along with his samples. After four years in the shoe business, he took a train to Washington in 1917 and offered his services as a volunteer worker for Herbert Hoover's Belgian Relief Commission. Drawing no pay (he skimped along on his savings), Strauss worked for Hoover for 2½ years, first as a sort of office boy and then as secretary ("My jewel of a secretary," Hoover called him). When Hoover went to Europe as wartime Food Administrator, he took Strauss along.
Into the Money. After war's end, the Wall Street investment firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. astonished Lewis Strauss by offering him a job at a five-figure starting salary. A Kuhn, Loeb partner, passing through Hoover's headquarters in Paris, had spotted Strauss as a truly promising young man. He was right. Sometime Shoe Salesman Strauss prospered spectacularly on Wall Street, pushed Kuhn, Loeb into highly profitable steel-company financing (Inland, Republic, Great Lakes), became a full partner at 32, piled up a fortune.
Invited to dinner early in his Kuhn, Loeb career by Partner Jerome Hanauer, Strauss offered to help Hanauer's pig-tailed daughter Alice with her Latin homework. He made some mistakes in translation, as Alice found out in class next day, but she apparently forgave him. In 1923, when she was 18 and he was 27, they were married. The Strausses have one son, Lewis H., 35, a Baltimore physicist, and three grandchildren.