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Battle for the Bomb. A Reserve lieutenant commander, Strauss headed for Washington at the outbreak of World War II to do deskbound Navy duty. Bad eyesight, the result of a boyhood rock fight, kept him out of shooting war. In wartime Washington, he originated the morale-building idea of awarding an "E" (for Excellence) pennant to outstanding war plants, helped set up the Office of Naval Research, wound up with the rank of rear admiral and the top medals a chairborne warrior could win: Distinguished Service Medal, Legion of Merit.
After the war, Democrat Harry Truman named Republican Strauss to the brand-new Atomic Energy Commission under Chairman David Lilienthal. Strauss soon started finding himself on the minority end of 4-to-1 AEC decisions. Unable to persuade his fellow AEC commissioners to set up a system to detect Soviet atomic tests, he sidestepped them by taking his case to friends at the Pentagon. When the detection system, set up at Strauss's urging, picked up radiation from the Soviet Union's first atomic explosion in September 1949, Strauss, proven man of scientific foresight, set off another minority campaign: the fight to get an H-bomb program started against the combined opposition of his fellow commissioners and the scientists of the AEC's General Advisory Committee, chaired by prestigious Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Strauss cannot claim sole credit for finally persuading Harry Truman to issue the order, early in 1950, to get going on an H-bomb program. Playing equally important roles were Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, and Connecticut's late Democratic Senator Brien McMahon. But without Strauss's lonely battling, the decision would have come much later, possibly too late. As it was, the U.S. tested its first H-bomb only nine months before the first Soviet H-bomb explosion in mid-1953.
Endless Rumble. Soon after President Truman announced his H-bomb decision, Lewis Strauss, his momentous fight won, resigned, to go back into the world of high finance as financial adviser to the Rockefellers. In June 1953, President Eisenhower tabbed Strauss (who had supported his longtime friend Bob Taft for the G.O.P. nomination) as AEC chairman.
Strauss's five years as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission resounded with an endless rumble of controversy. The wounding wrangle that followed the suspension of Physicist Oppenheimer's security clearance made Lewis Strauss many an unforgiving enemy among the nation's scientists. Conservative Strauss angered champions of public power by insisting on confining AEC's nuclear-power role to research and design, leaving the job of building reactors for commercial power to private enterprise. He drew much of the blame for AEC's heavily attacked (and long since canceled) Dixon-Yates contract, under which a private utility firm was supposed to build a power plant at West Memphis, Ark., right in the jealously guarded public-power domain of the Tennessee Valley Authority. He outraged stop-the-tests advocates by urging continued nuclear tests, with emphasis on developing "clean" weapons.