the IAS faculty's first choice, a choice in which the trustees soon concurred. Strauss offered Oppenheimer the directorship late in 1946 when the financier visited the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory as part of the AEC review of its Manhattan Project inheritance. Oppenheimer dithered through spring 1947 — “I regard it as a very open question whether the Institute is an important place, and whether my coming will be of benefit,” he commented loftily at the time — but he and his wife Kitty heard news of his acceptance over their car radio while they were driving across the Bay Bridge one night in April and let that leak of accident decide them.
The new director has a sharp, selective mind, and his friends sometimes feel that he wins arguments too quickly. He and his family live in an 18-room, white colonial house near Fuld Hall, and Oppenheimer stops work at about 6:30 every evening to go home and play with his children, Peter, 6, and Katherine, 3- On Sundays he and his wife, who was a biologist, take the children out to hunt four-leaf clovers. Mrs. Oppenheimer, whose thinking is also direct, keeps her children from cluttering the house with four-leaf clovers by making them eat all they find right on the spot.
An accompanying full-page photograph showed a youthful Oppenheimer in a three-piece suit tenting his hands beside an amused Einstein comfortable in a sweatshirt; the great relativist,
The inconsistencies in Oppenheimer's security record followed him into his new responsibilities. As part of the transfer of authority from the Army to the new civilian agency, the AEC laboriously reviewed personnel security files. Oppenheimer's was thick. When the FBI had interviewed him on September 5, 1946, about George Eltenton and Haakon Chevalier, the former Los Alamos director had not only aligned himself with Chevalier's version of the disputed 1943 espionage contacts in contradiction to Eltenton. He had also denied that Kitty Oppenheimer's Lincoln Brigade friend, Steve Nelson, had ever approached him for information. The FBI, however, had a wiretap of Nelson telling another suspect physicist, Joseph Weinberg, “that he had previously approached Oppenheimer for the purpose of securing information concerning the project at the Radiation Laboratory but… that Oppenheimer had refused him the information.” Nelson's wiretap might have helped exonerate Oppenheimer from suspicions of disloyalty, but his prevarications raised further doubts. It took the AEC until late August 1947 to vote Oppenheimer a high-level Q clearance.
Lewis Strauss never reported when he first began to despise Robert Oppenheimer. Strauss was both intellectually insecure and thin-skinned, two weaknesses that would have made him especially vulnerable to the physicist's notorious arrogance. Finding his name at the bottom of the IAS faculty list of recommendations with Oppenheimer's at the top was a good start on enmity. Disagreeing politically added to their mutual ill-will; Strauss was a conservative Republican preoccupied with keeping atomic secrets, Oppenheimer a liberal who championed openness. Oppenheimer's friend Joseph Alsop, the influential journalist and columnist, would write of Strauss a few years later that he was a “natty, energetic, ambitious, and intelligent man” who was “all pliability” with his “chiefs” but who “likes no argument” from “equals and subordinates… One of his fellow commissioners has said of him, ‘If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you're just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.’” With such a man as Strauss, Alsop concludes, “Oppenheimer was fated from the first to get on badly.”
More elementally than political differences, Strauss seems to have been repelled by what he characterized as Oppenheimer's immorality. When Edward Teller, some years later, wanted to write that Oppenheimer had been “magnificent,” Strauss rebuked him waspishly: “Is a man magnificent who is what JRO was by his own admissions in respect to his veracity and personal morals? (Did Ernest Lawrence ever tell you what he did in the Tolman household?) Some other word maybe, Edward, but not ‘magnificent.’” What Oppenheimer had done in the Pasadena household of Caltech senior physicist Richard Tolman, before the war, had been to sleep with Kitty when she was still married to the English physician Stewart Harrison; that Strauss was still indignant two decades later at such gossip is a measure of the financier's psychological rigidity. “[Strauss] was a contrary person,” Herbert York confirms, “and very obstinate.”
Oppenheimer's nonchalant disregard of Judaism — the assimilationism that I. I. Rabi caricatured as Oppenheimer's inability to make up his mind “whether to be president of the B'nai B'rith or the Knights of Columbus” — threatened Strauss as well. In Washington in that era when anti-Semitism was routine within the political and social establishment, Strauss successfully presented himself as a secular administrator with a special competence in science, but he was also a prominent Jewish layman, president for a decade of Temple Emanu-El, the largest Jewish congregation in New York. “Strauss spoke with God, you know,” commented forthright Italian emigre physicist Emilio Segre, Fermi's close friend and fellow Nobel laureate, adding, perhaps redundantly, “I didn't like him.”
Strauss voted to approve Oppenheimer's Q clearance — in his memoirs he blames Groves for advising the commissioners to do so — but the two men were never friends. An early disagreement was foreign distribution of radioisotopes bred in US reactors for medical and industrial research. The GAC favored such distribution, believing it would build goodwill and foster the progress of science; Strauss disapproved. When the AEC commissioners met in August 1947 at the Bohemian Grove, north of San Francisco, the minutes report that Strauss found himself “the only member who was opposed to such action at this time… He… expressed doubt that the proposed restrictions to be placed on the shipment of radioisotopes abroad could effectively prevent their use for unfriendly purposes or their divergence to unfriendly hands which might endanger our national security.” For good measure, Strauss announced his opinion that the publication of the Smyth Report had been “a serious breach of security.” “The debate within the Commission was so bitter,” Groves gloated in a contemporary memo, “that Admiral Strauss almost resigned.”
Small quantities of radioisotopes for scientific research were never even remotely a threat to national security, but Strauss bullied the question obsessively, carrying tales to James Forrestal and leaking them to the
He… is very sensitive to moods and was obviously worked up… As I told him my story he said he still felt we are wrong about the foreign isotope matter… He said… he thought the best thing for him to do was to resign. I said that was absurd; but that it was essential that he realize how dangerous and fatal to everything we are doing it was for him to oppose Commission action
If Strauss could be obstinate, he could also be perspicacious. In 1939, advised by Leo Szilard, he had been one of the first to realize the implications of the discovery of nuclear fission. Almost his first act as a newly confirmed AEC commissioner, in April 1947, had been to ask what the US was doing about the long-range detection of foreign atomic tests. “It is to be presumed,” he had lobbied his fellow commissioners, “that any other country going into a large-scale manufacture of atomic weapons would be under the necessity of conducting at least one test to ‘prove’ the weapon. If there is no [US] monitoring system in effect, it is incumbent upon us to bring up the desirability of such an immediate step and, in default of action, to initiate it ourselves, at once.” The commissioners asked Strauss to look into the problem; he assigned his former Navy aide, William T. Golden, a businessman of independent wealth, to serve as AEC representative to a Long-Range Detection Committee organized at the AEC's instigation under the Air Force. Thereafter the USAF cooperated with the AEC to develop a capability to detect nuclear explosions anywhere in the world.
Curtis LeMay, whose August 1946 recommendation of long-range detection had preceded Lewis Strauss's by eight months, transferred abroad in October 1947 as commander of the United States Air Forces in Europe (USAFE), picking up a third star along the way to become a lieutenant general. He found the Germans “still in a state of utter shock” more than two years after their defeat, “like the walking dead,” and USAFE forces in not much
