Lewis Strauss’s failed commerce secretary nomination

Lewis Strauss’s failed commerce secretary nomination was a 1959 Senate defeat that brought his conflict with J. Robert Oppenheimer into the open and helped prevent his return to high office. The vote was close—49–46—but its consequences extended beyond the appointment: Strauss regarded the defeat as evidence that the Oppenheimer case had become a continuing political reprisal, while the case itself followed both men for the rest of their lives.

Background: The Oppenheimer case

Strauss’s enmity toward J. Robert Oppenheimer had deepened after the 1954 security hearing. The dispute was not simply a matter of personal antagonism: Oppenheimer’s recommendations on nuclear weapons and his political associations had been assembled into a case against his reliability. In 1953, while Oppenheimer was away in Europe, William L. Borden used material from Oppenheimer’s security file to draft a brief for J. Edgar Hoover. Its conclusion was that Oppenheimer was, “more probably than not,” a Soviet agent. Strauss had arranged for Borden to remove the file from the Atomic Energy Commission’s vault, linking Strauss to the documentary campaign that preceded the hearing.

By the time Eisenhower nominated Strauss as commerce secretary, the Oppenheimer hearing had become a central factor in the confirmation battle. The nomination therefore reopened a dispute that had once been conducted through security files, accusations, and a closed hearing, bringing its judgments into a public contest over Strauss’s fitness for office.

The confirmation battle

Oppenheimer’s defenders, among them McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., lobbied Senator John F. Kennedy and drew his attention to Strauss’s conduct in the case. Kennedy initially protested that “It would require an extreme case to vote against the president.” Bundy answered, “Well, this is an extreme case,” and laid out what he considered Strauss’s reprehensible behavior in the Oppenheimer matter. Convinced by that account, Kennedy changed his vote.

The Senate rejected the nomination by 49 votes to 46. Strauss blamed Senator Clinton Anderson and Kennedy for the loss, but the vote was not merely a test of party loyalty to the president: the Oppenheimer hearing had made Strauss’s handling of the case part of the question before the Senate. The narrow margin underscored how a bitterly contested security proceeding could shape the fate of a cabinet nomination years later.

Aftermath and lasting repercussions

The defeat did not end Strauss’s resentment. In 1964, after Oppenheimer received the Enrico Fermi Award, Strauss wrote to Life magazine that the honor had “dealt a severe blow to the security system which protects our country.” He also continued to interpret the aftermath of his failed nomination through the Oppenheimer dispute. Seven years after the vote, he complained that “Oppenheimer’s partisans are continuing their reprisals against individuals who did their duty.”

The personal wounds remained visible beyond Washington. At a 1964 gathering with David Lilienthal, Kitty Oppenheimer called the Fermi Award ceremony awful, while J. Robert Oppenheimer recalled that “There were some very sweet things said.” Lilienthal observed that Kitty’s resentment still burned against those involved in what she regarded as Robert’s ordeal. The nomination defeat thus belonged to a longer aftermath: Strauss saw retaliation where Oppenheimer’s supporters saw accountability, and the hearing continued to govern how both men understood later events. The conflict, the biography concludes, followed Strauss and Oppenheimer to their graves.