Senate rejection of Lewis Strauss's nomination for secretary of commerce

The Senate rejection of Lewis Strauss’s nomination for secretary of commerce was a narrow 1959 defeat in which the controversy over J. Robert Oppenheimer’s 1954 security hearing became central. The vote made the hearing’s aftermath a force in Strauss’s own political fortunes: after Strauss had helped oversee Oppenheimer’s public humiliation, Oppenheimer’s defenders helped persuade senators to deny Strauss a cabinet post.

From rehabilitation to renewed conflict

Oppenheimer’s receipt of the Fermi Award had not ended the dispute surrounding him. Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper had publicly said he would boycott the White House ceremony, and Republican criticism led the Johnson Administration the following year to reduce the prize money to $25,000. Strauss, still hostile toward Oppenheimer, responded to the award with an angry letter to Life magazine, arguing that it had damaged the country’s security system.

The nomination reopened wounds that had remained raw since the 1954 trial. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower nominated Strauss as secretary of commerce in 1959, the Oppenheimer hearing became a central issue in the confirmation battle. The dispute had moved beyond the question of Oppenheimer’s standing: Strauss’s own actions in the case were now under political scrutiny.

The confirmation fight

The Senate rejected Strauss by a close vote of 49–46. Strauss blamed Senator Clinton Anderson and John F. Kennedy, who had been lobbied by defenders of Oppenheimer, including McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Kennedy initially objected that it would take an extreme case to vote against a president’s nominee. Bundy answered by laying out what he regarded as Strauss’s reprehensible conduct in the Oppenheimer case; Kennedy was convinced and changed his vote.

The narrow result gave the hearing a consequence its participants could not contain within the original security proceeding. The case against Oppenheimer had become part of the Senate’s judgment of Strauss, and the nomination failed amid arguments about whether Strauss’s conduct in that case disqualified him from high office.

A lasting grievance

Oppenheimer’s supporters greeted the result as a reversal of fortune. Bernice Brode cabled him that it was a welcome chance to enjoy Strauss’s anguish. The message’s relish contrasted with the gravity of the hearing that had preceded it: a proceeding ostensibly about national security now shadowed a cabinet nomination and helped determine its outcome.

Strauss continued to interpret later criticism through the same conflict. Seven years after the confirmation defeat, he complained that Oppenheimer’s partisans were retaliating against people who had done their duty. The episode thus did not settle the feud; it extended it into the political aftermath of the hearing. The book presents the case as following both Strauss and Oppenheimer to their deaths.