Ken Young. Journal of Strategic Studies. Volume 36, Issue 6, 2013.

The announcement by President Harry S. Truman on 31 January 1950 that United States would seek to develop the hydrogen bomb was one of the most momentous events of his presidency, and indeed of the post-war world. It followed a brief but intense period of confused and sometimes agonized debate within the institutions of government most closely concerned with nuclear matters. The decision was the president’s to take, and while he formally took it earlier that day after meeting and receiving the advice of a group of the senior officials appointed for that purpose—the Secretaries of State and of Defense, and the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)—in another sense it had been some time in the making. Truman’s decisiveness on that day—asking first if the Russians could achieve a hydrogen bomb and then, having been assured that they could, immediately authorizing work to proceed—followed from his having made up his own mind a while before.

As the President who had authorized the use of the atomic bomb against two Japanese cities, Truman was acutely aware of the importance of nuclear issues and of the burden that would continue to fall to him as Commander-in-Chief. He had overseen the creation, under the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, of the AEC and its subordinates, the scientific General Advisory Committee (GAC) and the Military Liaison Committee (MLC). The existence of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) ensured that his executive decisions on atomic matters would be relentlessly scrutinised. Gordon Arneson, Dean Acheson’s special assistant on atomic matters, recalled Truman musing over his famous ‘buck stops here’ desk plaque as he waited for the three man committee he had appointed to make recommendations on the H-Bomb to arrive at his office with their report.

There is a considerable body of authoritative historical writing about the H-bomb decision, notably Hewlett and Duncan’s official and originally internal history of the AEC, a massive, carefully researched blow-by-blow account of who said what to whom. Yet while the sequence of events has been fully recorded, and the history of the H-bomb decision well-documented, its historiography remains largely unexplored.

The Problem of (Thermo) Nuclear History

As an enterprise, writing the Cold War has been approached from many angles, ideological standpoints and conceptual lenses. The historiography of that half-century of contained conflict has a richness of interpretation. Re-assessments continue to be made, and the landmark event of a Cambridge History—three volumes in this case—does not mark the pause, the consolidation, that such an event normally signifies. The Cold War continues to be an arena of dispute.

Oddly, among all this scholarly vigor, the development of thermonuclear weapons—surely one of the more momentous developments—has not been brought into focus. It is a striking omission when seen against the background of critical investigation to which, for example, the Marshall Plan, the dollar gap, the Korean conflict, the Berlin crises or the formation of NATO and the Warsaw Pact have been subjected. Beyond the narrative of events and the actions of those who brought them into being, there still remain questions of how we read it. How much should be attributed to the brute facts of the international situation in the immediate post-war period, or to the United States’ drive to establish a particular world economic order? How much should be attributed to the relentless logic of scientific discovery? How much to the power of ideas in general and to the image of a crafty and expansionist Soviet Union in particular? How much to the influence of individuals as the originators, perpetrators or popularizers of such ideas?

While there are as yet no well-grounded answers to these questions, three distinct issues are apparent. First, the extent to which the science account predominates. Second, is the shadowy, largely unrecorded status of the lay participants in the story. Third, the ways in which some sought retrospectively to justify or deny their earlier positions, the powerful and skilful among them being well-placed to shape—or indeed distort—the record. These last come together in the hitherto neglected records of H-bomb advocate and sometime AEC member and chairman Lewis L. Strauss. Strauss—autodidact, sometime shoe salesman and reserve Admiral who became a trusted presidential advisor—was a controversial, indeed widely disliked figure in his day, and a neglected one in ours. Judged ‘irascible and unpleasant’ by his biographer and demonized for his role in the Oppenheimer affair, his unpopularity does not justify the lack of attention paid to him in the writing of nuclear history.

The Science Narrative

Richard Rhodes’ monumental Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, published in 1995, is primarily a story of advances in nuclear physics and of the scientific politics in which they were embedded. Harry S. Truman himself does not feature as prominently as might be expected in the 731 pages of Dark Sun, Rhodes’ index listing only 27 page references to the president, few of which refer to the decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb. Rather, Truman is portrayed almost as a bystander in a race to decision. The pace was set by such popular heroes as Oppenheimer (opposing) and popular villains as Edward Teller and Strauss (advocating), but Rhodes’ account has not gone unchallenged.

The scientists’ own recollections reinforce this account, with Herbert F. York in particular continuing to expound and defend the judgments he and other key scientists made at the time. In common with other more popular works, the dominant narrative is of the Faustian bargain that science made with politics, willingly during the Manhattan Project, less so later. The science narrative overshadows all else, not least because feelings among the scientists ran high, and drove a continuing stream of controversy, much of it attending the ambiguous role and ambivalent personality of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Nuclear scientists York and Hans Bethe are foremost among those who set out to crystallise the record by untangling the web of politico-scientific claims while defending the position taken by Oppenheimer and the GAC members in 1949–50. There is a tendency to accept their recollections as definitive, but historians of science, notably Barton Bernstein, have subjected their accounts to forensic examination. None of the participants in the H-bomb decision– York estimates it involved no more than 100 personnel—are with us today, but they have their partisans still, and the controversy continues to arouse passions among those who write thermonuclear history.

The Private Politics of Public Issues

This dominance of the science narrative obscures the activities of officials great and small, up to the level of the president himself. To a remarkable degree, Truman kept his own counsel, and we know virtually nothing of his reasoning. The influence of individuals so often lies below the surface of events. Much of what went to make the hydrogen bomb decision is to be found in the private maneuverings of public people, something which is caught in part, but only in part, by the literature. Where it is noted, there is a tendency to deprecate the bureaucratic politics of advocacy. For example, although Rhodes reports the impact of an indirect approach Strauss made to Truman to urge H-bomb development, he comments that Strauss was ‘never one to trust to open debate alone that he could more reliably translate by subterfuge’. This is misplaced criticism. Scientists engage in debate, bureaucrats do not, and we see here the unconscious biases of the scientific lens. A master of using the informal back channels of Washington, Lewis L. Strauss was simply very good at the game and, despite his open Republicanism, trusted up to a point by Truman.

Congressional politics and bureaucratic leaks apart, those Washington maneuverings remained largely unknown at the time, due to the secrecy that Truman—with only partial success—demanded for a project of such profound importance. There was a public reticence too. Those involved were aware of just how dreadful the threat to human life hydrogen bomb would pose were it ever to be used. This was a major factor in shaping the advice the scientists gave against the ‘genocidal’ weapon. Similarly, Senator Brien McMahon wrote of the ‘intense personal anguish’ with which he privately advocated H-bomb production, sharing with Truman his ‘feelings of horror at the thought of these hideous weapons entering into the arsenals of the world’. The consequences of thermonuclear war were publicly undiscussable, at least until March 1954, when Strauss, then AEC chairman, frightened America with an off-the-cuff press conference prediction of the destruction of the New York Metropolitan Area by a single Soviet weapon.

Retrospective Claims and Denials

Within a very few years, those who had been equivocal at the time of the H-bomb decision became quick to claim that they were on the right side—that is, the winning side—when it mattered. Despite the agonized politics of the time, the decision had come to be seen as militarily necessary, and therefore as morally right, in the light of the Soviets’ own advances. It was tempting to be on the side of history. To be seen as having been opposed to, or even skeptical of, the project in 1949–50 seemed inglorious, possibly even dangerous, in the inquisitorial atmosphere of the mid-1950s, as Oppenheimer discovered to his immense cost. The honorable exception was Herbert York who, with exemplary clarity and honesty, continued to insist that the scientists of the GAC had been right to oppose the development of the H-bomb, and for the right reason, as both unnecessary and dangerous. York’s point-by-point defense of Los Alamos is written from the perspective of someone who knew the participants. Until his death in 2009, he was a staunch advocate of the GAC’s view that the development of the hydrogen bomb would trigger an arms race by prompting the Soviet Union to follow, although David Holloway’s Stalin and the Bomb would question this analysis from the vantage-point of Soviet sources.

Some of the retrospective debate was precipitated by Lewis L. Strauss’ claims that he alone had been instrumental—not, of course, in taking the decision, but in persuading Truman to take it. Some, including James Conant, recanted their earlier opposition, earning gracious praise from Strauss. But he was generally grudging in his acknowledgement of his colleagues, wedded as he was to his self-image of the lone hero-innovator of the AEC. Again, the most striking absence in this aspect of the record is Truman’s own voice, and it is not possible to reconstruct Truman’s decision, the wealth of declassified material notwithstanding. When pressed in later years, the former president repudiated all claims to have influenced his decision. Truman (implausibly) denied the extent of Congressional influence and in passing helped torpedo Strauss’ own cabinet career. However, retracing events through the lens of Strauss’ records—and he was a meticulous, almost obsessive, scribe—shows that he and his associates amounted to more than the mere figures in the landscape of presidential decision that the science narrative portrays.

The public record is, as ever, scattered, capable of multiple interpretations and complicated by the fact that a key archival source—the official chronology of the decision produced by the AEC—was drafted by Strauss’ own office during his subsequent chairmanship, and bore his stamp. He devoted strenuous efforts to influencing the official and the popular record to give himself a central place in shaping events. He regularly fed information to commentators whose support he cultivated with an assiduity remarkable even by Washington standards. Much of the contemporary journalistic comment accordingly accepted the Strauss version of thermonuclear history.

This article focuses on Strauss’ efforts to construct, from a privileged position, an account of events that highlighted his heroic role in the making of the H-bomb decision. He had some success in establishing the popular narrative, less in shaping the official record. That his story is worth a closer inspection than it has attracted in the past can be seen from a recital of his successive roles: wild card first term AEC member; presidential adviser on atomic issues; chairman of the AEC. It was that last role for which he is mostly remembered. In bringing about the destruction of Oppenheimer’s public service career, he lived out his own narrative, of an American patriot triumphing over a former communist sympathizer of dubious loyalty to the United States. Before turning to examine how Strauss sought to influence the writing of thermonuclear history, the article will briefly summarize the course of events in which he was involved, from the August 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test through to the presidential decision, just five months later, to authorize work on the hydrogen bomb.

September 1949: A New Urgency

A fusion weapon required a fission trigger. So too did the debate on its development, which was fired up by the news that the United States no longer enjoyed a monopoly of the atomic bomb. The theoretical possibility that a fusion weapon—a ‘Super’—of vastly greater power than the fission bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki might be feasible had been recognized by Los Alamos scientists in 1945, but in by 1947 the Los Alamos advice was that such a development would be a long way off without a major investment. But although the science had a history, politically it became a matter for urgent decision only when the suspicion that the Soviets had conducted an atomic test of August 1949 was confirmed weeks later. Having eliminated the former American advantage, the Soviets were now expected to prosecute their intentions with greater vigor.

The point at issue, now that the gap between the two powers had dramatically narrowed, was whether US policy could be based primarily upon atomic superiority. The development of the hydrogen bomb offered hope of maintaining short term nuclear superiority and providing a protective umbrella beneath which conventional forces could be progressively expanded. Yet in late 1949, the ‘Super’ project, beguiling to a handful of scientists and well-informed officials, repellent to others and unknown to most, remained no more than a hypothetical possibility. For it to advance beyond that status would require presidential approval, bringing into contention differing and hotly opposed streams of scientific, military and bureaucratic advice.

Among the Washington agencies, the AEC enjoyed an uncomfortable primacy as the body established as guardian of the United States’ interest in atomic matters. Chaired by the urbane David E. Lilienthal, its initial members were Robert F. Bacher, Sumner T. Pike, William W. Waymack and Lewis L. Strauss. Appointed by the president under the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, the civilian Commission was itself subject to advice from the GAC, which provided the scientific input to the Commission’s deliberations, and the MLC, which represented the military pole in the spectrum of atomic concerns. Commission members held regular joint meetings with both.

Robert LeBaron’s MLC was keen on the Super, but the GAC, headed by Oppenheimer, was opposed. Strauss wrote a long letter to his fellow Commissioners calling for intensive effort to develop it, insisting the GAC be asked not to express an opinion on its desirability, but to advise only on how best ‘to proceed with expedition’. To his chagrin, the Commission would not agree to give the scientists such a steer. At a further meeting on 5 October Strauss again found little support on the Commission, even after lobbying individual members in advance. He had expected to be able to present a memorandum advocating a quantum jump ‘to get ahead with the Super’ but Lillienthal had declined to create the opportunity on the agenda for him to do so. Instead, Strauss had to insist on reading his memorandum to the full Commission meeting at the end of the formal business. Receiving no encouragement, he bypassed the Commission altogether and went direct to the President through Sidney Souers, the executive secretary of the National Security Council, who saw President Truman daily. When Strauss explained the issues to him, Souers expressed surprise and confided that the president knew nothing of the H-bomb issue. He immediately briefed Truman, who in Souers’ recollection told him to go back to Strauss and ask him to ‘go to it, and fast’. Souers passed a copy of the Strauss memorandum to Truman on 10 October and, on 25 November, Strauss put the case directly and more formally to the President in a personal letter.

When Oppenheimer’s GAC met on 29–30 October to settle their advice to the AEC, they confirmed that the United States should not proceed with the development of the ‘Super’. When the Commission itself came to discuss the report of the GAC on November 3, Lilienthal deprecated the demand for an agreed line, urging that the separate views of individual commissioners should be put forward. Against this, Strauss argued in favor of giving the president a comprehensive package of views incorporating those of the Commission and the Departments of State and Defense. While the Commission could advise on the feasibility, timescale, economy in terms of fissile material, and probable characteristics of the Super, he maintained that it was not competent to advise on its military usefulness or on the diplomatic consequences of its possession.

Later that day Strauss submitted a note elaborating remarks he had made about questions which he thought the Commission ought to be able to answer. These included the cost effectiveness of diverting funds, talent and material to the development of the Super; and whether it could be justified against the alternative of investing in what he called ‘ordinaries’. He asked whether it could be established that the military actually wanted the Super and wondered whether the decision not to proceed would be considered by European allies as ‘marking the beginning of a program of our withdrawal from the role of the strong and ready protector’.

Before the Commissioners resumed their discussions on 4 November, Truman had been made aware of the differences of views. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer threatened to put the GAC’s view directly to the President rather than through the Commission, in the event of the full AEC deciding in favour of the Super. When they next returned to the question on 7 November, positions were beginning to harden. Commissioner Henry D. Smyth, who had recently joined, made clear his unwillingness to develop a weapon ‘in the present world circumstances’ while Lilienthal was flatly against development at any time.

Strauss was absent from this meeting. John Manley, secretary to the GAC, prepared a letter in which he sought to answer some of the reservations about the GAC’s position. This took a high moral line, proposing that a decision not to proceed provided an ‘opportunity to apply our standards of life to our actions and the formulation of policy in a more consistent way’. Manley deprecated the possibility that the Soviets would develop the H-bomb on three grounds. First, there were technical difficulties, as ‘the effort involved is very large’. Second, the Soviets had struck a moral posture before the world and the use of such a weapon would spell the end of support for Communism in the United States. Third, they would fear retaliation with American atomic bombs. These were weak points by the standards of the GAC’s advocacy.

Presidents ignore Congressional opinion at their peril, and the second Truman presidency was marked by intense struggle with his opponents on Capitol Hill. One source of pressure on Truman was that of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) and its chairman, Democratic Senator Brien McMahon, in particular. McMahon, though a junior senator, made atomic energy his own issue and used his chairmanship to try to force the pace of United States nuclear development. In this, he was supported by the JCAE’s ranking Republican member, Bourke B. Hickenlooper, who took the chair for 1947–48 when the Democrats had lost control of Congress. Under the successive chairmanships of both, the AEC was repeatedly challenged. Under both Democrat and Republican chairman, the JCAE hounded the AEC and the Joint Chiefs on the question of atomic weapon sufficiency. On the day that Truman announced that the Soviets had tested a device, the Joint Committee formulated a 23-point plan for increased production of the atomic bomb and urged it upon the president. Its report to Congress warned that ‘Russia’s ownership of the bomb, years ahead of the anticipated date, is a monumental challenge to American boldness, initiative and effort.’ It was a small step from there to their outright advocacy of the development of the hydrogen bomb, which followed weeks later.

In early November, McMahon asked for a meeting with the President to press the case for the H-Bomb in the event of Truman being disinclined to authorize going ahead. Truman replied that the issue had not yet reached his desk. It did so a week later, with the divided advice of the AEC prompting McMahon to write once again stressing the urgency of a new program. Later that month McMahon urged Truman that:

The profundity of the atomic crisis which has now overtaken us cannot, in my judgment, be exaggerated. The specific decision that you must make regarding the Super bomb is one of the gravest ever to confront an American President … Those who oppose an all out ‘crash’ effort on the Super impressed me as being so horrified at the path down which the world is traveling that they have lost contact with common sense and reality …

Meanwhile, Senator Edwin C. Johnson, a member of the joint committee, broadcast the inconvenient claim that American scientists were working on a ‘Super’ bomb ‘one thousand times as powerful as the weapon detonated at Hiroshima’. This made the issue uncomfortably public, andraised the possibility that Congress might force the president’s handbyappropriating funds for H-bomb development if he did notgiveapproval.

The Breakthrough

Later in November, the GAC met to consider how to respond to an open-ended request from Lilienthal for advice. Lilienthal set the scene for them with a powerful statement against embarking on a new arms race. Strauss, meanwhile, was privy to information from Federal Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover that had yet to reach the Commissioners, namely that Klaus Fuchs, a physicist on the Manhattan Project, had probably been a Soviet spy. Fuchs, who had returned to Britain to take up a key position in atomic energy research at Harwell, had been involved in the theoretical discussions on the possibility of a fusion device and might have passed this information to Moscow through his Soviet handlers. Strauss was therefore concerned that there could already be a Soviet hydrogen bomb programme, and this possibility made the opposition of the GAC, and of Oppenheimer in particular, all the more frustrating. Indeed, it was at this point that Strauss began to suspect Oppenheimer’s own loyalty to the United States. The GAC again reported against developing the Super and the Commission accepted the advice, with Strauss once again in a minority of one. However, at this point the tide began to turn.

Truman established a study group of the National Security Council under the joint oversight of Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Defense Secretary Louis Johnson to review the wider issues of the United States’ vulnerability in the challenging years ahead. Gordon Arneson, Acheson’s special assistant for atomic affairs, was among the members of this group and readily admitted that it was the hydrogen bomb question that set their work in motion:

we all were of a mind that there really wasn’t any choice [about developing the Super]. Acheson, I think, showed more flexibility than any of us. He talked to Dr. [James B.] Conant [President of Harvard] at length; he talked to Oppenheimer at length; he talked to Lilienthal at length. They were all opposed, and he was not persuaded. He did try. I don’t see how we could say we’re not going to do this thing, that we will put it in a bushel basket somewhere; because if we didn’t do it, certainly the Russians would, the British would, maybe even Pakistan, certainly the French.

This array of advice and potential pressure as it existed in late 1949 offered no clear direction to the president. Powerful Congressional opinion challenged the scientific consensus, but that had not been sufficient to swing Truman behind the development of the Super. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, initially hesitant, came down in favour of the Super, with their report to the President ultimately shaping his view of the issue. With the Pentagon and Congress now both pushing in the same direction, it needed only some flexibility on the part of the AEC to provide Truman with the basis for consensual decision.

Senator Brien McMahon had used his position to persuade Truman to appoint his law partner, Gordon Dean, to a vacancy on the Commission, thus changing the balance of AEC opinion. He offered Strauss the unanimous support of the Joint Committee and assured him that Dean had emphatically joined his side. The effect on Strauss was to encourage him to continue to push for change in the Commission’s position. Following the 7 November meeting, Lilienthal, Pike, and Smyth recommended that the president decide against the development of the Super bomb, a course in which they could cite the support of the scientists of the GAC. Strauss followed this meeting with a letter to Truman urging him to direct the AEC to proceed with the development of the thermonuclear bomb as the highest priority, subject only to the judgment of the Department of Defense as to its value as a weapon, and of the advice of the Department of State as to the diplomatic consequences of its unilateral renunciation or its possession. A lengthy memorandum set out in detail his reasons for urging this course of action. He concluded that:

Until … some means is found of eliminating war, I cannot agree with those of my colleagues who feel that an announcement should be made by the President to the effect that the development of a thermonuclear weapon will not be undertaken by the United States at this time. This is because: (a) I do not think the statement will be credited in the Kremlin; (b) that when and if it should be decided subsequent to such a statement to proceed with the production of the thermonuclear bomb, it might in a delicate situation, be regarded as an affirmative statement of hostile intent; and (c) because primarily until disarmament is universal, our arsenal must be not less well-equipped than with the most potent weapons of how technology can devise.

Four days before, Lilienthal, still a vehement opponent of the H-bomb, had submitted his resignation to the president. Truman prevailed upon him to remain in post for the time being to carry through a final assignment.

Truman asked Acheson and Johnson to work with Lilienthal to study the alternatives and give him a recommendation, so absorbing Lilienthal’s intransigence in the larger triumvirate with the two secretaries. Matters moved slowly even there, due in part to Lilienthal’s continuing opposition and Strauss again intervened to urge upon Truman an end to delay in the preparation of advice by this trio, warning that press leaks by the opponents of the H-bomb might crystallize into a campaign against it. The Alsop brothers were as usual well informed about the appointment of this triumvirate and about the alignments within it, predicting that Truman would over-ride Lilienthal and announce a decision to proceed, unless Acheson chose to advise otherwise.

When the group met for the second and last time on 31 January, Lilienthal spent two hours setting out his reservations. After the meeting the three, together with Souers, saw the president. Acheson presented their recommendations: that the AEC should be asked to determine the technical feasibility of a further nuclear weapon; the speed and scale of this project should be agreed between the AEC and the Department of Defense; and the Departments of State and Defense should jointly undertake a re-examination of American objectives and strategic plans in the light of the ‘probable fission bomb capability and possible thermonuclear bomb capability of the Soviet Union’. Lilienthal demurred, but was cut off by Truman who declared ‘we have no other course’. The meeting had lasted just seven minutes, and Truman’s directive to the AEC followed within hours.

Johnson recollected in a private letter to Strauss that when he, together with Acheson and Lilienthal, presented their final conclusions to Truman, his fellow members insisted on ‘reiterating their long expressed doubts and fears’ before explaining how they had come to a favorable conclusion. With this recollection Johnson presented himself as the sole unequivocal member of the trio, a temptation to which, given the mutual loathing of the two secretaries, he would have readily given way. Moreover, ‘the committee knew at this final meeting that the President had indicated his intention to proceed’. This was indeed the case. The previous day, Truman had told Sidney Souers that he was inclined to authorize H-bomb development, while Assistant White House Press Secretary Eben Ayers recorded that the president had indicated as much to his staff some 10 days earlier, subsequently commenting that ‘there actually was no decision to make …’ and that he had settled the matter to his own satisfaction when determining the AEC budget for Fiscal Year 1950. Strauss now resigned from the AEC, telling Truman that Fuchs’ confession, of which he had just had word from Hoover, had vindicated the president’s decision on the ‘Super’. Lilienthal left the Commission and, while there was speculation that Strauss would take over, he departed, and it was the newcomer, Dean, who replaced Lilienthal as chairman.

Who, Whom? Lewis L. Strauss and the Politics of the Record

In later years Strauss and former Secretary of Defense Johnson took every opportunity to assure themselves just how important their advocacy had been in shaping the events of 1949–50. Strauss, recollecting their part in the H-bomb decision, wrote Johnson in 1958 to thank him for ‘what you did to stiffen my resolution back in 1949 when it seemed that only you and I believed that our salvation depended upon our strength. I am proud of our association in that great debate and thankful to Providence that we won it.’ Strauss was not a man who courted popularity. Certainly, had he done so, he would have generally failed to win it. But he was as deeply loyal to his few friends as he was acerbic and unrelenting about his numerous enemies. And this was not the only occasion on which he stressed Johnson’s role. In a conference speech the following year, he praised the ‘few in number’ who opposed the predominant scientific consensus against the development of ‘a qualitatively superior weapon’, a select band which, he recalled, included Louis Johnson. He lauded him as ‘the one man, highly placed in government, who stood up for what today seems so obviously the wise course’ between October 1949 and January 1950, going on to make the generous, if unsubstantiated, claim that ‘it was he who persuaded the President to issue the order to go ahead with the development …’ of the Super.

Johnson reciprocated Strauss’ admiration. When Columbia University academic Warner Schilling sought to interview Johnson about his part in those events, Johnson referred him to Strauss, advising that ‘I do not think it proper … to see you until you have spoken to this man, who is probably the most important of any in the picture.’ Returning the compliment two years later, Strauss assured Johnson that ‘[y]ou, of course, were stalwart, and I think your position had more to do with convincing the President than perhaps that of anyone.’

The steps Johnson took after discussion with Strauss one evening in October had much to do with this judgment. According to the Strauss version he, having not previously met the Defense Secretary, engineered a meeting through a mutual friend and, retaining his attention from afternoon late into the night, succeeded in convincing him of the need for the United States to ‘never be less well-armed than our enemies’. Johnson’s own biographers dismiss this claim of a dramatic late-night session by inspection of Johnson’s appointment diary, which records only a brief meeting with Strauss. Nevertheless, this version was put about by Strauss’ press contacts, notably Tris Coffin, who was a close informant and personal friend, and James R. Shepley and Clay Blair Jr, whose racy history of the H-bomb drew heavily upon unaccredited insights from Strauss and was likely to have been inspired by him.

Whether by a brief chat over tea or by whisky late into the night, Strauss impressed the Defense Secretary of the urgency of the push for the H-bomb. Following the meeting, Johnson asked LeBaron—a Strauss ally—to have the MLC make an assessment of the H-bomb’s potential value as a weapon. That report was favorable and, having gathered the (initially reluctant) support of the Joint Chiefs, enabled Johnson to urge the President to act. Overlooking the Joint Chiefs, Strauss was generous in attributing decisive influence to Louis Johnson.

Meanwhile, fellow Commissioners struggled against Strauss to correct his version of the parts they had played. When Senator Hickenlooper recalled at a hearing of the JCAE that majorities of the GAC and of the Commission itself had opposed the production of a thermonuclear weapon, Smyth, who was appearing before him, demurred. Strauss, ever quick to refer to his own meticulous record, challenged Smyth’s ‘lapse of memory’, adding that the GAC members had not been unanimously opposed, as Glenn Seaborg was out of the country, leaving the eight remaining members to vote. This he knew since he had discovered among Oppenheimer’s office papers an undeclared letter from Seaborg to Oppenheimer in which the former set out his willingness to consider supporting the development of the Super. Oppenheimer had not revealed the letter to his colleagues, and Strauss interpreted this oversight in line with his unshakeable suspicions of the scientist’s loyalty.

The disagreement with Smyth rumbled on. In 1953 the AEC produced an internal document recording the history of the thermonuclear debate. Strauss had rejoined the Commission as chairman, and the document emanated from his office. He claimed to be the author, and while he was not—the initial draft was a secretariat paper and he quibbled with some of its omissions—it is his recollections that were taken as the official record until, in 1969, Hewlett and Duncan completed their authoritative official history. Smyth in particular protested the way in which he had been represented in the AEC record: he had been opposed to the development of a thermonuclear weapon in October/November 1949 only so long as ‘certain conditions obtained’; if they were to change, then he would have been obliged to support it, as he eventually did.

In response to the Strauss version of history, Smyth produced his own full memorandum of events, rebuking Strauss with his complaint that ‘such oversimplification misrepresents the facts and the reasoning of the men concerned’. Smyth reiterated that his November reservations had been dispelled by December, by which time he had been persuaded of the potential utility of the weapon. He accordingly felt able to change his position and join Strauss in what then became a majority view, with Lilienthal, a lame duck chairman, the sole dissenter. For Smyth, the president had made the correct decision to authorize the Super and, had he not agreed fully with it, ‘would have felt in honor bound to resign at that time from the Commission’. Strauss was unmoved.

Smyth was not the only protestor in the retrospective politics of the record. In April 1954 former AEC chairman Gordon Dean was incensed by press articles, seemingly inspired by Strauss, which portrayed him as ‘completely alone in fighting for the development of the greatest weapon of all time’. Dean, wrongly portrayed as indecisive, protested that this claim was ‘quite untrue and places me in a very bad light’. He appealed without success to Strauss, his successor as chairman of the AEC, asking him to release documents reporting the Commissioners’ individual recommendations to the President, adding plaintively that ‘my instinct for self-preservation’—this was the era of McCarthy—‘requires that by one device or another these … implications be rebutted’. Just six months later, LIFE magazine, almost certainly acting on information from Strauss, repeated the claim that he had been the Commission’s only dissenter from the GAC’s advice. Dean again responded vigorously, pointing out that from the very outset he had been:

opposed to the views of the General Advisory Committee along with Lewis Strauss. In fact, while Mr Strauss was in Beverly Hills in the Fall of ‘49 I was the only person present arguing for a strenuous thermonuclear program at a specially called meeting of the General Advisory Committee’s Weapons Subcommittee.

His role had been to:

spearhead, along with Mr Strauss and Senator McMahon, the drive for a high priority program in the Fall of ‘49 and [he] had primary responsibility [as chairman] for three years thereafter to keep it as a high priority and see it through to its conclusion.

To Strauss, Dean had proved wobbly to begin with and had come over to his side only in December. Nevertheless, he grudgingly stepped in to protect Dean’s reputation with his own letter to the editors of LIFE.

This was not the end of Dean’s struggle to set the record straight. In that same month he became aware a book that journalists Clay Blair and Jim Shepley—respectively chief of the Time-Life bureau in Washington, and Time’s Pentagon reporter—were soon to publish on the history of the hydrogen bomb project. Incensed once again, and less willing now to let the matter drop, Dean remonstrated about the way his own role was portrayed by these authors, holding their account challengeable both in libel law and on security grounds. Moreover, he strongly, and correctly, suspected that Strauss himself was the source for much of what was said there, pointing out to him that ‘you are quoted at great length throughout the book—daily movements, conversations with all kinds of people, etc.’ Indeed, critical press comment noted that Shepley and Blair’s account had been ‘denied by almost every other Government official familiar with the atomic program except Admiral Strauss, who comes off very well …’ Hans Bethe, writing privately, observed that

The opinions presented in [Shepley and Blair] have obviously been obtained from persons holding extreme views on a number of matters. Whoever those persons may have been, they were extreme in their dislike and/or distrust of Oppenheimer, extreme in their certainty of the malfeasance of Los Alamos, extreme in their conviction that anyone who expressed misgivings or even raised questions concerning the wisdom of committing ourselves to the H-bomb program was ipso facto subversive.

Bethe could not attack the then powerful Strauss directly, but his readers at Los Alamos would have caught the reference.

Dean’s feelings ran high, and his representations to his former ally became more formal in tone:

In view of the numerous false references to my participation in the thermonuclear program, and in view of your key position [as Chairman] from which to refute these, I feel very strongly that you have a duty either to see that the book is not published or that the false statements concerning me are corrected.

Strauss gave little quarter, conceding only that Dean had abandoned his own initial opposition to ‘eventually [come] round to my point of view’. This continued to be his position, and it did nothing to allay Dean’s suspicions. He confided to Acheson that he had made his own enquiries to establish Shepley and Blair’s sources. He concluded that they did not include the Commissioners ‘with one possible exception’, a clear allusion to Strauss. Strauss’ own memoirs record a surely less than candid story of his involvement with these authors. He wrote that their manuscript had been vetted by the AEC office during his chairmanship, and that in order to avoid ‘exacerbating the relations between scientists’—surely, rather, between himself and them—he had attempted to buy the manuscript himself to avert publication. This bizarre, and confessedly ‘ill-advised’, move to cover his tracks was rejected, and when it became public Strauss was criticized both for allowing publication and for attempting to block it, but not, it seems, for the self-serving indiscretions which the authors had used.

Dean made no headway in setting the record straight. That would wait upon the publication of his diaries. Meanwhile, with the support of Time and Fortune, and despite fierce criticism as to its accuracy, Shepley and Blair’s book continued for many years to be read as an enthralling inside-dopester account of the H-bomb decision, its claims readily repeated elsewhere. Its central thesis—that there was a conspiracy among Los Alamos scientists, led by Oppenheimer, to frustrate thermonuclear research—was indeed Strauss’ view, and it was decisively rebutted by Hans Bethe on a number of points in a classified paper before Herbert York published his own broadside. Dean meanwhile enjoyed some compensation a decade later, when Harold Nieburg published a scholarly account of this period in nuclear history, in which he attributed the orchestration of Congressional influence on the H-bomb decision to Dean ‘with the help of Strauss’. Strauss, having read the book, politely urged some ‘corrections … for subsequent editions’, reiterating that Dean and all the other Commissioners had originally opposed his advocacy of the H-bomb. Of Nieburg’s claim that Dean had led, and Strauss followed, ‘it was the other way about, although the precedence is unimportant [sic].’ Interviewed around that time, some 15 years after the event, Strauss, with characteristic hubris, recorded that Truman’s announcement of his decision directed the Commission to proceed ‘in conformity with advice that I submitted to him’.

Strauss was not the only eager claimant in the politics of the record. In the institutional memory of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, former chairman Brien McMahon’s November 1949 letter to the president was seen as decisive, an exemplar of Congressional influence on the executive. Ten years on, another JCAE chairman (and Strauss critic), Senator Clinton P. Anderson, claimed that the ‘real determining influence’ on Truman’s decision would have been McMahon’s lengthy 5,000 word memorandum. Truman demurred. Then, a further decade after the decision, Senator Chet Holifield, by then chairman of the JCAE, proposed that his staff prepare an historical account of the committee’s role in the H-bomb decision, one that would highlight the importance of McMahon’s advocacy as well, perhaps, as his own role in support. Pressed to endorse this account, Truman conceded that he had frequent meetings with McMahon, and ‘held him in high esteem’ but, disingenuously, could not recall that the Senator ‘had taken a vigorous position on either side of the question’. This presidential insouciance was Truman’s characteristic response to the hubris of other, self-regarding Washington players. It would also work against Strauss.

The Repudiation of Lewis L. Strauss

Nemesis follows hubris, and Strauss was to be no exception. ‘Very smart and very vain’ was Oppenheimer’s characterization of Strauss, whose ‘braggart’ reputation and combative style would cost both men their careers. Strauss had made many enemies, and was excoriated by liberal America for the personal animosity and vehemence with which he had orchestrated Oppenheimer’s loss of security clearance and public disgrace. In 1959, when he was fighting to hold a cabinet post as Secretary of Commerce under President Dwight Eisenhower, his enemies set out to block the nomination. As the confirmation hearings opened, Newsweek ran a story lauding the veteran atomic advocate, praising Strauss’ judgment that the US should develop the H-bomb in the face of intense opposition and concluding that ‘In the end, after several months of argument, Mr Truman decided that Strauss was right.’ Democrat critics were incensed.

Strauss’ testimony to the Senate committee deepened his predicament. He spoke of having begun the movement to initiate development of the thermonuclear bomb ‘against respectable and substantial opposition’, unwisely claiming before the committee that ‘President Truman concurred with my recommendation.’ Senator Clinton Anderson publicly mocked this grandiose stance in a television interview: ‘Strauss says “I instituted [the H-bomb]. I developed it.”’ He wrote to Truman with a direct question: ‘whether Strauss persuaded you or had anything to do with your final decision?’ The reply was opaque, claiming mysteriously that ‘the order for the hydrogen bomb was issued before anyone had made any approach to me on the subject. No one influenced me in this decision.’ It was sufficient for the purpose, and the former president encouraged Anderson to use that recollection in the hearings. Anderson did more than this, briefing Drew Pearson, who broke the story in a radio broadcast on 21 March 1959, claiming that

Harry Truman has written a letter [to Anderson] … flatly and categorically denying that Admiral Strauss, now up for confirmation as Secretary of Commerce, had anything to do with the decision to develop the hydrogen bomb. The truth is not in that fellow, Truman added.

Strauss was deeply hurt by this apparent chicanery, but could have no recourse to the former President. Protocol demanded any approach should await the results of his confirmation hearing. He instead wired Sidney Souers, who had been his intermediary with the president in October 1949 and who had arranged for Strauss’ urgent representations to be laid before him. Souers had continuing access to Truman and obtained a copy of the letter, assuring Strauss that there was in it ‘no basis whatever to justify the statement made by the commentator—“the truth is not in that man’”. Souers then relayed what was clearly Truman’s own position, carefully framed for Strauss’ apparent benefit:

Mr Truman does maintain, and has always maintained, that he made the decision with respect to the development of the hydrogen bomb without the help of anyone … I presume his feeling is correct because he is the only man who could make it. He would probably admit that you were for it and that I was for it and that quite a few others were against it, such as many of the scientists, but I do not believe that it made any particular difference to him who was for it or who was against it. He never had any doubt in his own mind that it should be developed if that were possible.

With Souers as his mouthpiece, Truman minimized the offence by studied neutrality. Indeed, his position was not even privately attributable, with Souers referring only to information received from his ‘friend’. In a further letter, however, Souers took less trouble to shield his identity, writing that ‘the letter from our friend here was in response to one written to him by one of the Senators’.

While Souers confirmed Strauss’ recollection of events, he pointed out gently to his old associate that:

I think you know that I always give you credit for being a strong advocate of going ahead with the Super Bomb and felt that you were entitled to full credit for that. [Yet] I cannot quarrel too much the position of the President that he did make the decision himself and he was always proud of having made it, in spite of the very strong advice he received from many others against it.

None of this satisfied Strauss, whose career now ended. He just scraped the majority vote of the committee only to be rejected by a landmark single vote on the Senate floor. He would not be Eisenhower’s Commerce Secretary. Nor would he hold public office again.

With the confirmation disaster behind him, Strauss complained to Truman that:

I have heard that your opinion of me is not as high as it was when you appointed me to the Atomic Energy Commission in 1946, and that one of the results of this decline in my standing with you was a feeling that I should not be confirmed as Secretary of Commerce. This report distressed me when I heard it …

When the two met on 21 September 1959, Truman condemned Pearson’s claim as ‘a dammed lie. Pearson is almost incapable of telling the truth on any subject. You know what I think of you.’ Yet despite Strauss’ declared concern to use the meeting to set the record straight on the politics of the H-bomb decision, the conversation between the two scarcely touched upon it.

History, Science, and Politics

The historiography of the H-bomb is problematic. The development of the weapon ‘remains haphazardly documented, thinly interpreted, and partly secret … .’ In contrast with the history of the atomic bomb, thermonuclear history is for the most part told as a scientific-technological story, the science complex, the physics inaccessible to most lay people even where it is not classified. This is the science narrative—or perhaps the scientists’ narrative—and historical controversy has centered on four crucial issues within it. First, did Los Alamos move too slowly on thermonuclear development? Second, was development impeded by the political and moral judgments of the scientists? Third, were the GAC members right to warn against the development of the Super? Fourth, could or should Soviet developments have been anticipated?

The achievement of Lewis L. Strauss was to politicize, and thus popularize, what were seen as scientific judgments on these issues. He had been one of the most consistent proponents of the view that the Soviets could be independently developing, rather than following, the United States, and that events appeared to unfold in line with his predictions strengthened his faith in his own essential rightness, and his reputation among his admirers as both arch-patriot and prophet.

Neither the judgments Strauss made, not his actual influence, so hard to establish, are at issue here. Rather, it is his place in the historiography of the H-bomb decision. Were it not for Strauss and his journalist allies, it is unlikely that the narrative of a reluctant, foot-dragging science community, organized in secret cabals and orchestrated by Oppenheimer against the visionary Teller would have gained popular credence. And, had it not done so, the detailed account of the actual scientific endeavor would not have been made public in response, and veteran atomic scientists would not have been so ready to publish their own views, or talk to today’s historians.