Dissenter's Return

The task of hunting a man to succeed Gordon Dean, retiring chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was turned over to Lewis Strauss last March. Strauss, the President's unpaid personal adviser on atomic energy matters, lined up half a dozen prospects, but all of them backed away from the appalling job. Last week the AEC finally got a new chairman chosen by Dwight Eisenhower himself. Ike's choice: Lewis Strauss.

Balding, 57-year-old Strauss (rhymes with laws) was brought up in Virginia and has never lost the courtly manner of the Old Dominion. At 21, Strauss got a job as private secretary to Herbert Hoover, who has been his close friend ever since. By the time he was 33, he had become a partner in the New York investment banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. In four years of World War II naval service as a procurement and ordnance officer, Strauss rose from lieutenant commander to rear admiral.

In 1946, he became one of the first members of the five-man AEC. Often disturbed by his colleagues' ideas on atomic security, e.g., the decision to give radioactive isotopes to Norway, Strauss became a kind of one-man opposition party within the commission. To Dissenter Strauss, more than any other man, the U.S. owes its possession of the hydrogen bomb. In 1950, after a long fight against the combined forces of prestige-heavy atomic scientists such as Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and all other Atomic Energy commissioners save Gordon Dean, Strauss persuaded Harry Truman that the U.S. should proceed with construction of the H-bomb.

Weary of his constant battle with the other commissioners, Strauss resigned from the AEC in 1950, and returned to New York to become financial adviser to the Rockefellers. Last week, as he prepared to move back into the AEC building, Lewis Strauss was hailed by Democrats and Republicans alike as one of the President's best appointments.

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