Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
If Cillian Murphy is Oppenheimer's undisputed star, Robert Downey Jr can't be far behind. His portrayal of Lewis Strauss – Washington insider, H-bomb hawk and Oppenheimer's nemesis – is incredible: layered, serpentine, cynical, knowledgeable, from Salieri to the great scientist Mozart. Downey Jr., who will almost certainly be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor next March, described the character as “a man who is extremely insightful and intriguing, who has no climaxes, who is charming only when he tries to manipulate or undermine. “Lovers chase the sun and get burned,” the character says at one point. “Power remains in the shadows.” The performance prompted many moviegoers to ask the same question: who was Lewis Strauss really?
The answer begins in an unusual place: in the way he pronounced his last name, rhyming with “horse” rather than “house.” Southern roots because he was of Jewish origin: “I knew people who knew [Confederate General] Robert E. Lee,” he said. In later years, some critics accused him of trying to downplay his Jewishness with such a pronunciation, an accusation that not only hurt him deeply, but also touched on one of the three main reasons why he disliked Oppenheimer so much.
Strauss' father was a successful shoe salesman in the state capital of Charleston, and Strauss himself was an honor student (top student) in his senior year of high school. From here, he rose to the highest positions in Washington's notorious anti-Semitic political circles – rear admiral as a reservist, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), acting secretary of commerce – and did so without ever renouncing or lowering his faith. activities in the Jewish community (he was associated with a huge number of Jewish organizations over the years).
On the contrary, he considered Oppenheimer somehow freed from his Jewishness. Where Strauss was devoted to his faith, Oppenheimer could appear largely indifferent to his. “Oppenheimer was a Jew, but he wanted him not to be, and tried to pretend that he was not,” said Oppenheimer’s friend Isidor Isaac Rabi. Oppenheimer's references came from various cultures: he chose the name “Trinity” for the atomic bomb test, at least in part, from John Donne's Sacred Sonnet XIV, which begins with “Break my heart, three-person God,” and his famous reference to ” I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” from the Bhagavad Gita, which he recited in the original Sanskrit.
The second source of male hostility was political. Strauss was a conservative Republican who had a negative view of Oppenheimer's leftist leanings and his past flirtation with communism. When they sat together on the AEC in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Strauss tended to be the far more hawkish of the two, constantly insisting on the rapid development of thermonuclear weapons and adamant that only maximum capabilities could ensure effective containment.
Lewis Strauss testifying before the Congressional Atomic Energy Committee in 1954. Photo: Bettmann
For his part, Oppenheimer was not exactly opposed to second-generation nuclear bombs, as shown in the film, and the opposition he did support was technical rather than moral. He preferred to continue building atomic bombs for possible use on conventional battlefields where a hydrogen bomb would be too destructive; although, when he saw that such a bomb was possible, he was very attracted to the scientific task of creating one.
The two men had such different mindsets that disagreements were perhaps inevitable. Oppenheimer is a scientist accustomed to sharing and integrating research; Strauss, a politician who is suspicious of everyone and paranoid about sharing information even with nominal US allies like Britain and Canada, not to mention the Soviet Union. As Strauss biographer Richard Pfau wrote: “Oppenheimer maintained a policy of openness about the number and capabilities of atomic weapons in the American arsenal; Strauss believed that such one-sided frankness would not benefit anyone except Soviet military planners.
For a man like Strauss, the USSR was an existential threat to America that Nazi Germany and imperial Japan never were: indeed, he later said that “I did everything possible to prevent [the attack on Hiroshima] . The Japanese were defeated before the bomb was used.”
Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr as Strauss in Christopher Nolan's film. Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures
As one might assume from this phrase, Strauss actually doused Oppenheimer's creation with cold water, the third level of rivalry was exclusively personal. Strauss was a proud man, a millionaire who had made his fortune in commercial banking, and was irritated by what he perceived as Oppenheimer's dismissive attitude towards him. At a 1949 hearing on whether the export of radioisotopes for medical purposes posed a national security risk, as suggested by Strauss, Oppenheimer's testimony appeared to taunt Strauss when he said that isotopes were “less important than, say, , vitamins.
Even something as simple as Strauss's 1947 offer to Oppenheimer to become director of the independent research center of the Institute for Advanced Study—the scene we see in the film—was riddled with anxiety. Strauss, one of the institute's trustees, was looking for the job himself, but was only the fifth choice. Oppenheimer, of course, was the first.
This triskelion—religious, political, and personal—came together to play out in the later of Oppenheimer's two timelines when, in 1954, Strauss convenes an AEC committee to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance on rather minor political and ideological reasons.
As one of Strauss' colleagues said: “If you disagree with Lewis on something, he will first think that you are just a fool. But if you continue to disagree with him, he will decide that you must be a traitor. It was this betrayal that Strauss accused Oppenheimer of (among the phrases used were “fundamental flaws in his character”), which, in turn, ruined the scientist. “The hearings broke Oppenheimer's spirit,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes. “He was never the same after that.”
A year before this hearing, Oppenheimer compared the two nuclear superpowers to “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of their lives.” The same, perhaps, with Oppenheimer and Strauss. In 1959, Strauss' attitude toward Oppenheimer convinced the Senate to block his appointment to the Cabinet, something that had not happened since 1925 and would not happen again until 1989.
Strauss was Eisenhower's first choice for Secretary of Commerce due to his experience with the AEC as well as his financial position (unlike in the UK, cabinet members do not need to be elected representatives during their terms). meeting). His blocking effectively ended his public career: he was 63 at the time and effectively retired from at least official positions thereafter, though he was still quite active behind the scenes in the Republican Party and remained close as with Eisenhower and with Herbert Hoover. /p>
Lewis Strauss informs President Eisenhower about the 1954 hydrogen bomb test. Photo: Bettmann
Among the senators who voted against Strauss was John F. Kennedy, who four years later as president intended to help rehabilitate Oppenheimer by awarding him the Enrico Fermi Award for lifetime achievement in the development, use or production of energy.
Fermi, who built the world's first nuclear reactor, worked with Oppenheimer on the Manhattan Project and the prize was $50,000 ($500,000 in today's money), but Kennedy was never able to make the presentation in person. Instead, it was Lyndon Johnson who oversaw the ceremony in December 1963, less than two weeks after Kennedy's assassination in Dallas.
When Strauss died in 1974, his obituary hit the front page of the New York Times. Strauss, the article says, has puzzled most observers. “He was, on the one hand, a sociable man who loved dinner parties and a skilled swindler; and, on the other hand, he gave the impression of intellectual arrogance. It could be cordial, but at times it felt like a stuffed shirt. He could make friends, but create antagonisms.” These words could apply equally to Oppenheimer himself, despite the myriad differences between the two men: and this is perhaps as good an explanation of their antagonism as any.
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