Lewis Strauss

Lewis Strauss made two very different marks on American life. In the 1930s, as a leader of Jewish refugee-relief organizations, he lobbied Republicans to support a bill that would have admitted 20,000 German-Jewish children to the United States -- it failed -- and personally funded physicist Leo Szilard's early atomic research. Two decades later, as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, he orchestrated the 1954 hearing that stripped J. Robert Oppenheimer of his security clearance, arranging surveillance of him and writing the decision himself; the Department of Energy vacated that decision in 2022, citing process violations.