Page contents:
Strauss biography sketch
Excerpts from Lawrence and Oppenheimer, by Nuel Pharr Davis 1968
Excerpts from Men and Decisions, by L.L. Srauss 1962
Timeline
Excerpt from The Day Virginia Died, by Eustace Mullins
Property, stocks, investments and special projects
Atomic Energy Commission years
Memoranda of William T. Golden
Statement of T. Keith Glennan, first chief of NASA
*
_____________________________________
“He was pathologically ambitious, tenacious and extraordinarily prickly, a combination that made him a particularly dangerous opponent in bureaucratic warfare. One of his fellow AEC commissioners said of him, “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.” [p362, American Prometheus, Bird and Sherwin]
________________________________
*
L.L.Strauss, on accomplishing thermonuclear Super bombs:“The result of these [1952, thermonuclear] tests has brought us very much nearer to the day of the satisfaction of military requirements, put us within sight of them, so that we can see the ability to proceed aggressively with the peacetime development of power to an extent that we were not able to before the tests.” [Q. Admiral Strauss, can you go beyond this statement and describe the area of the blast..] “Well, the nature of an H-bomb, Mr. Wilson, is that, in effect, it can be made to be as large as you wish, as large as the military requirement demands, that is to say, an H-bomb can be made as-large enough to take out a city. (A chorus of “What?”)…To take out a city, to destroy a city.” [Q. How big a city? ] “Any city.”
http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/correspondence/eisenhower-dwight/corr_eisenhower_1954-03-31.htm
polioforever>>>Strauss resigned the AEC on January 31, 1950 (his birthday) to be Eisenhower’s private consultant and a financier to the Rockefeller brothers; reappointed as AEC Chairman in June 1953. The next October, Strauss counseled a small group of British and American negotiators seeking a nuclear information sharing arrangement: “
It seemed to me to make very little sense that we should withold from our allies information on the effects of radiation resulting from atomic explosions… We could give this information without compromising the secret characteristics of weapons. We had been able to measure these radiation effects with considerable success incident to our weapons tests. Familiarity with them would make our allies better able to protect themselves in the event that atomic weapons were used against them by the Communists. This was in the days before the intercontinental ballistic missile…. I told our British friends that, while the law forbade realization of their hopes for restoration of the partnership which existed before the [1946] McMahon Act, we were now prepared to consider including a new ‘area’ to the information we might exchange, to be defined as ‘the effects on human beings and their environment from the blast, heat and radiation’… I believed in the importance of having allies and was happy to have taken part in ending the estrangement in technology…” [pp372-373,
Men and Decisions] The public, however, was not told. Thus begins the practice of
Polio Diplomacy.
http://polioforever.wordpress.com/polio-diplomacy/
______________________________
_________________________________________
*
*
Lewis Strauss was an original Atomic Energy Commissioner, appointed in 1946 by Truman, who went on to be the AEC’s chief under Eisenhower (1953-58) during the most rabid expansion of nuclear testing which came to define the arms race policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Strauss reputedly promoted energy from nuclear plants saying it was “too cheap to meter”. He got his start in government on Herbert Hoover’s Food Administration staff as Hoover’s assistant (at age 21, following the Belgian Relief work) and as the Joint Jewish Distribution Committee liason, then became a Rothschild hospital president (at age 21), a Kuhn, Loeb & Co. partner ( from 1919-1946, under leadership of the Warburgs) and a US Navy Rear Admiral (end of WWII) before his appointment to the AEC. Strauss’s final government service was performed in Eisenhower’s cabinet as the Secretary of Commerce, from June of 1958 to June 1959 –rejected for office by the Senate after a year’s pro tem appointment– and lastly he became a special emissisary on nuclear development.
*
Readers directed to this page from JFK Assassination sources should note a minimum of narrative here on the subject. The Strauss page is concerned with constructing a profile of one of the major Cold Warriors of all time who, among them, has perhaps the least consideration and insight from historians. Strauss was also a major figure in polio history and on that score, the public has been completely stonewalled.
*
Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss (1896-1974), son of Lewis Strauss and Rosa Lichtenstein, was born in Charleston West Virginia. The family moved to Richmond, VA, in 1900 while Lewis was still a young boy.
Lewis Strauss dropped out of his last year in highschool to recover from Typhoid fever, and went on to sell shoes for his father’s wholesale business–Fleischman Morris & Co –which he claims to have done for four years before leaving at the age of 20 to volunteer in Washington DC for Hoover’s Food Administration. (c.1916), technically the Commission for Relief in Belgium which was not a part of any U.S. government program. Strauss became Hoover’s personal secretary, aide-de-camp, and liason for the Joint Jewish Distribution Committee. During the same time period, at age 21, he became the president of the Rothschild’s hospital -the Jewish Hospital on Deformities and Joint Diseases (the HJD, see the Henry Frauenthal page)- a position he held through 1925. The hospital, run by Rothschild in-laws (Herman and Henry Frauenthal) expanded from a 7-bed operation in the Rothschild’s residence to a modern 8-story facility (completed in 1927) during Strauss’s helmsmanship. Wall Steet baron, Louis F. Rothschild was the HJD’s lifetime treasurer.
In 1919, while in Paris for the Peace Accords and still on Hoover’s Food Administration staff, Strauss met with Mortimer Schiff who extended an offer to work for Kuhn, Loeb & Company at its New York headquarters (concurrent with his hospital presidency). Strauss rejected a position with the European League of Nations to accept Schiff’s offer. In 1923, Strauss married Alice Hanauer, the daughter of Kuhn Loeb & Co. partner Jerome Hanauer (the first non-family partner). She was 18 and he was 27. Within five years, Strauss became a full Kuhn Loeb & Co. partner. According to Kuhn Loeb, Strauss was among the first non-family associates to make partner (along with Sir William Wiseman of British Intelligence). The company was then controlled by the Warburg brothers, following the death of Jacob Schiff in September of 1920, who also maintained M.M. Warburg in Hamburg and directed the industrial chemical giant I.G. Farben. Strauss left the hospital in 1925 and joined the USNaval Intelligence service as a reservist.
During the 1930s, Strauss gained prominence as the director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ), president of the NYC Temple Emanu-el (1938-1948), the foremost Reform congregation in the US, and a member of a secretive medical philanthropy, the Maccabean Club. He personally took responsibility to counter the activities of famous ‘anti-Semites’ Charles Coughlin and Henry Ford. In 1939, under the imminence of war, Strauss volunteered for active duty; he was promoted to Rear Admiral after managing the Bureau of Ordnance and became a special ‘troubleshooter’ for Sec. of the Navy, James Forrestal. Personal memoirs about Strauss from his circle of friends indicate that he and ”Wild” Bill Donovan (OSS) introduced Albert D. Lasker to his third wife, Mary Woodward, about this time (1942-43). He remained a close friend of the Laskers who themselves gained unprecendented influence over American health policy, taking over the American Cancer Society in 1945.
In 1946, Strauss was appointed to the 5-man Atomic Energy Commission by Harry Truman, resigning from Kuhn Loeb &Co, forbidden by law to engage in “any other business”. His primary goals as a commissioner were to tighten security, restrict the distribution of radiopharmaceuticals, and build up a highly efficient fallout detection program through AEC contracts which came to include the CIA’s U-2 spyplane. Commissioner Strauss resigned in January of 1950, but returned under an Eisenhower appointment as Chief. Between 1950 and 1953, Strauss served the Rockefeller family Brothers Fund as a personal financier. Under Strauss, the AEC engaged in its most intense period of nuclear testing. He was never ‘absent’ from the program. His brief departure in 1950 signaled the emerging thermonuclear era which he heartily endorsed, using his temporary ‘outsider’ status to arrange intimate meetings on his yacht or at vacation homes. He was active in the affairs of Sloan-Kettering Institute and Memorial Hospital as a founding trustee and board member. Strauss also became an executive board member at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton during WWII. As an officer of the IAS (founded in 1930 by Abraham Flexner on the department store fortune of the Bambergers) Strauss offered the Director position to Robert Oppenheimer in 1946 which later led to a “notable tension” during the AEC’s loyalty hearings of Oppenheimer in 1954, who was denied a ‘security’ clearance in any further weapons programming.
*
In 1954 the U.S. performed full-scale H-bomb tests in the Marshall Islands, noted for having been underestimated in creating dangerous fallout. Oppenheimer, and virtually every former atomic scientist from the Manhattan Project (excluding Edward Teller, Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez who were staunchly allied to Strauss) had been opposed to pursuing a vigorous ‘Super’ program for reasons of military strategy and technical uncertainty.
Robert Oppenheimer was denied atomic security clearance, 1954, by special hearings of the AEC;
“In July 1953, according to AEC staff lawyer Harold Green, ‘Strauss had promised [J. Edgar] Hoover that he would purge Oppenheimer.’ “ [ref.p474,
American Prometheus, Bird and Sherwin, 2005] Strauss had not even yet formally taken the chair.
*
Security was Strauss’s main focus as an AEC Commissioner and Chief. His plans were directed to structuring a complete fallout monitoring system, which began in 1947 as Jonas Salk and his sponsors were laying plans to produce polio vaccine. On his return as the AEC chief (1953-1958), Strauss initiated the “Sunshine” campaign –a PR blitz to equate fallout with sunshine and assuage public fear. The danger of fallout was kept from the public well until 1958-1959 when doctors and dentists began reporting the cumulative effects of measurable ionizing chemicals in the teeth and bones of American youngsters. By this time, Strauss had reached the end of his long government career in a bitter 2-month battle for his post with Commerce. His last executive job in Washington was a one year appointment as Secretary of Commerce pro tem, rejected finally by the Congress in June of 1959. (See the articles linked below called “The Strauss Affair” and “The One That Broke The Camel’s Back”)
Strauss was renown to Washington insiders as a big operator behind the scenes with a “ruthless, vindictive” character, “silken tact”, and was hugely influential over the public psyche during the Cold War. According to Eustace Mullins, he was the power behind the political [Harry F.] ”Byrd machine” in Virginia.
________________________________________________________
Excerpts from Lawrence and Oppenheimer, by Nuel Pharr Davis [1968, Simon and Schuster]:
[p277] “Lewis Strauss, despite assertions by a Congressional witness that he had financed the Russian Revolution through his firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company, was the most conservative-minded [AEC] Commissioner. After Bard had resigned from Stimson’s Interim Committee, Strauss had taken his place to represent the Navy and there he had met Oppenheimer in the summer of 1945…
[p278]…genuinely in love with science –the Office of Naval Research, the best of the government’s science-subsidy programs was his child– Strauss did not think of nuclear physics as a curse. ‘No I would not wipe out any part of it, not the bomb nor any other part of it if I could’, he said. ‘I believe everything man discovers, however he discovers it, is welcome and good for his future’…
[p279] About [Aug. 1947], Strauss ran into his first conflict with the philosophy Oppenheimer had diffused into the Atomic Energy Commission [the philosophy of international cooperation]. The McMahon Act, blandly ignoring commitments by Roosevelt and Truman to the British, forbade any export of atomic energy or of secret information about how to produce it.
[p280] ..Oppenheimer took [that] to mean anything one could conceivably use to make bombs of. So did the General Advisory Committee [of the AEC/JCAE] and all the Atomic Energy Commissioners but Strauss. Strauss by contrast talked of the term ['atomic energy'] as pretty much the same thing as radioactivity …any form of radioactivity that came out of the [AEC's] plants and laboratories. A big peaceful by-product of Hanford and Oak Ridge was radioisotopes on a scale that put Lawrence’s machines –all except the M.T.A.[**]– out of the isotope production business…
[Radioisotopes] represented the innocent foreign aid [the AEC] liked to associate themselves with. Strauss objected. He saw two dangers… First, Strauss said, was the industrial danger: [a nation] might apply the isotopes to construction of an atomic energy industry… Second..was the danger [of]..radiological warfare, which as Lawrence’s friend he took more seriously than did the other Commissioners.
[p281] In 1947 the other Commissioners overrode his objectives four to one. Henceforth they distributed isotopes widely abroad, and he watched in opposition, seeking a chance to prove how dangerous was their mania for extending to foreigners the fruit of this country’s atomic labor.” *
*
* The controversy over selling isotopes, in this case, concerned material sold to the French whose chief physicist, Frederic Joliot-Curie, was a Communist.
** The M.T.A., or
Materials Testing Accelerator, was a giant five-story proton-generating linear particle accelerator, built between 1947 and 1950. The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, formally opened in 1952, was incepted with the construction of the M.T.A. which was built to make plutonium (and the hydrogen isotope tritium) at the intense urging and lobbying of Ernest Lawrence. Lawrence and Strauss were “good friends” and strategic allies in building America’s nuclear industry. Radioisotopes were Lawrence’s stock-and-trade, distributed from the Berkeley Radiation Lab as ‘cyclotron’ particle accelerators were developed and expanded from 1930 onwards. During and after WWII, Oak Ridge “
became the nation’s largest supplier of radioisotopes for medical, industrial and physical research…[and] also conducted the largest radiation genetics program in the world.” http://www.atomictraveler.com/HistoryofAEC.pdf The Oak Ridge biological testing facilities were the most highly guarded and secret of the entire complex.
*
N.P.Davis wrote, “The nuclear dawn was wild with hope as well as fear. McMahon worried that his bill might put the country’s coal mines and oil wells out of business… he and Truman could not help regarding the proposed Atomic Energy Commission as a sort of super T.V.A. [Tennessee Valley Authority]. With this view Truman, in October 1946, nominated [David] Lilienthal to be chairman. Two of the Comissioners, Lewis Strauss and Robert Bacher, were familiar with the government’s science establishment. …The other two members were Sumner Pike [from Wall Street] and William Waymack, a Des Moines Iowa newspaper executive. Pike distinguished himself particularly in raw-materials procurement…
“Senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper (Republican of Iowa) became chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy [JCAE] after the November election of 1946. …In December, Truman had appointed [Oppenheimer] one of nine technicians on a General Advisory Committee that was supposed to answer the Atomic Energy Commissioners’ science questions. [p263] …Oppenheimer felt happy about his eight fellow [GAC] members, who included [Enrico] Fermi, [Isador] Rabi, [James] Conant, and [Lee] DuBridge… The eight liked him too… [and they] unanimously elected him chairman. [p264]
“First, the Committee revived moribund existing installations. Hanford…got going again under new management. At Oak Ridge they shut down vast needless electromagnetic plants [Lawrence's particle accelerators]. Under their guidance two laboratories that had been founded in 1946 –Argonne and Brookhaven– rose to the stature of Los Alamos and Berkeley. From Los Alamos they removed the routine production line; freed to work at physics.. [the physicists were focused] in bomb design during the years 1947-49. [p266] …As for the estimable but tepid peaceful projects, they had a special justification. By drawing in a cadre of foreign scientists, they kept alive Oppenheimer’s dream of an international science community vigilantly inspecting the world’s laboratories to see that they studied war no more.” [p267]
” ‘A strong force on the side of the angels’, [Hans] Bethe called Oppenheimer’s committee [the GAC]. While in January of 1950 it spent itself trying to stay the national death wish, research toward the Super went on unaffected by the overt struggle… the issue had shifted from physics to psychology… The British reported they had caught Klaus Fuchs giving bomb data to the Russians and had got a confession from him that he had been doing it for years. All security-cleared scientists in the country thought at once of the Fuchs-von Neumann patent. ..Bethe in New York telephoned Ralph Smith, director of the documents division at Los Alamos. [p323] “Is it all there?’ Bethe asked. ‘All’, said Smith. ..Bethe began to think. Since this government now knew it shared the secret of the Super with its principal ally and with its principal enemy, an international agreement to ban the thing looked more obviously advantageous. One could not tell the American public why, of course, since Security was still functioning effectively against them.” [p324]
“[O]n..Monday, January 30, Oppenheimer reported to Truman that Fuchs knew all about the Super. …Truman at once convened a committee of three… With Lilienthal opposing, they voted two-to-one formally to inaugerate the crash program toward the Super. [p326].
“On January 31, 1950, his fifty-fourth birthday, Strauss too was expecting Truman’s announcement. His term as Commissioner had been a long contest of wills with the rest of the Commission. In every one of its dozen non-unanimous decisions, he had been one-to-four on the losing side. The Commission’s last such decision plunged him into what he later let a newsman-protege term his Gethsemane. Truman’s reversal [for the crash program] brought him out. It was the highest triumph he could hope for against his four present fellow Commissioners. His plans already laid, he went to the White House and resigned, then staged a celebration at the Shoreham Hotel. Congressmen, generals, government officials, and of course, newsmen came to rejoice with him over the country’s dedication to the way of the Super. [p327].
“Strauss at the time had little further power to help them. But three years later, as personal advisor to a President [Eisenhower] whom Oppenheimer had galled with demands for impolitic statesmanship, Strauss was to have unlimited power… there would be lavish funds and inordinate publicity. For Lawrence there would be much more… an annual medal and award… All these great gifts Strauss was able to channel to his friends after he remade the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953-54. Chairman then, and with all the former Commissioners replaced but Smyth, he commanded four-to-one majorities…”[p328]
“When Strauss came back as chairman, physicist David L. Hill told a Congressional committee, ‘He apparently started to work on a few of the people who had dared to disagree with him in the past. The first to receive his attention was Carroll Wilson… Immediately after Strauss’s appointment an unusually intensive investigation of Wilson was suddenly initiated. …For his own general manager Strauss as chairman appointed General Kenneth Nichols, long hostile to Oppenheimer. [p329] …The general belief, said..David Hill, was that Eisenhower acted upon the counsel of his personal atomic advisor, Strauss. In July of 1953, Eisenhower appointed Strauss chairman… In August of 1953 the Russians set off their first detectable thermonuclear explosion.” [p334]
…”Reality in 1953, physicist David Inglis observed, was the rapid horrible fruition of the bomb.” [p336]
[end excerpts]
_________________________________
__________________________________________
*
Autobiographical content and excerpts from Men and Decisions, Doubleday 1962:
[Foreward] “In the main..this is intended to be a book about other men –men under whom I served or with whom I worked in business and..government…”
polioforever>>> in other words, not an autobiography but a ‘legacy’ crafted after Stauss’s rejection as Secretary of Commerce in 1959
SELLING SHOES IN THE SOUTH
[pp 1-2] “From the age of sixteen until twenty, I was a traveling salesman..selling shoes at wholesale to merchants in the Carolinas, Georgia, and West Virginia… I used to introduce myself by saying, ‘I am a son of the vice-president of Fleishman Morris & Company in Richmond, Virginia, and I would like to show you our line of fine shoes.’ “
[p3]..”I observed the Sabbath by not working on Saturdays..[and] had two days each week for study. One of my uncles, who had become wealthy and who lived in New York, would visit the less affluent members of the family in Richmond…. he would reason with me on the folly of wasting one day out of each week…”
..”In cities where there was a Jewish congregation…I gained the friendship of some remarkable scholars such as the late Rabbi Mendelssohn of Wilmington, North Carolina…
..”By 1916, when I was twenty, I had saved about twenty thousand dollars…
..”The precise moment my interest in physics began is sharp in my memory… I had a damaged front tooth and had to be taken to a dentist…
[p4]…[the dentist] gave me a saucer of mercury..[and] a tuning fork and I found that quite beautiful waves could be produced on the surface of the mercury with the vibrating fork. When the dentist saw what I was doing, he fastened two small wires to the tines of the fork..setting it vibrating… There to my astonishment and delight was the first ‘standing wave’ I had ever seen.”
THE HOOVER YEARS (c.1915-1919)
[p5] “Through the newspapers, people were beginning to be familiar with the name of Herbert C. Hoover. It was understood that he was a successful mining engineer who had been pressed into service by Ambassador Walter Hines Page in London. [Hoover's] job was to get Americans who had been stranded in Europe by the war back to their homes.Apparently he had done so well at this assignment that, when starvation began in Belgium and Northern France, the Ambassador..again turned to Mr. Hoover for help.”
[p11] “The group of men who responded to Mr. Hoover’s call to help organize wartime activities included many whose careers were afterward closely allied with his… Robert A. Taft, an early recruit with whom I was to be closely associated..became the Republican leader of the Senate and a close contender for the presidential nomination in 1952; Frederick C. Walcott..of Connecticut…; H. Alexander Smith..Senior Senator from New Jersey; Joseph P. Cotton [who] became Under Secretary of State; Christian Herter [who] became governor of Massachusetts and Secretary of State. There were many others who became university presidents, governors of states, editors, business executives, and useful citizens… By June 1917, the Food Administration was fully staffed and under way.”
[p14] “We sailed on July 11 on the S.S. Olympic…she carried six thousand troops in her passenger spaces. Literally every foot of space was occupied… On reaching London, Mr. Hoover was given the enthusiastic reception to which his accomplishments since 1914 entitled him. The Allied food controllers (at that time they were Clynes for Great Britain, Boret for France, and Crespi for Italy) came to meet him… Italy had suffered more than any of the other Allies for shortage of food…”
[p15] “The meetings with the food controllers were successful. An Allied Food Council was set up, of which Mr. Hoover was named chairman… There was a grand banquet given by the Lord Mayor of London at the Mansion House.”
[p17] “We left the following morning in cars sent..by the Belgians… King Albert received us..the Queen..Crown Prince Leopold and his brother Charles…”
[p19] “After we returned to Washington and in anticipation of the end of hostilities, the President [Wilson] sent for Mr. Hoover and asked him to make plans for transforming the Food Administration into an agewncy of relief and reconstruction for all of Europe. Mr. Hoover had suggested this to Colonel House in the course of several communications in the summer of 1918.”
[p22] “As early as June 13, 1918, Colonel House suggested to President Wilson that Mr. Hoover should be temporarily relieved as Food Administrator and be sent to Russia to head nonmilitary intervention..concerned with the alleviation of starvation… Mr. Hoover was willing to undertake any assignment..delegated to him… No more was heard of the subject until spring of the following year…”
[p23] “In November 1918…President Wilson had suggested to Mr. Hoover that he should consult Justice Brandeis..on political and economic affairs in Russia. There was no man in the United States, however, who was more familiar with Russia than Mr. Hoover himself. For years before the war his mining interests in Siberia had been important and he had traveled to Russia extensively. Justice Brandeis knew this…”
[p24] “As I took leave of Justice Brandeis on the November afternoon in 1918, he asked me to keep in touch with him… this I promised to do… At irregular intervals, I sent him a sort newsletter from London or Paris or wherever…
[p54]..”Before sailing for Europe in November 1918, there had been a meeting in Mr. Hoover’s office attended by Harry A. Garfield [chief of the Fuel Adminstration], Bernard Baruch and Vance McCormick to decide what should be done after the war with the four emergency organizations, the War Trade Board, the War Industries Board, the Fuel Administration and the Food Administration. There had been considerable agitation that they should become permanent agencies of the Government. The four conferees reached unanimous agreement that..all these departments should gradually withdraw the restrictions they had imposed on commerce…”
[p19] ”Accordingly, on November 17, six days after the Armistice, we were again on the Olympic…
[p21] “Mr. Hoover was painfully aware that the primary sufferers were children… Therefore, he planned that immediately upon surrender cargoes of food should be rushed to the children in the vanquished countries…distributed to children as a first priority through schools and soup kitchens.
[p27] “I saw President Wilson only three times during the period between December 1918 and the day when the treaty was signed at Versailles… I was simply a message bearer on these occasions… I was proud to be named a trustee of the foundation which cares for the Wilson birthplace in Staunton, Virginia…
[p28]…”Wilson recognized that after the defeat of Germany the problem posed by the emergence of Bolshevism in Russia was the most serious of all… the Russian question became an ominous presence at the council table…
[p29]…[William C.]“Bullitt’s mission to Russia had extraordinary consequences. He was a trained and conscientious observer…
[p30] “Bullitt’s report highlighted the unsatisfactory condition of our troops at Archangel and the necessity for their early withdrawal… widespread starvation was exerting the pressure…
[p39] “There were also in the Mediterranean at that time a considerable number of our naval vessels…[that] ran a sort of shuttle operation between ports on the Adriatic and Aegean seas…
[p40] “Although the Armistice had been signed on November 11, 1918, most of the details of surrender were left for subsequent settlement… In the preliminary conference with the British..March 13, Mr. Hoover..made a strong representation for formally ending the blockade of Germany..technically still in force and through which we had periodic difficulty in getting our food cargoes…
[p41] The Belgian delegation was led by Emile Francqui, president of the great Belgian bank of the Societe Generale. He had been one of Mr. Hoover’s right-hand men during the days of..Relief in Belgium… The building in which the German delegation was quartered was kept under military guard by the Belgians…
[p42] “Every day –indeed several times each day– at the central office…we received telegraphic intelligence on every economic and political factor in Europe…
[p43] “one of the most serious difficulties which arose between the Allies and ourselves [the U.S. delegation] was an apparent decision of the food controllers to break the price of food in the United States…
[p45]..But maintenance of the Allied blockade appears to have been part of the plan to keep pressure on our price levels. It was essential to the scheme that we should find ourselves compelled to sell our surplus [cheap] because we could not hold on to [perishables]…
[p49] With the signing of the Treaty..there was great anxiety on the part of the American staff..many of whom had been in Europe since 1917, to return home… Mr Hoover devised a plan to establish..advisers in the several countries. These men were Americans but [became] employees of the..ministries in those countries. With this enterprise functioning, our Paris headquarters closed in September of 1919.”
[Foreward] “In order to earn a living, I was compelled to leave [Hoover's] staff in the autumn of 1919. The friendship with him, however, which following the death of my father, became almost filial, has endured. There has been scarcely a month in the half a thousand months which have elapsed that I have not visited him, and our correspondence has grown to be voluminous.”
*
polioforever>>>
Eustace Mullins, taking John Hamill’s book, The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags, as his source wrote,”The Belgian Relief Commission was organized by Emile Francqui, director of a large Belgian bank, Societe Generale, and a London mining promoter, an American named Herbert Hoover, who had been associated with Francqui in a number of scandals which had become celebrated court cases, notably the Kaiping Coal Company scandal in China, said to have set off the Boxer Rebellion, which had as its goal the expulsion of all foreign businessmen from China. Hoover had been barred from dealing on the London Stock Exchange because of one judgment against him, and his associate, Stanley Rowe, had been sent to prison for ten years. With this background, Hoover was called an ideal choice for a career in humanitarian work… Hamill (on page 156) identifies Francqui as the director of many atrocities committed against natives in the Congo. “For every cartridge they spent, they had to bring in a man’s hand”.. ” http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/esp_sociopol_fed06d.htm
*
Lewis Strauss described obtaining uranium for the M.E.D. : “the origin of our supply of the potent element begins..and revolves about the granitic figure of an engineer and industrialist, Sir Edgar Sengier…[who] controlled a mine in the Congo which was the world’s richest producer of uranium ore…[where] the concentration..was uniquely high. Despite all the prospecting that has occurred within the past twenty years, no other deposit has ever rivaled the Shinkolobwe mine for richness.
…”We had both [Sengier and Strauss]
been connected with Hoover’s Commission for Relief of Belgium in World War I, and our friendship dated from those days…In the field of atomic energy, a special relationship thus existed between the United States and Belgium, and the two governments have closely co-operated ever since.” [p317,
Men and Decisions, by Lewis L. Strauss, 1962]…
Union Miniere du Haut Katanga (UMHK) “
was created on October 28, 1906 as a result of a merger [between]
a company created by Leopold II and Tanganyika Concessions Ltd. (a British company…) to exploit the mineral wealth of Katanga. It was jointly owned by the Societe Generale de Belgique, Belgium’s largest holding company..and Tanganyika Concessions Ltd… In 1922, the UMHK built its first refinery for uranium ore, and by 1926 had a virtual monopoly of the world uranium market” http://www.aadet.com/article/Union_Mini%C3%A8re_du_Haut_Katanga; taken from the article JFK Conspiracy Con (part two)
http://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/jfk-conspiracy-con-ii/; Canada played a decisive role in providing radium and uranium for weapons, beginning in 1931.
*
KUHN, LOEB & CO. (1919-1946)
>>>”Kuhn, Loeb & Company was founded by Abraham Kuhn and Solomon Loeb, who began working as commercial partners in 1850, selling clothing and dry-goods in Indiana and Ohio. In 1867, they co-founded a private banking house in New York with assets estimated at half a million dollars. Jacob H. Schiff and Abraham L.Wolff joined Kuhn, Loeb & Company as partners in 1875, and Felix M. Warburg and Otto H. Kahn became partners in 1897. By the end of the nineteenth century, the firm numbered among the six leading investment houses in the country. Kuhn, Loeb & Company eventually branched out into transportation finance, underwriting and financial advisory. The firm also managed loans and securities sales for foreign governments and municipalities, eventually introducing shares of large foreign corporations into the American market.”
http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~bak00042*
[p83] “The twenty-seven years with Kuhn, Loeb & Co. were fortunate ones for me, as I came under the tutelage of men who were among the wisest..experts of their day…”
[p85] “The aggregate..financing in which I was involved totals many hundreds of millions of dollars and included adventurous projects such as building a steel plant in Detroit… the laying of a new transatlantic cable…financing the ideas of inventors and other enterprises that were off the beaten course of banking…”
[back to 1919..]
[p49] “A minor matter of a personal nature had followed the signature of the Treaty of Versailles…
[p50]…”I had met Mortimer Schiff in Paris. Mr. Schiff was the only son of Jacob H. Schiff, of New York, and was a partner of the international banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. He had come to Paris on a mission for the American Red Cross. He asked me whether I would care to come to work for his firm at the end of my duties with Mr. Hoover. I discussed the subject with Oscar Straus..a former Ambassador of the United States to Turkey and Secretary of Commerce and Labor in the cabinet of Theodore Roosevelt..[in] Paris representing an independent organization of the League to Enforce Peace, which he had organized… I had been invited by Mr. and Mrs. Straus to live in their apartment in Paris and I was very fond of them and set great store by Mr. Straus’s judgement. He..counseled me to accept the invitation from Mr. Schiff… I had also written to my friend Justice Brandeis, and he had replied to say that he had hopes of a career of public service for me…”
[p51] “I returned ahead of Mr. Hoover to keep the long-deferred commitment to report for work at the offices of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., and sailed from Brest on the S.S. Finland with Sargeant Everett Somers,..my efficient and overworked assistant in Paris. We landed in New York on September 19.”
[p81] “On arrival in New York in September..I knew only two of the partners of Kuhn, Loeb & Co… I had become acquainted with..Felix Warburg in connection with a charitable matter which had brought him to Washington three years previously, and I had met Mortimer Schiff..during the war representing the American Red Cross [in Paris] which resulted in his offer. The other three partners..were Jacob H. Schiff.. Otto H. Kahn.. and Jerome Hanauer [whom] I did not know at all.”
[p82] ”The offices of our firm were in its own building at the intersection of William and Pine and the firm’s letterhead..bore no name or other identification than the words ‘William and Pine Streets’… In 1922 tha partners gave me a joint power of attorney, which authorized me..to obligate the firm’s name and credit and entitled me to..participation in profits… The years that closely followed were without disappointment. I found my wife in 1923… I visited Japan and other countries, representing the firm… my visit in 1926 was the first [since Jacob Schiff's visit after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905] made by anyone..with the firm… my wife and I received a princely welcome…”
[p83] “The twenty-seven years with Kuhn, Loeb & Co. were fortunate ones for me, as I ca,e under the tutelage of men who were among the wisest..experts of their day…”
[p84] “I have mentioned Otto H. Kahn… Working with him, I helped reorganize the Denver, Rio Grande & Western, and other railroads… With Felix Warburg..I enjoyed a close working relationship but almost wholly in the field of philanthropy… Mr. Warburg..gave large sums and most of his time to charities. Shortly before I joined..his brother, Paul M. Warburg, had resigned..[and] been made a governor of the first Federal Reserve Board..[having] written the fundamental charter for that institution. It was, in fact,..his idea. I had the good luck to come to know him well… Hardest working of the partners was Jerome J. Hanauer. Unrelated to either of the founding families, he had reached partnership without benefit of nepotism. I worked as his assistant in [railroad] reorganization..and soon learned why he was regarded as the most knowledgeable authority of his day in the field of railroad finance… Of all the financiers I have ever known, he is the only one who was never wrong on any business question… It was his daughter [Alice]..whom I married [in 1923].”
[p92] “In 1923, I purchased a residence on East Seventy-sixth Street in New York. The seller was a Mr. McKesson, of the old and reputable firm of McKesson & Robbins drug manufacturers… one of my friends, a partner in a Wall Street firm, was listed as a director of the drug company…”
[p53] During Mr. Hoover’s service in the cabinets of Harding and Coolidge, my contacts with him were less frequent. The banking business absorbed my interest and my time. I was succeeded as his assistant by Christian A. Herter, [from Hoover's staff] who had been secretary of the U.S. Peace Commission in Paris in 1918-19, where he had impressed everyone… He served Mr. Hoover with distinction during the period when the Department of Commerce was raised to a degree of usefulness to the economy which it had never before attained. Mr. Herter later entered politics, served..the House of Representatives, as Governor of..Massachusetts and was appointed Under Secretary of State, and later Secretary [1959] by President Eisenhower.”
[p55]..”Mr. Hoover did not settle in Washington, but established his headquarters at 42 Broadway in New York, where his overseas relief activities were centered… my office was at the corner of William and Pine streets, only a few blocks distant… On one day, September 16, 1920, I traversed this route to call on Mr. Hoover and introduce Dr. Harry Plotz, a young physician who had achieved fame as the discoverer of the organism of typhus… Plotz made an interesting report on conditions in the Ukraine… Mr. Hoover said he had heard that the administration in the Red Cross wished to replace him as chairman of the Council of War Relief Organizations, and he asked me to inquire of Dr. Fred Keppel… He also said that Paul Warburg had invited him to join the International Acceptance Bank..[under] any arrangement he cared to make… Mr. Hoover..concluded to continue in public service.”
polioforever>>> Standard Oil was headquartered at 26 Broadway on the same ‘block’ further south, overlooking Bowling Green, site of the now famous bronze Bull.
[p85] “[During the 1920s] I came to know Leopold and Philip Block of Chicago, Ernest Weir of Pittsburgh, George Humphrey, George Fink, Tom Girdler, Frank Purnell, and other powerful figures in the world of steelmaking. Eventually I handled the banking for their companies; Inland, National, Great Lakes, Youngstown, Republic and other steel companies. At one point, all but two of the large independent steel manufacturers were my clients.”
[p97] “As a boy, photography had been a major interest…”
[p98] “In 1922, Everett Somers [military aide]..introduced two young musicians, Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky… [T]hey conceived a method of making photographs in color with one exposure on a single film..using an ordinary camera… I arranged for the necessary money to pay for patent applications and attorney fees and to rent and staff a small laboratory. The Eastman Kodak Company co-operated by furnishing required sensitizers, dyes, and other materials, but brushed the process itself aside… [until] I decided to go over the head of [Kodak] officers.. and traveled to Rochester with Sir William Wiseman [of British Intelligence], one of my associates, ..to George Eastman himself.. which resulted in marketing the product called Kodachrome. Annually it earns many millions for the Kodak Company and until the patents finally expired in 1952, was highly profitable to the young inventors and to all concerned.”
>>>George Eastman (1854-1932) committed suicide by a gunshot to the heart on March 14, 1932
…”Another decision was to back a young inventor, Edwin H. Land, who was introduced to me..by his camp counselor, Julius Silver… Land impressed me at once, a fact of which I am proud… Land has many inventions to his credit.. some of them of a classified character… He is best known perhaps for the Polaroid Land Camera.”
>>>
Edwin “Din” Land was to lead a CIA science and technology advisory called “Project Three”, activated in 1954 under the Technological Capabilities Panel (TCP) of the National Security Council: “It was Land’s Project Three panel that pushed the idea of building a high-flying aircraft [the U-2]
to obtain photographs of the Soviet Union…” http://www.scribd.com/doc/94772549/CIA-Sci-Tech [pp15-19]
[p85] “In the early thirties, Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, decided to sell an affiliate, the Universal Credit Corporation, and to get out of the business of financing the retail sales of his automobiles. I negotiated the transaction..through the intermediation of Ernest Kanzler. The purchaser was the Commercial Investment Trust..[founded by] Henry Ittleson, who..asked me to obtain assurance from Mr. Ford in writing to the effect that..he would not start a competing business. Mr. Ford declined to put [it] in written form, but pledged his word.”
[p94] “My education..process was advanced during a visit to London..in October and November of 1933 [where] on November 1 I had lunch at New Court, the impressive and venerable Rothschild banking establishment… At the table, with my Rothschild hosts Anthony and Lionel, were Sir Robert Waley Cohen, Lord Melchett and other figures… Mr. Lionel..said, ‘Mr. Strauss, I suppose you know.. your government has been buying gold and this morning your President Roosevelt has set a price of $32.28 for it. Can you tell us why the President would suddenly jump the price to that particular figure?’ To this I replied, ‘Maybe he just pulled the figure out of a hat.’… Many years later, I learned that on October 25, 1933, the then Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr., Dr. George F. Warren, the President’s oracle on money matters, and Mr. Jesse Jones, Chairman of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, held the first of a series of meetings..for setting the price of gold for the day. These meetings were held in the President’s bedroom… Mr. Morgenthau records..on one occasion the President decided that the rise in price..would be twenty-one cents. ‘It is a lucky number’ the President said with a laugh, ‘because it is three times seven.’ Mr. Morgenthau was a conscientious Secretary..[w]hether or not the President was pulling his leg, it is of record that the price of gold was set by this system. It might as well have been drawn out of a hat, as I so lightly advised the Rothschilds and their friends.
“I have often wished that some of those with whom I lunched at New Court..were alive today in order that I might redeem myself…
[p95] “Kuhn, Loeb & Co. occasionally imported gold from England and sold it to the Treasury Department. In the 1930s, when I suspected that its origin, despite the mint stamp, might be from mines expropriated by the Communists, the firm discontinued the practice… a decision I never regretted.”
[p131] “The banking years were years of constructive work, of friendships… not years of decision such as those..which were to follow.”
[p164] “..Toward the end of 1937…Dr. Arno Brasch and Dr. Leo Szilard, having learned of my interest [in radioactive isotopes], approached me through Francis Rosenbaum, a mutual friend. They asked me to finance them in the construction of a ‘surge generator’ [particle accelerator] with which they wished to explore nuclear phenomena in high-energy ranges… Brasch and Szilard believed that it would be possible to produce radioactive isotopes of many elements..by surges of current at very high voltages… Radioactive cobalt could be made, they calculated, at a cost of a few dollars per gram. Cobalt had certain advantages over radium..[it] is rapidly excreted. I foresaw the possibility of producing this isotope in quantity and of giving it to hospitals as a memorial to my parents.”
>>>Strauss’s special relationship with Szilard and Brasch over their inventions appears to have begun in 1934; that same year Szilard signed over a nuclear reactor patent to the British Admiralty
[p102] “It was a hard personal decision when in 1946..resignation was in order to comply with the law upon accepting appointment to the first Atomic Energy Commission… Business was a less demanding and far more agreeable way of life…but there is satisfaction of a unique kind in public service if the inevitable disappointments are foreseen and, to lapse into banking parlance, discounted.”
[p131] “I had held a commission in the Naval Reserve since 1925, and in March 1941 orders..arrived to report for duty. This was nearly ten months before Pearl Harbor and I seriously considered asking to be released, as I was then forty-five and had been a lieutenant commander for fourteen years… My commission..bears the signature of Calvin Coolidge… But..I wanted to be useful in any way possible.”
WORLD WAR TWO — BUREAU OF ORDNANCE
[p132] “The orders assigned me to duty with the Bureau of Ordnance… I had become acquainted with Admiral W.R. Furlong, chief of the bureau, just as these orders arrived he was transferred to a command in the Pacific. The new chief of bureau..by reason of..ability, had been promoted over officers senior to him, was Rear Admiral William Henry Purnell Blandy… By professional specialty, he was a gunner –a ‘battleship admiral’– and proud of that tag… Blandy’s first action was to reorganize completely the Bureau of Ordnance…[T]he staff of only eighty regular officers..spread experience very thin. In consequence, the reserve officers had great opportunities… Some of us (myself in particular) were assigned to responsibilities for which we were unprepared… I was placed in charge of ordnance inspection with the astonshing designation General Inspector of Ordnance.”
[p133] “As we had only a handful of qualified men, the first step was to train more immediately. I arranged for a school for inspectors..by dragooning civilian friends and acquaintances, [and] recruited some hundreds of men… [N]ine months later there was a trained staff of INOs (Inspectors of Naval Ordnance) at all the major centers of manufacturing… There were also many of these plant inspectors for the Bureau of Ships, the Bureau of Aeronautics, and other Navy Bureaus and offices…independent of one another, even in the same plant… This led to the obvious conclusion that there should be one naval inspection service…
“At dinner one evening..[with] Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Knox.. I expounded on the value of consolidating all naval inspection activities… The Secretary was impressed and asked..[for] a memorandum..which I did the next morning.”
[p134] “…Navy material inspection was duly consolidated for the remainder of the war, but only after a pitched battle with the bureau chiefs..”
[p135] “The next morning my assignment was changed and I was ordered to report as executive assistant to the chief of the bureau –Admiral Blandy. We soon became friends… During his tenure as Chief.. he succeeded in ‘putting the prod into production’ –a slogan he coined.”
[p136] “[Under] Blandy’s administration..there was a Research Division..particularly alert to new developments… Blandy himself was on the lookout for new weapons… It was rumored that, in the best cloak-and-dagger tradition, Blandy obtained the detailed drawings of..two new guns overseas and concealed them in reduced form under postage stamps. I never persuaded him to confirm..or deny it.”
”One of the most original and effective military developments in World War II was the proximity, or ‘VT’, fuse… For a long time, ordnance specialists had dreamed of a fuse which would tell the shell..to explode just when it came within..the target… Such a fuse would turn near-misses into hits.”
[p137] “Blandy’s interest was of long standing. One of his first acts on becoming chief of ordnance was to contract with the Carnegie Institute of Washington..to develop a proximity fuse… a fuse which could contain a radio transmitting station, a receiver, and a power supply to operate both…
[p138]..contained within a space somewhat smaller than a..light bulb.. [and] unbelievably rugged.
…Following..Pearl Harbor..the Navy eagerly desired that the development of the fuse should be hastened… Johns Hopkins University (which replace the Carnegie..as contractor to the Navy)..were now full time on the project with a large staff.”
[p139] “By September 1942 we were in quantity production of fuses and they were tested against drone planes, radio-controlled… we saw drones brought down in flames, one after another, with a minimum of rounds fired.
…The earliest use of the fuse in action occurred in the South Pacific in January 1943. From that time on, proximity-fused shells became more and more lethal.”
[p140] “Near the end of the war, a number of shells..with VT fuses were reported to have fallen into the hands of the Germans… The fuse was used by the Army with great effect against the Germans…used in howitzer ammunition… German prisoners described our artillery fire as completely demoralizing, and General Patton..wrote..’The new shell with the funny fuse is devastating… I think that when all armies get this shell, we will have to devise some new method of warfare. I am glad that you all [in Navy Ordnance] thought of it first.”
[p146] “In early 1944, I proposed to Forrestal that we should make an effort to obtain a sizeable appropriation from the Congress for postwar research in military areas and to get this while the war was going on. We should request a billion dollars..to subsist upon the income..that..would enable long-range research programs..without dependence upon annual appropriations… [As] a result, a Committee on Post-War Research was named under [Charles E.] Wilson as chairman…
[p147] “A directive for a new ‘office’ –the Office of Research and Inventions– was prepared, and the Naval Research Laboratory near Washington and the Special Devices Center of the Bureau of Aeronautics, among others, were..assigned to it… The office later became the Office of Naval Research [under] Admiral Bowen… first Chief of Naval Research ..[who] has generously ascribed its establishment to me… Bowen was a highly competent engineer… His early realization of the importance of radar ..[p148] (developed at the Naval Research Laboratory when he was in charge) and of atomic energy for ship propulsion was farsighted.
..”The ONR proceeded to work out a program by which contracts were made with universities for basic research… Men who had vowed..[to] never do any work after the war for either Armed Service found themselves doing so… The result was that when the Office of Scientific Research and Development began to liquidate at the end of the war, the Office of Naval Research filled the breach.
…”The Atomic Energy Commission has shared many projects in nuclear physics with ONR.”
*
polioforever>>> An example of ONR funding nuclear physics is recorded in the oral transcripts of Caltech’s Kellogg Radiation Laboratory chief, Charles C. Lauritsen. Lauritsen was a pioneer builder of particle accelerators at Caltech, dependent on funding for “medical research” in the transmutation of elements into radioactive isotopes, which fundamentally mirrored the work of Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez in Berkeley. http://www.aip.org/history/ohlist/4733.html The Chief Scientist of the ONR, Emanuel Piore, records his key Navy contact as Lewis Strauss, which remained so until Piore left the ONR in 1955 while Strauss was AEC chair. http://www.aip.org/history/ohlist/4823.html
The Russian-born Piore began his work in physics with RCA and CBS, followed by ten years with the ONR, science advocacy to the U.S. government and an executive role with IBM.
“Careful readers of Zuoyue Wang’s recent book [
In Sputnik's Shadow] on the
President’s Science Advisory Committee [PSAC]..will know that
Piore became a ubiquitous figure on various high-level government panels (i.e., though not well known to historians,
he was a big deal). The idea behind establishing IBM Research was the general sense, widespread in the 1950s and ’60s, that technology-oriented companies would be well-served by conducting their own basic research. Piore’s goal was to establish an environment..where researchers could freely explore their own ideas.” (Will Thomas of
AIP, July/Aug.2010)
http://etherwave.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/gomory-on-research-industry-and-national-competitiveness/*
..more from Men and Decisions to come…
Timeline for L.L. Strauss
1915 or 1916 - joins Herbert Hoover in the effort for Relief of Beligium; Strauss functions as liason for the Joint Jewish Distribution Committee on the invitation of Felix Warburg; Strauss indicates his first trip to Washington D.C. was in February of 1917. A written testimonial from Hoover claims knowing Strauss at age 19 (from 1915 onwards); while staying in Washington D.C. he lives at the Cosmos Club
1917 — Aug 10, U.S. Food Administration was created by the “Lever Act”, or the Food and Fuel Control Act; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_Fuel_Control_Act
1917 – becomes president of the Jewish Hospital for Joint Diseases (HJD), 1917-1925: http://polioforever.wordpress.com/henry-frauenthal/ (Strauss made no personal memoir of this experience nor has anyone else); the JHJD was possibly the largest and only polio hospital in the US; LLS’s presidency corresponds to a rapid expansion of the facilities
1919 – in Paris on Hoover’s business with the Food Administration, Peace Treaty, and League of Nations; Strauss bunks at the luxury Hotel Crillon on the Place de la Concorde until invited to stay with “Uncle” Oscar Straus [Oscar Solomon Straus: brother of Isador (died on Titanic) and Nathan Straus ("king" of milk pasteurization) and father of Roger Williams Straus, head of his Guggenheim in-laws mining corporation, ASARCO and President of Princeton University]; deduction of correspondence legacies among Strausses confirms that LLStrauss and the family ‘Straus’ were in actuality relatives despite the cheeky use of “Uncle” and “Aunt” in the memoirs (for example, calling the LLStrauss family’s black maid “Aunt” as a prior reference). The earliest known letter from LLS to a ‘Straus’ was to a young member of Nathan Straus’s family c.1914. These relationships, regardless of blood ties, are among the most vital links in an otherwise nonexistent personal history.
“Strauss turned down an offer to be comptroller for the League of Nations in 1919 and returned to the United States to join the New York banking firm Kuhn, Loeb and Company” on the invitation of Mortimer Schiff in Paris (arrival in New York September 19, 1919)http://millercenter.org/academic/americanpresident/eisenhower/essays/cabinet/588; Strauss’ invitation to the firm predates the death of Jacob H. Schiff (Sept.25,1920) by over a year;
Origin of the League To Enforce Peace: “..in 1917 when the two kindred forces from Russia, revolutionary Communism and revolutionary Zionism, emerged into the full open, the third secret purpose of the war, the one of which they were instruments, also was revealed. This was the project for a “federation of the world” to takeover the managemnent of human affairs” and to rule by force… Its basic principal was the destruction of nation-states and nationhood so that it gave expression..to the ancient conflict between the Old Testament and the New, between the Levitical Law and the Christian message. The Torah-Talmud is the only discernible original source of this idea of ‘destruction of nations’…” [from The Controvery of Zion by Douglas Reed] http://knud.eriksen.adr.dk/Controversybook/TheLeaguetoEnforcePeace.htm
1922 –begins relationship with Kodachrome inventors, Mannes and Godowsky
1923 – marries Alice Hanauer (1903-2004), daughter of Jerome J. Hanauer, the first ‘non-family’ partner of Kuhn Loeb; bankers Hanauer and Otto Kahn were LLS’s closest working associates from whom he learned the trade; Alice Hanauer Strauss reported she is a cousin of lawyer Samuel Irving Rosenman (Judge and FDR adviser/speechwriter)
1924 – (continuing thereafter) becomes an executive officer of the American Jewish Committee (AJC)
1925 – resigns JHJD hospital presidency, joins US Navy with “a commission signed by Coolidge”; “In 1925 Strauss was commissioned in the naval reserve as an intelligence officer”, inducted as a Lt. Commander in the New York Naval Intelligence District, a rank he held until WWII http://navy.togetherweserved.com/usn/servlet/tws.webapp.WebApp?cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=CollegeAttendedExt&ID=194866; Strauss served under Commanding Officer Paul Foster; as a friend –during WWII– Adm. Foster joins the office of Chief of Naval Operations and in 1954, joins the Atomic Energy Commission (the NY ONI forged a vital liason with mafiosi Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano after the S.S. Normandie sabotage in 1942)
1926 – Strauss traveled to Japan to ‘retrace’ the steps of Jacob Schiff and renew the relationship between the Japanese leaders and Kuhn Loeb & Co.; on his return, Strauss was promoted by KL&C with power of attorney
1927 – handles steel and iron contracts: for example in December,”Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. sold $75,000,000 of bonds through Kuhn Loeb &Co. That was the biggest piece of industrial financing of the year.” http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,731252,00.html; Strauss’s financial management extends to Younstown, Bethlehem, Inland and National Steel companies
1928 – made full partner in Kuhn Loeb & Co. by his own statements; campaigns vigorously for Herbert Hoover’s nomination
1930 – Strauss makes illegal use of Naval Intelligence on Hoover’s behalf; “What this incident showed about Strauss was his willingness to employ the clandestine skills of counterintelligence for a political purpose… a wanton abuse of power. It shows that for Strauss..no sacrifice was too great, even though it violated the law, if he could convince himself it was necessary for the nation’s security” [ref.p42, No Sacrifice Too Great]. The incident involved a “onetime policeman named James O’Brien and a writer named John Hamill…O’Brien decided to have the Hoover past researched and publish a book thereon...” http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,753208,00.html; Strauss was to use Naval intelligence to find O’Brien and eliminate documents. http://thehistoryinsider.blogspot.com/2012/09/president-hoover-authorizing-break-in.html
1933 - purchases 1,600 acres, Brandy Rock farm; the Depression made farm estate lands cheap at this time
–Oct/November, among other activities as a representative of the American Jewish Committee, visiting the Rothschilds at New Court, London. Strauss was keynote speaker for the London conference of Jewish organizations on Oct.29, 1933
1934 – Directs the National Conference on Christians and Jews (1934 to 1973)
—according to autobiographical information in “Men and Decisions”(pub.1962), Strauss’s father and mother both died of cancer in 1935 (mother first) and 1937. This is at odds with an account by Edward Teller who met L.L. Strauss’s mother, Rosa Lichtenstein Strauss, in 1948 at Temple Emanu-El. (ref. Energy and Conflict, The Life and Times of Edward Teller, p.198)
1936-37 – Edwin Land and Polaroid (Land-Wheelwright Laboratory) secured ‘reorganization’ funding arranged by Julius Silver: “Under the enthusiastic sponsorship of Jimmy [James A.] Warburg, a group came together that included W. Averell Harriman, Lewis Strauss and Strauss’s partners at Kuhn Loeb, and several members of Schroder-Rockefeller. The group put up $375,000… Neither [Bernard] Baruch nor Morgan was among the the original..investors… The board of directors included Warburg, Harriman, Strauss –who was later replaced by his brother, L.Z. Morris Strauss– Donald Brown, George Wheelwright, Land, and Julius Silver. Carlton Fuller..[and others].…” [p55, Land's Polaroid, Peter C. Wensberg]
1937 – “Toward the end of 1937, two young nuclear physicists, Dr, Arno Brasch and Dr. Leo Szilard…approached me through Francis Rosenbaum, a mutual friend. They asked me to finance them in the construction of a ‘surge generator’..to explore nuclear phenomena in high-energy ranges… Brasch and Szilard believed that it would be possible to produce radioactive isotopes of many elements… I decided to help them…” –p163, Men and Decisions
1938 – becomes president of Temple Emanu-el (May 1938-1948)
1939 - January 25, receives a letter from Leo Szilard concerning the news of fission brought by Niels Bohr of Copenhagen; “The letter made Lewis Strauss the first public figure in America to be alerted to the nuclear future.” [ref.p171, The Deadly Element, Lennard Bickel, 1979]
–July, sails to Britain to meet UK officials about establishing the United States of Africa, a plan devised by Strauss, Bernard Baruch and Herbert Hoover, to create a new nation for “refugees” in central Africa from British-owned colonial territory (Tanganyika, Rhodesia, Kenya, Congo); Baruch declared, “In this new land there would be place for tens of millions…” While in London, incorporates “The Coordinating Foundation” to transfer funds for German Jews.
Finnish Relief — vice president, Lewis Strauss. Stalin invaded Finland in November of 1939 and Strauss helped found the Finnish Relief Fund (becomes FRF vice president) and the Finnish-American Trading Corp for which Strauss records, “I enlisted Dr. Julius Klein to head this.” [pp 67-68, Men and Decisions] FRF records: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4k4003hv/ ; ‘General’ Julius Klein http://www.smokershistory.com/IHR.htm#Julius_Klein; the Finnish-American Trading Corp was created to funnel arms to the Finns to repel the Soviet invasion– the fighting Finns were virtually crushed. Strauss wrote, “The flower of the Finnish army had been sacrificed in the early weeks of the war. On March 12, 1940, the Finns had asked for terms of peace. These were severe –a large part of their best land had to be ceded to Russia.” [p70, Men and Decisions]. Later, in 1954, Finland was subjected to “field testing” of the Salk polio vaccine.
Polish Relief — vice president, Lewis Strauss. ”Our route for shipments was from the United States to Sweden and thence to Hamburg or Danzig. When it was cut off because of the German invasion of Norway on April 9, 1940, the Commission was able to ship through Genoa or Lisbon and thence by rail to Poland.” Records, Sep.1939-1949: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4b69n6pg/
[Permindex] “insider General Julius Klein ran guns to the murderous Haganah when the Zionists seized Israel from the Palestinians.” [ref. Dope, Inc] Permindex is the “assassination mechanism” in JFK’s killing, according to wide agreement among researchers. http://www.whale.to/b/dopeinc.html; Klein was hand-picked by Herbert Hoover to head the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce in the 1920s http://lcweb2.loc.gov:8081/ammem/amrlhtml/dtfordom.html; “..[O]n the East Coast, Julius Klein was an underling of William Wiseman..head of British Intelligence in the United States, [who] was deployed to pull together a “dirty tricks” unit..on behalf of British interests in the Middle East… Klein recruited from the ranks of the Jewish War Veterans. Run out of the Manhattan offices of Kuhn Loeb, Wiseman’s “plumbers unit” continued work that had begun with Baron Edmond de Rothschild’s founding of the Palestine Economics Commission in the 1920s. Under Rothschild funding, the commission established anintricatenetwork ofweapons-smuggling cells, money-laundering channels, and contraband shipping lines-utilizing criminal enterprises and respectable businesses interchangeably. Julius Klein supervised the smuggling networks stateside.” [pp479-480, Dope, Inc.] http://lyndonlarouche.org/dope16.pdf
1940 –June, “The Navy had arranged for the first approach to the Union Miniere du Haute Katanga to obtain a supply of uranium. In June 1940, Dr. Briggs, Dr. Harold Urey and Dr. [Alexander] Sachs conferred with Admiral Bowen at the Naval Research Laboratory on the amounts of the ore believed to be needed. After the meeting, at Bowen’s request, Sachs made a contact with the company [Edgar Sengier] and a small quantity..was secured. Nearly two years elapsed before the Government sought significant quantities.” –p181, Men and Decisions >>>Alexander Sachs “between 1918 and 1919..was an aide to Justice Brandeis and the Zionist Oranization of America; From 1922 to 1929 he was [an] investment analyst for W. Eugene Meyer… He then organized..research at the Lehman Corporation; 1931 joined the board at Lehman [and] was Vice President from 1936 to 1943; During the war, he was economic advisor to the Petroleum Industry War Council and special counsel to the director of the Office of Strategic Services.” www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Sachs
Also in June 1940, Vannevar “Bush reorganized the Uranium Committee into a scientific body and eliminated military membership. No longer beholden to the military for funds, the National Defense Research Council (NDRC) had greater access to money for nuclear research…” www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Research_Committee
1941 - Naval duty orders as of March of 1941, “ten months before Pearl Harbor”; Strauss’s title is General Inspector of Naval Ordnance; creates a school and recruits inspector trainees; becomes the executive assistant to the Chief of Ordnance, Adm. William Blandy
- during 1940 and 1941, Strauss and H.Hoover “help” two Maryknoll catholics, Bishop Walsh and Father Drought, attempt diplomatic peace negotiations with Japan. The peace mission began November 11, 1940 as Drought and Walsh set sail with letters of introduction from Lewis L. Strauss.
1943 — appointed by Secretary Knox to the Reserve Policy Board, bearing the rank of Lt. Commander; “In due course I was promoted to captain, later to commodore, and finally.. to rear admiral.” [p143, Men and Decisions]; Secretary of the Navy “Knox, formerly of the Chicago Daily News, was an old friend of Albert Lasker; Lasker’s son Edward also served in his office.” http://navy.togetherweserved.com/usn/servlet/tws.webapp.WebApp?cmd=ShadowBoxProfile&type=CollegeAttendedExt&ID=194866; “Albert Lasker was Assistant Secretary of the Navy during FDR’s administration. His role as a major fundraiser for Roosevelt is briefly mentioned in the 1950 book ‘Roosevelt and Hopkins,’ by Robert E. Sherwood… [Lasker's] former [Lord and Thomas] executive vice president for Chicago, David M. Noyes, became a consultant to the chairman of the War Production Board (1942-44), and eventually the assistant of former Pres. Harry Truman from 1953 to 1972.” http://www.smokershistory.com/Roosevel.htm War Production Board chair, Donald Marr Nelson, was formerly vp of Sears Roebuck & Co., owned by Lessing J. Rosenwald http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_M._Nelson
1944 – early 1944, proposes a postwar research program that becomes the Office of Naval Research, the postwar successor of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD); Strauss’s key man at ONR was its Chief Scientist, Dr. Emanuel Piore http://www.aip.org/history/ohlist/4823 ; Piore became the first Director of Research at IBM (succeeded by Ralph Gomory)
–”Appointed as Navy member of the Munitions Board in 1944, I served for a period of a year as chairman of that body in the absence of a civilian chairman.” [p155, Men and Decisions]
“He was made special assistant to Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal in May 1944 and promoted to rear admiral by President Truman in November 1945.” http://millercenter.org/academic/americanpresident/eisenhower/essays/cabinet/588
1945 – becomes Lifetime Trustee of the American Cancer Society, taken over by the “Lasker Syndicate”(Albert D. and Mary), also called the “Bobst-Lasker cabal”; becomes Trustee of the newly chartered Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research (see 1950, Golden memo)
–fall, 1945, replaces undersecretary of the Navy, Ralph Bard, on the Interim Committee on Atomic Energy (also known as the ‘target committee’; earlier Strauss had suggested the plutonium bomb be dropped on the village of Nikko, a sacred Shinto site on the main island. That bomb was dropped instead on Nagasaki Aug.9)
- becomes vice-chair of the Princeton, N.J. Institute of Advanced Study Trustees (listed in IAS Bulletin No.12); In 1946 Strauss flies to San Francisco to recruit Robert Oppenheimer as the new Director of IAS
Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) Bulletin No.12, 1945-1946
[p22] High Speed Computing
“John von Neumann has for some time past been studying..high speed computing. This work was supported by the United States Navy Bureau of Ordnance and was carried on with the collaboration of Valentine Bargmann, Deane Montgomery and Salomon Bochner… [The project] is supported by the United States Army Ordnance Department and carried out in cooperation with the Princeton laboratories of the Radio Corporation of America under..Zworykin… It is intended to carry out in 1946-1947 work in theoretical meteorology… sponsored at [IAS] by the United States Navy Office of Research and Inventions…with the help of H. Wexler from the United States Weather Bureau.”
*
“As the war in Europe neared its close…I proposed the establishment of a task force..composed of naval personnel..to be sent to the European Theater at once. Their duty would be to discover and take possession of German military and scientific data. A related project..secretly conducted..[u]nder the code name ‘Alsos’..was shillfully managed by Dr. Sam Goudsmit, who later worked with the Atomic Energy Commission. Our project..was called..’Nav-Tech-Mis-Eu..for Naval Technical Mission Europe… It took possession of tons of documents and reports…commanded by Commodore H.A. Schade, an officer whom I had known..in the Navy Department…[Nav-Tech] worked closely with the Army G-2 and with Allied intelligence… Among the officers commended was a young [Lt.]J.G. who had entered some occupied cities ahead of the liberating army. He was my son and I was more than pleased.” –pp148-149, Men and Decisions
1946 – July, “Blandy had offered me a place on his staff for [Operation] Crossroads similar to the one I had filled in the Bureau of Ordnance. I declined regretfully in order that a resolution to return to private business might be realized. During the same week that the underwater, or ‘Baker’, test was scheduled [July 25] at Bikini Atoll, I went to California to be the guest of ex-President Hoover at the annual encampment of the Bohemian Club of San Francisco…a gathering of kindred spirits..for a fortnight… Mr. Hoover and a few of his friends maintain a camp there where I had enjoyed a visit some years earlier.” –p210, Men and Decisions; Strauss becomes Atomic Energy Commissioner and resigns Kuhn Loeb; focus on security, fallout detection, and restricting the sale of radiopharmaceuticals. “I believe that the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 was the first U.S. law to require that appointees to the Commission it established should engage in no other ‘business, vocation or employment.’ It may be unique in that respect. If its purpose was to eliminate any possible conflict of interest, it also required an unusual sacrifice on the part of the appointees. The men who framed the law are not themselves subject to such a requirement.” –p214, Men and Decisions
–Strauss recalled his actions after Truman’s invitation to join the new AEC: “When I left the White House, I called my wife… I also consulted two friends… Robert A. Taft [lifetime friend from the Hoover Relief days] in Salt Lake City at the time …[and] Arthur Krock, the dean of American journalism. I went to [Krock's] home and talked it over with him. His advice was, ‘Accept it.’ That afternoon I sent word to the President.” p215, Men and Decisions. Arthur Krock can be considered an important source of information for Strauss on the Kennedys. Krock wrote of meeting Joe P. Kennedy Sr. in 1934 on appointment to the the SEC “to take the measure of the man” at the initiation of two friends. “These two friends were Bernard M. Baruch and Herbert Bayard Swope.” Krock went on to describe Joe Kennedy ”as a news source and later as an intimate companion.” pp330-331 Memoirs, Arthur Krock 1968, Funk and Wagnall’s [Readers Digest]
Strauss’s assostant William T. Golden said,”I couldn’t think of anything more exciting than the AEC. I was there from the first day… I was the only assistant; the other commissioners didn’t have assistants… I was assistant to Admiral Strauss exclusively…” http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/goldenw.htm
*
James B. Conant understood that he was going to be offered the Chair of the new AEC. Conant’s biographer James Hershberg wrote, “he was tempted, well aware that taking the job could place him in one of the most important positions in the world.” During Conant’s personal deliberations considering his potential friends and enemies, he received warnings from friends who “strongly counseled him to avoid one person in particular: Lewis L. Strauss.. whom they said was out to make a name for himself by whatever means were necessary… And during the war, [Conant] later told Lilienthal, he and [Van] Bush had been exasperated when Strauss, while at the navy ‘kept poking his unauthorized nose into things we were doing about atomic matters [at the OSRD]…’We told him off; in fact, Van and I didn’t speak to him after that. We didn’t trust him and never did.’ Concluding that he would not be able to work effectively with Strauss on the..commission, [Conant] gave Truman a blunt him-or-me offer when the two met in the Oval Office late on the morning of July 29. Truman replied..that he had promised Senator McMahon that Strauss would ne named, and he could not change his mind. That settled the matter…” [pp271-272, James B. Conant]
1947 – “That spring, reports surfaced in the press that ‘secret files’ had been lost or stolen from the AEC’s laboratories. Critics of the AEC called for a military takeover of the agency on account of its ineptitude in managing security…” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2923454/
–uranium goes missing from the Argonne National Lab
– ”In June 1947 Albert Einstein had a brainstorm about how to save the world from nuclear holocaust. He called the secretary of state, George C. Marshall, who called Lewis Strauss… Mr. Strauss, in turn, called his assistant, a 37-year-old investment banker named William T. Golden… ”You can imagine how excited I was,” Mr. Golden..recalled, ”Einstein said it was essential that a world army be created, under the leadership of the U.S. Unless this was done there would be an atomic war in the next 10 years.”…As a consultant to President Harry S. Truman in the early 1950′s, Mr. Golden invented the idea of a presidential science adviser” http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/01/science/01GOLD.html; “After the early [AEC/liason] meetings, the Commission was represented..by Commander William T. Golden, to whom great credit is due.(Mr. Golden had come to work with me in the Navy during the war and left his business again to join us in Government service in the Atomic Energy Commission…)” [p202, Men and Decisions]
1948 – security breach reported May 17, plutonium missing from Argonne. Bourke Hickenlooper calls for David Lilienthal’s resignation.
1949 -”The Albert Einstein Award..was established on March 14, 1949..by Lewis Strauss [and] first awarded in 1951 to Professors Kurt Godel..and Julian Schwinger” http://www.corbisimages.com/stock-photo/rights-managed/U1163440INP/albert-einstein-presents-award-at-princeton-university ; http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/153/1/themonth.pdf; Strauss is president of the Board of Trustees for the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton
1950 -resigns AEC, January 31 (his 54th birthday), ending his term in April; becomes personal financier for the Rockefeller Foundation (Brothers Fund) hired by Laurance Rockefeller
–January, 100 grams of plutonium goes missing from the DP West site, Los Alamos
–Sloan-Kettering in 1950: “The Institute connects with Memorial Hospital and the new city-owned Ewing Hospital, each of which has about 800 beds…Technically SKI is a subsidiary of Memorial Hospital. There is also a tie-in in operating arrangements with the nearby Cornell University Medical Center, New York Hospital, etc. Dr. Conant, Compton, Dr. Bronk, as well as Lewis Strauss and Alfred Sloan, are trustees of SKI. Lawrance [sic] Rockefeller has recently become President of Memorial Hospital, in which his family has long been interested, and which has a relatively large board, including Lewis Strauss… Dr. [Cornelius "Dusty"] Rhoads is eager to obtain supporting grants because of the uncertainties of the Institute’s sources of income. He pointed out that much of the work that is being directed toward conciseresearch is closely related to chemical warfare and perhaps not so distant from biological warfare matters… He told me that he has been invited to lunch by Fred Lawton, Director of the Bureau of the Budget on November 10…[and] thinks that Mrs. Lasker may have arranged it.” [memo written by William T. Golden] http://archives.aaas.org/golden/doc.php?gold_id=80
1951 – private citizen Strauss becomes Chairman of the Atomic Plant Expansion Advisory Panel for the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE) [p378, Men and Decisions]; Strauss assistant, William T. Golden successfully promotes the creation of a Presidential scientific advisory (to become the later-named PSAC in 1957); Scientific Advisory Committee members (from 1951) http://www.aip.org/history/acap/institutions/psac.jsp
1952 – Chairman of a panel to report on ‘Incentive, Hazardous Duty and Special Pay” for the Senate Armed Services Committee
–uranium boom in North America; the Colorado Plateau (major strike by geologist Charles A. Steen) and northern Canada (polio is peaking); On the Plateau ”309,380 claims were filed in four Utah counties…by 1955 there were approximately 800 mines producing high grade ore… In the 50s and 60s, Salt Lake City became known as the Wall Street of Uranium Stocks” www.onlineutah.com/uraniumhistory.shtml
1953 – January, Eisenhower appoints Strauss his Special Adviser on Atomic Energy; Strauss joins the National Security council
–formally appointed in September Chairman of the AEC by Eisenhower; Strauss arranged for the prior chairman, Gordon Dean, an offer of executive position at Lehman Brothers
“great gifts Strauss was able to channel to his friends after he remade the Atomic Energy Commission in 1953-54. Chairman then, and with all the former commissioners replaced but Smyth, he commanded four-to-one majorities instead of losing by them as before.” [p328, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, Nuel Pharr Davis]
1954- Feb. 5, AEC Commissioner Thomas Murray writes to Eisenhower and proposes a nuclear test moratorium; on Feb. 11, Eisenhower sends a reply–in fact, Lewis Strauss wrote the draft suggesting the President will talk it over with the Sec. of State [Dulles] and the Chairman of the AEC http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/726.cfm
–Strauss sails to the Marshall Islands to witness the CASTLE full-scale thermonuclear tests, controversial for enormous and miscalculated amounts of fallout; first shot BRAVO on March 1 contaminates fisherman and islanders; Strauss will later enlist intelligence (CIA?)to surveil the Japanese fisherman on the belief they were actually Soviet spies who were faking radiation injuries.
–April/May, spearheads AEC prosecution against Oppenheimer (JRO), revoking security clearance; J. Edgar Hoover gave high-level cooperation at Strauss’s initiation of full surveillance and illegal microphone bugs on Oppenheimer’s lawyers. JRO’s questionable fitness for national security went back to his wartime interrogation by Col. Boris Pash; Oppenheimer lied about an offer to supply secrets involving his friend ‘Chevalier’ –this was known to the Manhattan Project and AEC. The charge against JRO of greatest value to Strauss was the claimed obstruction in developing the H-bomb. Oppenheimer, and the majority opinion of the Advisory scientists, favored continued fission work and a ‘flexible’ arsenal –smaller, tactical, battlefield weapons– ironically the policy adopted by Eisenhower’s successor, JFK.
–Vice Admiral Paul F. Foster joins the AEC as “special assistant”. Foster participated in the secret surveillance by Naval Intelligence of Herbert Hoover’s detractors [James O'Brien and author John Hamill] back in 1930-31. In 1959, Foster was jointly appointed by Eisenhower to be AEC General Manager and the US”Ambassador” to the International Atomic Energy Agency. http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/pers-us/uspers-f/p-fster.htm
- 1954 revision of the atomic charter to include “large areas of reactor information” to be shared with friendly nations and private contractors; Strauss and Eisenhower construct an ‘Oasis Plan’ for nuclear-powered water desalination “to make the desert bloom”, proposed as a way to help Israel relocate Palestinians, build an agricultural economy, and ease tensions with Arab/Muslim nations. This becomes the root source of later confrontation concerning the Dimona plant, inspections, and the secret weapons facilities underground.
1955 – Dixon-Yates controversy with the AEC over Memphis TN’s electric power http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,891625,00.html; Eisenhower and Strauss make opening statements for the inauguration of the Shippingport, PA nuclear power station, May 26, 1955, the first commercial reactor in the U.S. >>>Exactly 6 weeks earlier (Apr.12) the Salk vaccine went public, suspended for 5 days during the contamination “Cutter Incident” scapegoating [see 'Polio Vaccine' page], a most likely result of the Nevada Teapot tests.
Westinghouse Corp. previously offered to donate profits from Shippingport construction to the AEC http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1117.cfm (Shippingport power was uncompetitively expensive and the plant was only the first in a series of demonstration reactors. Strauss believed if utilities built reactors at a rapid rate, the prices would drop on ‘economy of scale’ principle)
–August. Strauss leads the U.S. delegation to Geneva Switzerland for the First International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy (Aug.8-21); the reactor ‘model’ erected for demonstration was purchased by the Swiss; he was believed to have met and (secretly) befriended Ernst David Bergmann at this conference. Bergmann was a chemist, member of Haganah, and leader of Israel’s Atomic Bomb project.
–The Pond, secret intelligence run by Grombach and governed in an unknown measure by the American Security Council founders, performs its last contract services on-the-record.
1957 – creation of the President’s Science Advisory Committee: “PSAC has garnered surprisingly little analysis by historians… PSAC’s predecessor body, the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, was established in 1951 during the Korean War… that committee was a marginal body, and it was replaced by PSAC following the Soviet launch of the Sputnik satellite and reconsideration of American government’s management of its scientific and technological resources. PSAC’s chair served as the science adviser to the President until 1973 when Richard Nixon dissolved PSAC. In 1976 Gerald Ford established a new organization, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)… that body still exists [under direction of John Holdren]… In my own experience, the further one gets from World War II, the more convoluted and confusing the terrain becomes…” http://etherwave.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/wang-on-the-presidents-science-advisory-committee-psac-pt-1/; first PSAC chair was Eisenhower appointee Dr. J.R. Killian (1957-1959)
1958 -Eisenhower entreats Strauss to accept an offer of “permanent chairman” of the Atomic Energy Commission (declined); Eisenhower offers Strauss the position of Chief of Staff to replace Sherman Adams who resigned amid scandal (declined)
-June, appointed Secretary of Commerce (to June 1959) by Eisenhower; Strauss revives his water desalination scheme for the Middle East, variously called the “Oasis Plan” or “Water for Peace” (LBJ will reintroduce these proposals again as president)
- July 14, 1958, Strauss awarded Medal of Freedom by Eisenhower: “So, this is a little ceremony, as I say, to mark the dropping of that [AEC] kind of work and then to take over–as my Special Assistant–more emphatically and more specifically this work of promoting the atom as a peaceful agency for the world.” http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=11125
- replaced, by Strauss’s own recommendation, as AEC Chairman by John McCone (Bechtel-McCone-Parsons Inc., former Standard Oil director, future CIA director); as a special appointee by Eisenhower, Strauss heads the U.S. delegation to the Second International Scientific Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in September 1958, Geneva Switzerland; permanent exhibitions prepared for Geneva include four nuclear reactors and over 50 industrial exhibits
1959 – June 19 1959, the “ Nomination of Lewis L. Strauss as Secretary of Commerce. Rejected 46-49 ” http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Miscellaneous-Information/Voting-Record-and-Stands-on-Issues-Page-7.aspx; Lyndon B. Johnson was Strauss’s main support prior to the vote: At the crucial hour, LBJ held off the Senate from disbanding in anticipation of the out-of-state arrivals of loyal Republicans (who were too late); LBJ had previously negotiated a way to achieve partisan parity, expecting a precisely split party-line vote in which Richard Nixon would cast the final ‘victory’ decision for Strauss; At the last minute because of late arrivals, LBJ could not swing the necessary votes to Strauss’s favor and voted ‘against’ in the final count for political reasons. Arthur Krock wrote,”I have reason to believe that Strauss had sound reasons for expecting favorable votes from [Democrats] Johnson, Neuberger, and Kennedy…Since Kennedy also had spoken and written most favorably to Strauss with respect to his chairmanship of the Atomic Energy Commission..I was especially curious over the change of front by the young Senator from Massachusetts..So I sought enlightenment on Kennedy’s shift from his father…[who] represented the situation to be that a vote for Strauss was a vote against [Clint] Anderson…” [pp312-313, Memoirs, Arthur Krock, 1968]
Press article by Joseph Kraft:”The One That Broke The Camel’s Back”, containing the publicized details of the Senate hearings http://www.unz.org/Pub/Reporter-1959jul09-00025
*
1962 – publishes semi-autobiographical memoirs, “Men and Decisions” (Doubleday books), deemed by this researcher to be a precisely timed “demonstration of power” to the Kennedy Administration
1963 – “During his retirement, Strauss joined in the public debate on major Cold War issues twice, both times to take positions against agreements on nuclear weapons. In 1963 he opposed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty negotiated by the Democratic administration of John F. Kennedy to halt tests..in the atmosphere. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Strauss argued that the Soviets could not be trusted to keep the agreement…” p 244, No Sacrifice Too Great
1964 - extended travel to Israel; returns to revitalize his nuclear water desalination plans with LBJ; helps organize Senator Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in 1964
1968 – aids Nixon candidacy; “Again in 1970, when the Republican administration of..Richard M. Nixon began to discuss limitations on strategic weapons with the Soviets, Strauss issued a warning, published in the New York Times in June [1970]..and in the National Review in December. ‘The euphoria’ that followed the Test Ban Treaty was ‘hollow anf deceptive,’ Strauss wrote, because both superpowers had improved their weapons with underground tests. In that sense, Strauss disproved his own warning before the ratification of [that] treaty; despite the cessation of tests in the atmosphere, the United States had preserved its nuclear deterrent. Now he urged that Nixon restore ‘mutual verification’ which he claimed had been a wise policy for the U.S. until Kennedy deleted it in 1963 to the American negotiating position.” p244, No Sacrifice Too Great
1974 – January 21, dies painfully of cancer at home in Brandy Station, VA http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0613FA3B59147A93C0AB178AD85F408785F9
___________________________________________________________
|
From The Day Virginia Died by Eustace Mullins
…Byrd had actually been born in Martinsburg, West Virginia; a classmate there had been one Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss. Strauss later became an itinerant shoe salesman. With the advent of World War I, he suddenly showed up in Washington as “Secretary” of the U.S. Food Administration, being named assistant to Herbert Hoover, a longtime Rothschild agent who had been named by them as director of their family firm, Rio Tinto. After World War I, Strauss was named a partner in Kuhn, Loeb Co.; Byrd, with Strauss’ money behind him, became Governor of Virginia. Strauss bought a large estate at Brandy Station, Virginia, scene of the last cavalry charge in the United States. He continued his long association with Byrd during their years together in Washington. When Byrd retired, Strauss became his son’s campaign manager.”
From Elegy For A State By Eustace Mullins
Baliles was the political heir of ex-Governor Charles Robb, son-in-law of Lyndon Johnson, who has been courting the American Israel Political Action Committee for financial and political support for his current race for the Senate. Although this grovelling before the most dangerous elements in the nation is hardly unique among our craven politicos, it is more flagrant in Virginia because of the invasion of the leading Rothschild operators in the United States, who have come to Virginia seeking instant squiredom on their vast estates. Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, partner of Herbert Hoover and of Kuhn, Loeb Co., the American representatives of the Rothschilds, bought an historic estate at Brandywine, Virginia during the 1930′s, from which he ran the notorious Byrd machine for many years, a totalitarian control of Virginia politics which had begun at the turn of the century, when the Rothschild railroad operator, William Glasglow, became the driving force in state politics. Strauss was followed by another Kuhn, Loeb partner, Freddie Warburg, who ignored local politics in favor of throwing great parties at his Middleburg Va. estate. The present Virginia mogul is Edgar Bronfman, another Rothschild stooge who heads Seagram liquor. Bronfman bought a vast estate near Charlottesville, a few miles from Thomas Jefferson’s historic Monticello. Bronfman seems less interested in becoming a Virginia gentleman than in making Virginia even more Jewish. As president of the World Jewish Congress, he has been the principal financier of the worldwide hate campaign against the president of Austria, Kurt Waldheim, and the entire population of Austria (which is presently an American ally). Bronfman is also chairman of the notorious terrorist organization, the Anti Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (the Jewish Masonic organization), the American Jewish Congress, the United Jewish Appeal, the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, B’nai B’rith, and the National Urban League. He is also a primary member of the notorious U.S./U.S.S.R. Trading and Economic Committee, which is desperately trying to salvage the faltering Soviet economy with U.S. taxpayers’ dollars. In doing so, it has shrouded its operations in mystery, so that its machinations have become officially protected from public view by the U.S. government, which announces that USTEC, as it is often known, is now Top Secret.
|
[Edgar Bronfman was also on the Board of Directors of the Salk Institute]
__________________________________
Brandy Rock Farm, Strauss’s estate in Virginia, was a former Civil War battleground-encampment designated as a ‘conservation’ property. The heirs of L.L. Strauss have been paid $30-50,000 annually in government funds to maintain this status, although the property is/was used for cattle-breeding and specialty growing. Brandy Rock Farm receives the third largest farm subsidy in the state of Virginia. http://www.nps.gov/history/museum/exhibits/eise/Farm/cattleFittingShowing/EISE-6873c.html . Civil War artifact-hunters were allowed paid access to the property to dig for relics http://www.nathpo.org/News/NAGPRA/News-NAGPRA97.html;
In 2002, the Secret Intelligence files of Jean ‘Frenchy’ Grombach and his organization, called “The Pond” were found “in a barn near Culpeper” –not on Brandy Rock property, but not far distant. The files belonged to the American Security Council, then under the supervision of Dr. Henry A. Fischer; a woman named “Ruth Fischer” was said to be one of the Pond’s most effective agents. Culpeper resident John M. Fisher was the nominal founder of the American Security Council; Strauss and Fisher were co-benefactors of the regional Culpeper hospital in 1955, the same time as Pond records cease to exist. The FBI seized the files, parted some to the CIA, and released a statement in 2010 that materials from Grombach’s records would soon to available to the public. News: “Before the CIA, there was the Pond” http://www.komonews.com/news/national/99542139.html
Here are some of the presidential visitors to Culpeper County and Brandy Station: http://www2.starexponent.com/cse/news/local/article/culpepers_connected_02_18_08_cse/12052/
__________________
http://www.smokershistory.com/Strauss.htm
Board of Directors (Trustees) memberships:
Inland Steel Corp. –Inland Steel executive (vp, president and chairman) Clarence B. Randall, special assistant to Eisenhower for Foreign Economic policy http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/Research/Finding_Aids/PDFs/Randall_Clarence_Journals.pdf; “Philip D. Block, the head of Inland Steel in Chicago, was a close friend of Albert Lasker dating from the 1920s. Leigh Block (Philip’s son) was a director of Inland Steel, who married..Albert Lasker’s daughter Mary.” http://www.smokershistory.com/inlandst.htm
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital – established in 1945 with a board composed of Manhattan Project chiefs (see William T. Golden memo below)
Executive Committee of the American Jewish Committee http://www.ajcarchive.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1924_1925_8_AJCAnnualReport.pdf
Institute of Advanced Study [IAS] Princeton, Trustee/officer/president/chair
Medical College of Virginia : “He sponsored research through the Lewis and Rosa Strauss Memorial Fund and raised so much money for the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond that the school named a surgery wing for him.” p243, No Sacrifice Too Great
Hampton Institute (Board of Directors)
George Washington University (Board of Directors)
Eisenhower College (Chairman, Board of Trustees)
_______________________________
Controlling (stock) ownership and investments:
*Radio Corporation of America (RCA) – RCA was created by General Electric in 1919 to rebrand American Marconi (a branch of British Marconi) into a domestic company. David Sarnoff, who built RCA into a monopoly of acquired patents, also founded NBC.
Polaroid – Strauss personally befriended Edwin Land. Polaroid, originally a partnership between Land and George Wheelwright III called Polarad Electronics Co., chartered corporate status in 1937 and grew wealthy as a defense contractor on special projects such as the DOVE heat-seeking missile and U2 spyplane. Polaroid also produced any number of of X-ray devices: Picker-Polaroid x-ray units (for portability and civil defense) http://www.civildefensemuseum.org/cdmuseum2/cdeh2.html; Polaroid radiation dosimeters (1950s-60s) http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/radiac/DT60.htm; and specialty optical equipment. Edwin Land sat atop the intelligence structure as a scientific consultant and planner: “Possibly Land’s greatest contributions..came in 1954 when James R. Killian appointed him head of the Intelligence Section of the Air Force Technological Capabilities Panel [TCP]. In this position, Land…facilitated the..U-2 spy plane and satellite technology… As a member of PSAC, Land co-authored a study that led to the establishment of the highly secretive National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)…[and] also served on the special committee..that laid the foundations for the transformation of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) into NASA…” http://www.cmu.edu/coldwar/mcelheny.html
*Industrial Rayon Corporation – the world’s largest auto tire cord manufacturer; “Rayon” in Cleveland http://www.clevelandmemory.org/irc/
*Kodachrome – Kodak made radiation film badges for the nuclear industry and, according to this document, also made cigarette filters and packaging in the 1950s. http://tobaccodocuments.org/nysa_ti_s1/T154363118.html George Eastman was a primary benefactor of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry that performed Manhattan Project experiments with plutonium and fluoride. Kodachrome, introduced in 1935: http://www.kodak.com/global/en/corp/historyOfKodak/1930.jhtml?pq-path=2217/2687/2695/2700 [Note in 1931 "Kodak bought the Nagel Camera Company in Stuttgart, Germany. This became Kodak A.G., which for decades served as an equipment manufacturing site for Kodak."]
Studebaker – auto; South Bend, Indiana: “Studebaker had about 7,ooo employed at the time of its closing, Dec.17, 1963,..three weeks after the JFK assassination… During WWII they produced 60,000 Cyclone aircraft engines for the B-17 bombers; they made 12,000 Weasels, an amphicar… They also made 170,000 Large Army-type transport trucks, most of these ended up in Russia to transport troops to the front line.” http://www.myspace.com/studebakerlazysmusic/blog/501662972; Studebaker also bought the Kennedy Radio Company (founded by Colin B. Kennedy) in the 1920s where nuclear physicist Charles C. Lauritsen got a start in electrical physics. Lauritsen went to Caltech in 1926 and became the chief (1931-1962) of the W.K. Kellogg Radiation Laboratory where he pioneered development of particle accelerators. http://www.aip.org/history/ohlist/4733.html; longtime president of Studebaker was Paul G. Hoffman, who founded the U.N./CFR Committee on Economic Development (CED) and served as its first director administering the Marshall Plan in Europe. Hoffman became Ford Foundation president (1950-1953) and returned to Studebaker from 1953-1956. In 1963 he married the close friend of Mary Lasker, Anna Lederer Rosenberg [see the Nelson Rockefeller page]. http://www.smokershistory.com/PHoffman.htm
>>>Dr. Alton Ochsner of New Orleans, president of the American Cancer Society (the ‘Lasker cabal’), is also listed in the tobacco document, implicated in the “cancer bioweapon” conspiracy described here: www.polioforever.wordpress.com/dr-marys-monkey/
_______________________________
SPECIAL Projects
Anti-Semitism – Strauss personally managed campaigns against Henry Ford and Father Coughlin in the 1920s and ’30s
Finnish Relief, (records from 1939-1946 http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=tf4k4003hv;query=;style=oac4;doc.view=entire_text)
Polish Relief, (records from 1939-1949 http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf4b69n6pg/)
Relief work associates (for example):
Chauncey McCormick: cousin of Chicago Tribune publisher ‘Col.’ Robert McCormick who held the “subversives” library which became the property of the American Security Council. Chauncey and Robert repurchased the estate of their greatgrandfather in Virginia, Hickory Hill, for a time occupied by Robert F. Kennedy & family.
Maurice Pate: Princeton math and physics grad; worked for Standard Oil N.J. between Belgian (WWI) and Polish (WWII) Relief work; Pate and Hoover co-founded UNICEF which Pate directed. He donated his Connecticut estate to become a Tibetan monastery and Universal Peace Center (located between Danbury and Newtown CT). Pate’s wife lobbied for nuclear disarmament.
W. Hallam Tuck: Princeton chemical engineer who worked on Belgian Relief, married a Belgian woman and engaged in “
various Belgian industrial and fiscal activities” which included joint representation for Solway in Belgium and Allied Chemical and Dye Corp of which Tuck was a director. Tuck maintained relief work in WWII.
http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt809nf69h;query=;style=oac4;doc.view=entire_text; “Both the Solvay Process Company and the Semet-Solvay Company in 1920 were absorbed by the Allied Chemical and Dye Corporation, a merger promoted by chemist William Nichols and financier
Eugene Meyer.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Process_Company; Eugene Meyer ran the U.S. Reconstruction Finance Board through WWI, counterpart to Baruch’s War Industries Board, and parlayed his earnings on war bonds (illegal bond duplicates, some say) into ownwership of Allied Chemical. He also bought the Washington Post which passed to his daughter, Katherine Meyer Graham. Hallam Tuck also became the director of the International Refugee Organization (IRO, until 1949), and worked on “
the Second Hoover Commission on the Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, where he served as executive director from 1953 to 1955.” Additional Tuck papers:
http://www.ecommcode2.com/hoover/research/historicalmaterials/other/tuck.htm
War production incentive program (the “E” for Excellence assignment)
Nuclear-powered Water Desalination – for the Navy and Israel; beginning with a formal ‘Oasis Plan’ proposal in 1954, Strauss promoted the program as a Palestinian resettlement plan wherein Israel would “make the desert bloom” for the displaced and advance the cause of Mid-East peace. Dimona came to represent that effort in the eventual show-down that led to Israel’s infamous “inspection” fraud. “Taking Eisenhower’s lead, Johnson had established a bilateral commission with Israel to study nuclear desalination, while Oak Ridge was tasked to develop a detailed feasibility study of how nuclear-power plants could become the center of complexes to power cities, produce potable water, provide process heat for home heating and industry, and revolutionize agriculture. Just days before the June 1967 Six-Day Middle East War, an international conference in Washington, organized around Johnson’s “Water for Peace” program, drew thousands of participants… The details of the program were spelled out by Rear Adm. Lewis L. Strauss (ret.), who had been AEC Chairman under President Eisenhower, in an Aug. 7, 1967 article in U.S. News & World Report. Admiral Strauss proposed the construction of three nuclear plants to desalt water and provide cheap electrical energy. One plant might be built on the Mediterranean coast of Israel, he proposed, from which the desalted water would flow to Israel, Jordan, and Syria. Another plant, on the Gaza Strip, could pipe water under the Suez Canal to eastern Egypt, to be used for irrigation. And a third, on Jordanian territory at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, could transform what is otherwise a wasteland… The three plants together will “have the effect of opening to settlement many hundred square miles which heretofore have never supported human life . . . and the controversy over the division of the Jordan River would be minimized,” he wrote. This opening of new lands would provide a solution to the Palestinian refugee problem…” http://larouchepac.com/node/14722
Cancer research/medical radioisotopes
Creation of science advisory panels http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/finding_aids/pdf/US_Presidents_Science_Advisory_Committee.pdf
Jewish martyrs of ancient Masada
Honorary Vice-president of the Jewish Publication Society of America http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/1959_18_JPSAReport.pdf
___________________________________
______________________________________________
ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION YEARS
“Nuclear people have made a Faustian contract with society. We offer..[a] miraculous, inexhaustible energy source, but this energy source at the same time is tainted with potential side effects that..could spell disaster” –Director Alvin Weinberg, Oak Ridge Nat’l Lab.
The AEC was chartered as a government monopoly to own all fissionable material, develop weapons and power reactors, and sponsor medical and industrial research. “Under the Atomic Energy Act the Bureau [FBI] has the responsibility of investigation of applicants for positions with the Atomic Energy Commission and also..investigation of unauthorized disclosure of restricted data… The development of confidential informants with reference to the Atomic Energy field has been one of continuing importance...” http://www.governmentattic.org/4docs/FBIundercoverAECfacilities_1949-1964.pdf
1946, The first Comissioners, http://www.mbe.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/first_aec.htm; AEC Chairman David Lilienthal; the four Comissioners “Robert F. Bacher was nuclear physicist from Cornell who had been a division director at Los Alamos; Lewis L. Strauss was an admiral and financier with a strong background and interest in nuclear physics; Sumner T. Pike was a businessman and former member of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Office of Price Administration; and William W. Waymack was a newspaper editor and deputy chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.” [ref. "Radioisotopes as Political Instruments, 1946-1953", http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2923454/]
*
“Between 1948 and 1971, the AEC purchased nearly 350 million pounds of uranium concentrate at a cost of almost $3 billion from more than 30 uranium mills operated under AEC contracts. The Uranium Reduction Company / Atlas Mill in Moab [Utah, for example] accounted for more than 40 million pounds of yellowcake costing the government $325 million. A similar amount of uranium concentrate purchased at the projected price of $110 a pound would generate $4.4 billion.”
1954 – “Willard Libby, a famed chemist and new member of the AEC, insisted that “there is no immediate hazard to the civilian population.”[from fallout]. Privately..Libby told his colleagues on the commission that fallout was just a fact of life that people would have to learn to live with, chairman Strauss retorted that it was all right “if you don’t live next door to it”—“or under it” added general manager Kenneth Nichols.” http://spot.colorado.edu/~chernus/Research/Apocalypse%20Management%20text/Chapter6.htm; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Libby
Time Magazine, 1959 (“The Strauss Affair”) : “After the war, Democrat Harry Truman named Republican Strauss to the brand-new Atomic Energy Commission under Chairman David Lilienthal. Strauss soon started finding himself on the minority end of 4-to-1 AEC decisions. Unable to persuade his fellow AEC commissioners to set up a system to detect Soviet atomic tests, he sidestepped them by taking his case to friends at the Pentagon. When the detection system, set up at Strauss’s urging, picked up radiation from the Soviet Union’s first atomic explosion in September 1949, Strauss, proven man of scientific foresight, set off another minority campaign: the fight to get an H-bomb program started against the combined opposition of his fellow commissioners and the scientists of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, chaired by prestigious Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.” http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,892639-4,00.html “…almost from Strauss’s first days as head of the Atomic Energy Commission, [Clint] Anderson complained that Strauss deliberately withheld information from the Joint Congressional Committee, thereby evading his responsibility under the Atomic Energy Act to keep the committee “fully and currently informed” about AEC matters… Strauss, incapable of quietly accepting criticism or the hint of criticism, fought back with all his natural aggressiveness.” http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,892639-5,00.html
“In June 1947 Albert Einstein had a brainstorm about how to save the world from nuclear holocaust. He called the secretary of state, George C. Marshall, who called Lewis Strauss, a member of the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission. Mr. Strauss, in turn, called his assistant, a 37-year-old investment banker named William T. Golden…”You can imagine how excited I was [to meet Einstein],” Mr. Golden, now 91, recalled on a recent morning in his 50th floor office in Midtown Manhattan. ”Einstein said it was essential that a world army be created, under the leadership of the U.S. Unless this was done there would be an atomic war in the next 10 years.” http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/01/science/science-adviser-at-work-50-years-of-guiding-policy-by-persuasion.html
“William T. Golden, who died Oct. 7, 2007, a few weeks short of his 98th birthday, was one of the most influential figures in post-World War II American science…In 1946, he became an assistant to Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis B. Strauss and helped organize that federal agency… His first recommendation..to Truman on December 18, 1950, under the title, “Mobilizing Science for War,” was the establishment of the position of scientific advisor to the president…Golden searched among the first NSF director candidates for someone..[and] found the right candidate in Alan T. Waterman, a physicist who was then chief scientist for the Office of Naval Research … After ending his service to President Truman, Golden embarked on a life of stewardship and philanthropy. He was a trustee, board member or officer of nearly 100 scientific, educational and non-profit organizations. ” http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=110493&org=OD&from=news; Alan T. Waterman was the brother-in-law of H. Neil Mallon, head of Dresser Industries and close friend to Prescott Bush. (Bush very unofficially ‘filled the shoes’ of Senator J. Brien MacMahon for less than one year in an unprecedented act of taking his seat on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. MacMahon died of cancer in 1952 at age 48. The JCAE was later disbanded in 1977 as an unconstitutional committee for having direct legislative powers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Congress_Joint_Committee_on_Atomic_Energy)
>>>Strauss’s personal aide at the AEC was Bryan F. LaPlante; “…In this paper, we focus on a little-known bureaucrat, Bryan F. LaPlante of the Atomic Energy Commission (to whose personal files we had access), to explore the evolution of the military-industrial complex, 1946-1961…The personal papers..provide a window into how this non-business business functioned. LaPlante ..was invited to join..because of the personal connections he had already formed. He operated as a relatively faceless facilitator for atomic energy policy… LaPlante sometimes called himself a ‘messenger boy’…Strauss..made LaPlante his personal security adviser. Their relationship became cordially personal…”[p10 http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHonline/2006/harrisanddeblois.pdf
Memoranda of William T. Golden (1950-51)
Dec 11, 1950, six weeks before Strauss's first resignation from AEC as Commissioner, Golden wrote: "He thinks the idea of creating a Scientific Advisor to the President, with the functions I described, an excellent one. His suggestions for the person to fill this position were first, and quite strongly, Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, for he said that in addition to his special competence in the nuclear energy field, for which he received the Nobel Prize, he also has broad general understanding of the other sciences, great enthusiasm and qualities of leadership and organization. When I asked for other names he mentioned, but as decidedly lesser possibilities, Luis Alvarez, also of Berkeley, and Merle Tuve." http://archives.aaas.org/golden/doc.php?gold_id=31 [Merle Tuve and E.O.Lawrence were close childhood friends. Tuve went on to direct the Carnegie Institute Dept. of Terrestrial Magnetism] …”In connection with the scientific liason matter.. I suggested to Dr.[Theodor] von Karman [of Caltech] that Lewis Strauss might be interested and that young Lewis H. Strauss might be a person to attach to the staff… [Von Karman] spoke very highly of Lewis Strauss whom he knows quite well.” http://archives.aas.org/golden/doc.php?gold_id=46 polioforever>>> In 1930, von Karman was made chief of the new Guggenheim Aeronautics Laboratory at Caltech (GALCIT) in which capacity he also founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the the private company Aerojet in 1936. Perhaps the most controversial associate of von Karman in these years was Jack Parsons, a devotee of Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO). Parsons took over leadership of the Pasadena Agape Lodge (#2), sharing his home and spouse with L.Ron Hubbard.
1950 Memoranda, Golden to Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads, director of Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research: “As indicated above, Dr. Rhoads is eager to obtain supporting grants [for Sloan Kettering]..He pointed out that much of the work..is closely related to chemical warfare and perhaps not so distant from biological warfare..” http://archives.aaas.org/golden/doc.php?gold_id=80
T. Keith Glennan [later, NASA's first chief]–AEC Commissioner, recruited by Strauss who ‘resigned’ prior to this interim (interview):”Needell: Tell me about Strauss… He’s a rather strong character, I understand” Glennan: “Strong and strange… [I was] asked if I would permit my name to be considered for a post as a Commissoner of the AEC. I said, “You must be crazy. I don’t know the first thing about an atom. I don’t know about a reactor. I don’t know anything about nuclear energy… [AEC used the] building originally built for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It was the first one they were in, on Constitution Avenue, right next to the Federal Reserve Board… I got there in 1 October, 1950″… http://www.nasm.si.edu/research/dsh/TRANSCPT/GLENNAN4.HTM [During WWII, the Joint Chiefs used the building] “Beginning in October 1950 the Commission embarked on a vast expansion program…three-year three-billion dollar expansion..” http://www.atomictraveler.com/HistoryofAEC.pdf
Glennan left the movie industry as a studio manager for Paramount and Goldwyn [MGM] to join defense work during WWII, much later to become the first Director of NASA: [The] occasion came while he was on vacation in the summer of 1950, when Glennan..learned that the White House had been trying to reach him. Glennan found that outgoing Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) member Lewis L. Strauss had given his name to Donald Dawson, a Truman aide who was looking at candidates to serve on the AEC. Strauss had been Herbert Hoover’s private secretary in the World War I era, became a successful Wall Street businessman in the 1920s, and turned his attention to philanthropic enterprises associated with scientific research in the latter 1930s. A member of the Naval Reserve since 1925, he had served as a Rear Admiral in World War II as a special assistant to Navy Secretary James V. Forrestal. During the war he had also learned of Glennan’s work at the Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory, and when the time came to seek a replacement for his own seat on the AEC, Strauss remembered the 45-year old Case president. While some of the Democratic Congressmen involved in the search preferred the appointment of AEC General Counsel Joseph A. Volpe Jr., Strauss used his connections in the White House and the Pentagon to Glennan’s appointment…” Read ‘The Birth of NASA’ : http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4105/introduction.htm
______________________________________
Strauss, AEC Chairman 1953-1958
“the naval nuclear propulsion program [was] conducted as a joint program of the Navy and the U.S.Atomic Energy Commission,..headed in both agencies by [Rear Adm.] H.G.Rickover, USN…nuclear reactor development funded by the government, both civilian and military..assigned responsibility for both to a Division of Reactor Development headed by Dr.Lawrence Hafstad. Rickover was Assistant Director, Naval Reactors. In late 1954 Hafstad resigned…Led by Chairman Lewis Strauss, vigorous efforts were made to find someone to take the position — anyone but Rickover. We will never know how costly the failure to pick Rickover as head of all reactor development will turn out to be” https://www.usna.com/SSLPage.aspx?pid=11090
Like this:
Like Loading...
