During World War II, Strauss served as an officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve and rose to the rank of rear admiral due to his work in the Bureau of Ordnance in managing and rewarding plants engaged in production of munitions.

[8] He was on track to be valedictorian of his class at John Marshall High School, which would have entitled him to a scholarship to the University of Virginia, but typhoid fever in his senior year made him unable to take final exams or graduate with his classmates.

[27][28] Strauss had grown up in Virginia, in a culture that venerated Southern military heroes of the "War Between the States",[29] but a tour he took in summer 1918 to the devastated battlefields of Château-Thierry and Belleau Wood disabused him of any romantic illusions about the glory of warfare.

[52] Following the November 1938 Kristallnacht attacks on Jews in Germany,[54] Strauss attempted to persuade prominent Republicans to support the Wagner–Rogers Bill that would legislatively allow the entry of 20,000 German refugee children into the United States.

[54] At the same time, Strauss joined with Hoover and Bernard Baruch in supporting the establishment of a refugee state in Africa as a safe haven for all persecuted people, not just Jews, and pledged ten percent of his wealth towards it.

[57] Still another scheme that involved Strauss concerned an international corporation, the Coordinating Foundation, that would be set up to effectively pay Germany an immense ransom in exchange for their allowing Jews to emigrate; that too did not happen.

[59] Decades later, Strauss wrote in his memoir: "The years from 1933 to the outbreak of World War II will ever be a nightmare to me, and the puny efforts I made to alleviate the tragedies were utter failures, save in a few individual cases—pitifully few.

[11] The program proved popular and helped the United States ramp up production quickly in case it entered the war; by the end of 1941 the Bureau of Ordnance had given the "E" to 94 different defense contractors.

[90] At the end of the war, when the first atomic bombs were ready for use, Strauss advocated to Forrestal dropping one on a symbolic target, such as a Japanese cedar grove near Nikkō, Tochigi, as a warning shot.

[99] Other people in government and science, including physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, argued that the radiological approach would not work, but Strauss and the newly formed United States Air Force continued regardless.

[8] This extended to allies: Among the commissioners, he was the most skeptical about the value of the Modus Vivendi to which the United States, Britain, and Canada agreed in January 1948 that provided for limited sharing of technical information between the three nations (and that already was a stricter set of guidelines than those established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Quebec Agreement of the Manhattan Project era).

[104] The first atomic-bomb test by the Soviet Union in August 1949 came earlier than expected by Americans, and, over the next several months, there was an intense debate within the U.S. government, military, and scientific communities regarding whether to proceed with development of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb, then known as "the Super".

[105] Strauss urged for the United States to move immediately to develop it,[1][8] writing to his fellow commissioners on October 5 that "the time has come for a quantum jump in our planning ... we should make an intensive effort to get ahead with the super.

[109] In a memorandum urging development of the Super that he sent to President Truman on November 25, 1949,[110] the pious Strauss expressed no doubt about what the Soviets would do, writing that "a government of atheists is not likely to be dissuaded from producing the weapon on 'moral' grounds.

[112][113] However, by the time that the decision was made, Strauss was one of an increasingly large coalition of military and government figures, and a few scientists, who strongly felt that development of the new weapon was essential to U.S. security in the face of a hostile, nuclear-capable, ideological enemy.

[143] The British asked the AEC for the report, but Strauss resisted giving them anything more than a heavily redacted version, leading to frustration on the part of Prime Minister Winston Churchill and other UK officials.

[144] Internal debate ensued over the next several years within the Eisenhower administration over the possibility of an atmospheric test ban with the Soviet Union, with some in favor of trying to arrange one, but Strauss was always one of those implacably opposed.

[151] During 1956, Harold Stassen, who had been chosen by Eisenhower to lead an effort on disarmanent policy, focused on making nonprofileration a key goal of the United States, including proposals to halt not just testing but also the continued expansion of the U.S. fissionable material stockpile.

[155] Strauss visited Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to give a message from Eisenhower to this effect, and subsequent talks and hearings resulted in the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement coming into place.

[157] During his terms as an AEC commissioner, Strauss became hostile to Oppenheimer, the physicist who had been director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project and who, after the war, became a celebrated public figure and remained in influential positions in atomic energy.

[159] Strauss, who as one writer notes was a man of high intelligence and financial skills if not higher education, had also been considered for the job; he was the institute's faculty's fifth-ranked choice, while Oppenheimer was their first ranked.

[161] Oppenheimer supported a policy of openness regarding the numbers and capabilities of the atomic weapons in America's arsenal; Strauss believed that such unilateral frankness would benefit no one but Soviet military planners.

[171] The United States had exploded the first thermonuclear device the previous year; however, only a month after Oppenheimer made his proclamation, in August 1953, the Soviet Union declared that it had tested its own fusion-based bomb, which U.S. sensors identified as a boosted fission weapon.

[177] In November 1953, William L. Borden, the former executive director of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote a letter to the FBI alleging that "more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.

"[216] Strauss responded by first sending a letter to the petitioners saying that they were not trying to quash the expression of professional opinions – "We certainly do not want 'yes men' in the employ of the Atomic Energy Commission" – and followed that with a July 1954 visit to the laboratory to try to mollify the scientists.

[239] President Eisenhower, who had invested both personal and professional capital in the nomination of Strauss,[11] spoke of the Senate action in bitter terms, saying that "I am losing a truly valuable associate in the business of government.

[64] In a 1997 essay in the New York Times Book Review commenting on the Oppenheimer matter, literary critic Alfred Kazin claimed Strauss "pronounced his own name 'Straws' to make himself sound less Jewish".

Scholar of the early Cold War period Ken Young studied the historiography of H-bomb development and scrutinized the role that Strauss played in trying to form that history to his benefit.

[256] In particular, Young looked at the publication during 1953 and 1954 of a popular magazine article and book that promoted a highly distorted notion that the hydrogen bomb project had been unreasonably stalled, both before Truman's decision and after, by a small group of American scientists working against the national interest; also that Strauss was one of the heroes who had overcome this cabal's efforts.

[258] Historian Priscilla Johnson McMillan has identified archival evidence which suggests to some degree that Strauss was in collusion with Borden, the former congressional staff member whose letter had triggered the Oppenheimer security hearing.