The film, though excellent, misrepresents Lewis Strauss and Gordon Gray, two honorable men.
To all of the chatter about Christopher Nolan’s riveting new film, let me add two notes of at least parochial interest.
• Lewis Strauss, who is played mesmerizingly in the film by Robert Downey Jr., is portrayed as an egomaniacal D.C.-swamp creature determined to take down J. Robert (“Oppy”) Oppenheimer for small but never clearly defined reasons.
Strauss, pronounced “Straws” in the Southern manner, was a self-made son of Richmond, Va. He served in the U.S. Navy, rising from nowhere to the reserve rank of Rear Admiral. Starting below the bottom rung — he had no Wall Street connections — Strauss became a hugely successful partner in the investment firm of Kuhn Loeb. A proud Jewish American – not an American Jew, as he would insist — Strauss was elected president of the powerful congregation at Emanu-El in New York. Armed with only a high-school diploma, he became the moving force at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. And despite being a vocal supporter of Robert Taft, Strauss was recruited, redundantly, by President Eisenhower for senior administration posts, among them chief of staff and secretary of state. (Strauss, oddly, preferred to be secretary of commerce, an office to which he was denied confirmation by his many anti-anti-communist foes.)
Lewis Strauss was one of the most distinguished Americans of his generation.
And now for the parochial part. Lewis Strauss was an early supporter of Barry Goldwater, an early patron of National Review, and an early friend to NR’s founding editor at a time when the rich and powerful wanted no part of him. I remember the Admiral fondly. He once agreed to host an event for NR – and I exaggerate here only slightly – after the first 2,000 names in the New York telephone directory had declined to do so.
• One of the taller dramatic peaks of Nolan’s film is the hearing, orchestrated by Strauss, to determine if Oppenheimer should continue to receive top-secret security clearance. It was not a tough call. During the proceedings, it was revealed that Oppy’s wife had been a Communist. That Oppy’s brother had been a Communist. And that Oppy’s mistress had been a Communist. (Oppy had also welcomed into his inner circle in Los Alamos a colleague named Klaus Fuchs, who, it was later revealed, had passed the fruits of Oppy’s A-bomb research to Moscow.)
Robert Oppenheimer was, beyond the slightest of all possible doubts, a security risk. The security-review panel was far from the gross miscarriage of justice that Nolan depicts. The wonder is that it voted only two-to-one to revoke Oppy’s clearance.
Was J. Robert Oppenheimer himself a Communist? We don’t know, and with the passing of M. Stanton Evans a few years ago we may never know.
And here’s the parochial part. The security panel, known as the Gray Board, was headed by Gordon Gray, who is portrayed by Nolan as a manipulative, smallminded bureaucrat with a pre-fixed personal agenda. Again, this is a bald Hollywood smear. Gordon Gray was a Yale-educated attorney, a prize-winning newspaper publisher, and the president of the North Carolina university system who, after turning to public service, served with distinction as secretary of the army and national-security adviser to the president. To find that J. Robert Oppenheimer posed a security risk to the United States was to find that, begorrah, the earth is round.
Amid the raucous media enthusiasm for Oppenheimer, who was by the time of the hearing a cult figure to the trendy-Left, Gordon Gray did his duty.
It ran in the family. Gordon Gray was the father of Boyden Gray, the conservative legal sage, who died this past May. I never knew Gordon, but I watched Boyden walk across the hot coals of Washington for decades without burning a single toe. It may be an old-fashioned formulation, but it applies in full to both Grays, father and son: They were men of character.
I loved the film, but I hate it when the losers write the history of our righteous battles.