Word: aec
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Talent for Controversy. Sometime Wall Street banker, longtime member (1946-50) and chairman (1953-58) of the Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis L. Strauss made a lot of enemies during his AEC years in the controversies that swirled about him: his winning fight to get an H-bomb program started, the lifting of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer's security clearance, the Dixon-Yates electric-power contract with AEC. But weighed calmly against his long record of achievement, going back 42 years to his service as secretary to Food Administrator Herbert Hoover in World War I, Strauss's talent...
Finally releasing details last week, the Department of Defense and the AEC called Teak and Orange "by far the most spectacular shots ever fired by the U.S." They were also the first megaton (i.e., equivalent to 1,000,000 tons of TNT) bombs ever exploded by the U.S. in the stratosphere...
...Final Break. As senior Democratic Senator and sometime chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, Clint Anderson was thrown into close contact with AEC Chairman Strauss, and that contact ripened into a beautiful hatred. Today, neither Strauss nor Anderson can give any specific cause for their feud; indeed, each swears that he went out of his way to be friendly to the other, only to be rebuffed...
...almost from Strauss's first days as head of the Atomic Energy Commission, 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. Anderson was openly annoyed on several occasions when Strauss released headline-making nuclear news, beating the congressional committee to the punch. But every time Anderson moved onto the offensive, Lewis Strauss, incapable of quietly accepting criticism or the hint of criticism, fought back with all his natural aggressiveness...
While the hearings were going on, Strauss-hating Columnist Drew Pearson wrote that Strauss had obtained top-secret information from the AEC security file of a hostile witness, Physicist David Inglis. Questioned about the point, Strauss said flatly: "I have never asked for anything on Mr. Inglis in my life." Then the committee put on record a letter from the AEC showing that Strauss had asked for information on Inglis. Strauss argued that by "anything" he meant any secret information, not the few nonconfidential facts he got from AEC; But Strauss stirred up trouble for himself by telling the committee...