be a security risk. In September 1953, Strauss, hoping to uncover evidence of Oppenheimer's disloyalty, asked FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to initiate surveillance to track Oppenheimer's movements. The director readily did so; the tracking uncovered no evidence of disloyalty but that Oppenheimer had lied to Strauss about his reason for taking a trip to Washington (Oppenheimer met a journalist but had told Strauss that he had visited the White House). Strauss's suspicions increased further with the discovery that in 1948 and 1949 Oppenheimer had tried to stop the long-range airborne detection system that Strauss had championed and that had worked in discovering the Soviet Union's first atomic weapon test. In December 1953, the FBI notified Strauss that it would not watch Oppenheimer more closely without a specific request, which Strauss provided. Director Hoover then ordered full surveillance on Oppenheimer and his attorneys, including illegal tapping of phones. At first Strauss moved cautiously, even heading off an attack on Oppenheimer by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He had the AEC staff compile a list of charges and surprised Oppenheimer with them in December 1953. Strauss is often most strongly remembered as the driving force in the month-long hearings, held in April and May 1954, before an AEC Personnel Security Board that resulted in Oppenheimer's security clearance being revoked. Strauss had access to the FBI's information on Oppenheimer, including his conversations with his lawyers, which was used to prepare counterarguments in advance. In the end, despite the support of numerous leading scientists and other prominent figures, Oppenheimer was stripped of his clearance, one day before it would have expired anyway, as Strauss had wanted. By all accounts, the hearings broke Oppenheimer's spirit and he was never the same person afterward. Secretary of Commerce nomination Strauss's term as AEC chair completed at the end of June 1958. Eisenhower wanted to reappoint him, but Strauss feared the Senate would reject or at least subject him to ferocious questioning. Besides the Oppenheimer affair, he had clashed with Senate Democrats on several major issues, including his autocratic nature as AEC chair and his secretive handling of the Dixon-Yates contract. Indeed, by this time Strauss had garnered the reputation, as a Time magazine profile put it, of being "one of the nation's ablest and thorniest public figures." Eisenhower offered him the post of White House Chief of Staff, to replace Sherman Adams, but Strauss did not think that