and for several years in the 1960s Eisenhower and Strauss advocated construction of a nuclear-powered, regional desalination facility in the Middle East that would benefit both Israel and its Arab neighbors, but the plan never found sufficient Congressional support to move forward. During his retirement Strauss devoted time to philanthropic activities, and to the American Jewish Committee, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the Alliance Israélite Universelle. He lived on a farm, where he engaged in cattle breeding and raised prized Black Angus. A book he was working on about Herbert Hoover was never completed. After battling lymphosarcoma for three years, Strauss died of it on January 21, 1974, at his home, the Brandy Rock Farm, in Brandy Station, Virginia. His funeral was held back in New York at Temple Emanu-El and there was also a memorial service held in the capital at Washington Hebrew Congregation. He is buried in Richmond Hebrew Cemetery along with more than sixty other family members. Alice Hanauer Strauss lived until 2004, when she died at age 101 in Brandy Station. Legacy The Oppenheimer matter quickly became a cause célèbre, with Strauss frequently being cast in the role of villain. This was an image that would persist over the next several years, and then on beyond that. Strauss had his defenders as well, who saw the hero and villain roles as being reversed. Such polarized assessments followed Strauss for much of his career. Even such matters as the unusual, Southern-based pronunciation of his surname could be perceived as a puzzling artificiality. Pointedly, in a 1997 essay in the New York Times Book Review commenting on the Oppenheimer matter, literary critic Alfred Kazin assailed Strauss as one "who pronounced his own name 'Straws' to make himself sound less Jewish". Strauss had been a quite prominent leader in Jewish causes and organizations throughout his life, however, and this particular charge was fundamentally implausible. In any case, Strauss's personality was not simply categorized; a mid-1950s interviewer, political scientist Warner R. Schilling, found him bland and courteous in one session but prickly and temperamental in a second session. As Alden Whitman's front-page obituary of Strauss for the New York Times stated, At the start of his 1962 memoir, Strauss states his belief that "the right to live in the social order established [at the American founding] is so priceless a privilege that no sacrifice to preserve it is