during the seven months between April and December 1953, Lewis Strauss—with considerable help from William Borden—accomplished the “great deal of preliminary spade work” that he and J. Edgar Hoover had agreed was necessary before a successful assault could be launched against Oppenheimer. They had diverted Senator McCarthy from the attack, knowing that he was too unreliable to prepare the case carefully. In July 1953, according to AEC staff lawyer Harold Green, “Strauss had promised Hoover that he would purge Oppenheimer.”
