Moonroof posted...
And had Strauss never done anything? I feel like he still would have gotten his seat in the senate or whenever.
The movie frames it like it was significantly because of his vendetta Oppenheimer, but he had created a lot of enemies in the political sphere and he floundered pretty hard in the hearing. And he had already poisoned himself against the science community himself, regardless of Oppenheimer, though they were rather outraged by everything that Strauss had done to him too.
A large part of it was him constantly overstating his importance to the atomic bomb to the point he claimed to have been vital in convincing the President Truman to use it, to which the President wrote a letter that leaked stating that Strauss in no way was a part of his decision to use it.
He was just a nasty dude that made a ton of enemies.