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Spoilers for “Oppenheimer” follow below. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

I walked into “Oppenheimer” thinking I knew the plot: man builds bomb, bomb blows up, man has second thoughts, man is disgraced.

What caught me by surprise: the entire arc of Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s complicated nemesis.

Who was this guy, really? Why was he so self-important? And did the Senate really reject him from President Eisenhower’s Cabinet because of his feud with Oppenheimer?

It left me with an itch that could only be scratched the old-fashioned way: a visit to the National Archives, a chat with the Senate’s historians, emails with the Eisenhower presidential library, a scan of academic databases, a spin through The Post’s article archives, plus a few Amazon orders.

It was a little bit of a passion project for me the past few weeks. And it led to this piece in The Washington Post, ahead of Sunday night’s Academy Awards:

It’s a gift link! No paywall!

We also did a Post video, focusing on a couple key scenes in “Oppenheimer” versus reality, with my colleague Allie Caren. That’s here too!

But if you want the story-behind-the-story-behind-the-story — well, keep reading.

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Director Christopher Nolan structures “Oppenheimer” as a puzzle box, jumping between three plotlines:

I’m a Washington reporter, not a physicist — I barely passed the class in high school — so maybe it’s not surprising that the Strauss plotline was the one that hooked me.

Any failed Cabinet nominee is a pretty big deal. It doesn’t happen often. And quick googling made clear: the Strauss confirmation battle was the first modern Cabinet fight — the one that predicted the media and political frenzies that followed.

It also became clear that Strauss really was an important figure — arguably the most important American of the atomic age right after World War II, in the ear of presidents and steering national policy. Why hadn’t I heard of this guy before?

First, I started with a simple question that turned into a rabbit hole: could I find the room where the Strauss hearing took place in 1959? It was listed as New Senate Office Building, Room 5110 — a combination that doesn’t exist anymore. (Long story short, the room used for the Strauss hearing decades ago now appears to be a room used for recent hearings about the LIV-PGA Tour deal and McKinsey’s foreign dealings.)

Next, and far more important: did the Oppenheimer affair really sink Strauss’ nomination?

That’s where all the reading came in. And the short answer is… not really.

The Oppenheimer affair was certainly influential. Strauss’ role in ending Oppenheimer’s career soured scientists and some members of the media against him. It absolutely came up at his confirmation hearing.

But Strauss had many other political enemies who were looking for revenge, including a senator who made it his mission to stop his confirmation. Strauss was seen as secretive and untrustworthy; he got caught in what appeared to be a lie under oath.

Strauss also was scrutinized for all aspects of his career, including a long-forgotten scandal called Dixon-Yates, an issue pushed by one of the leading Democratic presidential contenders of that era, Sen. Estes Kefauver.

And having thumbed through letters to senators urging them to confirm or oppose Strauss in 1959, I can tell you: many average Americans were worried about other things — the risk of fallout from nuclear tests that Strauss had helped oversee, for instance.

Perhaps the most important factor: presidential politics. Senate Democrats had just won overwhelming victories in the midterms and saw a chance to score political points off Eisenhower’s nominee.

A future president and a prominent reporter even struck a deal to help kill Strauss’ nomination…

You can read more about all these things in my Post article!

The film also torqued up the Oppenheimer-related Senate drama. You might remember how a scientist named David Hill — played memorably by Rami Malek in “Oppenheimer” — testifies against Strauss.

That really happened. But it wasn’t the pivotal scene that the film makes it out to be. Another, more prominent scientist had already testified days earlier, saying that the Federation of American Scientists was overwhelmingly against Strauss’ nomination. And by 1959, it wasn’t a secret that Strauss had played a major role in the end of Oppenheimer’s career. He had already been publicly denounced by journalists in 1954.

But “Oppenheimer” played down a fascinating detail.

Without looking, how many days do you think the Senate spent considering Strauss’ nomination?

The movie makes it seem like a handful of days. Maybe a week or two?

Try three months.

The guy was in front of the Senate Commerce Committee for 16 separate hearing dates over two months before he squeaked by. Then the full Senate debated his nomination for another month before rejecting Strauss in a dramatic, narrow floor vote that concluded just after midnight.

Nearly 30 years later, elderly senators were still talking about it as one of the most bruising Senate battles they’d ever seen.

Remember the drama of Sen. John McCain’s thumbs-down vote that helped kill Obamacare repeal? Nolan missed a chance to put a real-life scene like that in his movie!

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I also found it fascinating to read President Eisenhower’s letters with Strauss, where they compared and lamented the Senate’s vote, all while trying to keep a stiff upper lip for history. Here are two batches of correspondence, courtesy of the Eisenhower Presidential Library.

In one letter, Strauss says that Arthur Sulzberger (presumably the one who was publisher of the New York Times) wrote the NYT editorial criticizing the Senate’s decision.

But Eisenhower was privately furious, and you can pick up on that in his icy remarks to the press after Strauss was defeated.

In his biography of Strauss, author Richard Pfau argues that his prickly personality overshadowed his national service, and that his contributions to America made him a true hero. (The book’s title is “No Sacrifice Too Great,” a clue to the author’s thinking.)

Sonny Bunch, one of my favorite film critics, had a similar thought after watching “Oppenheimer.”

"You could certainly make the case that Strauss" — alongside physicist Edward Teller — is "the real hero of reality," Bunch argued on the Sub-Beacon podcast.

Strauss certainly believed it. And that’s one reason Downey’s performance is so terrific: when that guy walks into a room, it’s clear he thinks he’s the main character of history, not Oppenheimer.

I don’t know if I’d go so far. But I did find Strauss a fascinating figure — and one worthy of a Washington Post reporting project decades later.

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