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A very curious piece appeared on the op-ed page of the New York Times on June 7, 2003. Its author was Jenny Strauss Clay, a professor of classics at the University of Virginia, and the title was “The Real Leo Strauss.” Highlighted in a box midway down the page were the words, “My father was a teacher, not a right-wing guru.” Clay wrote: Recent news articles have portrayed my father, Leo Strauss, as the mastermind behind the neoconservative ideologues who control United States foreign policy. He reaches out from his 30-year-old grave, we are told, to direct a “cabal” (a word with distinct anti-Semitic overtones) of Bush administration figures hoping to subject the American people to rule by a ruthless elite. I do not recognize the Leo Strauss presented in these articles. The “recent news articles” had appeared in an array of magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the International Herald Tribune, and the New Yorker. In only one of these does the term cabal appear. That one was Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article, the opening line of which is, “They call themselves, self-mockingly, ‘The Cabal,’ a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.” Abram Schulsky, “a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss,” directs this self-identified cabal, according to Hersh. In Clay’s apologia on behalf of her father, she wrote, “My father was not a politician. He taught political theory, primarily at the University of Chicago.” It is not incidental that Leo Strauss rarely, if ever, referred to what he taught as political theory, but I will come back to that. “He was a conservative insofar as he did not think that change is necessarily for the better,” which is a rather bland description of a conservative. “Leo Strauss believed,” she wrote, in the intrinsic dignity of the political. He believed in and defended liberal democracy, although he was not blind to its flaws. He felt it was the best form of government that could be realized, “the last best hope.” He was an enemy of any regime that aspired to global domination. He despised utopianism , in our time Nazism and communism, which is predicated on a Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of the War on Terror Nicholas Xenos 59 denial of a fundamental and even noble feature of human nature, love of one’s own. His heroes were Churchill and Lincoln. Keep in mind a few of the things that come up in this paragraph. Among these is the notion of the “dignity of the political.” We still need to know exactly what Leo Strauss thought the political was, as well as what he thought liberal democracy was and in what sense he was a defender of it. The use of the word regime on the part of his daughter is not entirely innocent, as I show later on, and the notion that Churchill and Lincoln were his heroes and Nazism and communism were the things he abhorred I address in due course. Professor Clay went on to say, “The fact is that Leo Strauss”—and this is very important and is the reason why the issue is ultimately of much more than academic interest— also recognized a multiplicity of readers, but he had enough faith in his authors to assume that they, too, recognized that they would have a diverse readership. Some of their readers, the ancients realized, would want only to find their own views and prejudices confirmed. Others might be willing to open themselves to new, perhaps unconventional or unpopular, ideas. I personally think my father’s rediscovery of the art of writing for different kinds of readers will be his most lasting legacy. Strauss’s students are aware of the impression their admiration for him makes on outsiders. Allan Bloom was the best known of those students, thanks to his best-selling 1987 antiegalitarian diatribe The Closing of the American Mind and, more recently, to his having been “outed” by his old friend Saul Bellow in Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. In a tribute to his former teacher, published after Strauss’s death, Bloom observed that “those of us who know him saw in him such a power of mind, such a unity and purpose of life, such a rare mixture of the human elements resulting in a harmonious expression of the virtues, moral and intellectual, that...

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