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EARLY LIFE
California Boy

The University of Chicago: Many Staussians PhDs, One Scaramouche

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He started in the Committee on Social Thought, which is a big amorphous interdisciplinary program where some famous people have come out of it, but it tends to take forever because it’s interdisciplinary. Bob, who had come somewhat late to it because he had been in the military in the Second World War, wanted to […]
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This is the ‘50s and we had a variety of professors, Hans Morgenthau in global politics and of course Leo Strauss and David Easton. They were both theoreticians. Anyway, I was just coming from a year in Amsterdam where I had a Fulbright grant and the first couple of months were kind of lonely. And […]
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I met Bob the first day I was there. I met John Rensenbrink first on the line waiting to register and he invited me to go to dinner. It was at somebody’s apartment, a very unforgettable person, but Bob Gaudino was there. There were four men sharing a small house. Then Bob took me to […]
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Gradually we found ourselves going to the same class of (Prof.) Leo Strauss. Leo Strauss at that time was engaged in a great debate as to whether or not political science should be anchored, as David Easton felt it should be, on a clear and distinct separation between fact and value. David Easton’s book The […]
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Oh, Strauss was a fabulous teacher. I took his class, actually audited, on Machiavelli, on the Discourses, and we went paragraph by paragraph through it. Clark Bouton once said to me, “You’re lucky you didn’t take The Prince. It’s only 95 pages. We went sentence by sentence.” No, Strauss was a fabulous teacher. You didn’t […]
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The main thing is he was a magnificent teacher. People would arrive in his seminar with quite different interests from his and in six months we were all studying Arabic or Greek or whatever. It was like a European university in which people were all immersed in the great philosophical traditions going back to the […]
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We didn’t like [Sen. Joe] McCarthy. We thought he was terrible. We were very much in favor of [Adlai] Stevenson. I don’t know where Leo Strauss came down on that. He appealed to people who later became very important in Bush’s administration. My trajectory has been so different. I’m a founder of the Green Party […]
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Well, I’ve known a few great men, Strauss was one, and all of them were extraordinarily childish at some level or another. Chicago was filled with geniuses of every discipline, men like Enrico Fermi. The greatest individuals I’ve known were men of enormous intelligence and complete simplicity. Strauss was a great reader of detective stories, […]
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We went down to Washington for the political science convention, Bob Gaudino and John Rensenbrink and I, and when we came down we couldn’t find a place for the three of us to stay. In those days, if you remember, two men and a woman, there was no way. And I ended up sleeping at […]
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They were a nice group. Nobody had very much money. Graduate students were poverty stricken lot. They took turns cleaning and I know they took turns cooking. I remember going over there and Richard Staveley had an apron on and looked very busy in the kitchen.
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