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, for example, and a lot of what he knew of the United States came from his reading of Perry Mason, who was a great favorite of his. He would always quote Perry Mason in his classes on Aristotle in which both of them say, “A just man is as clean as a hound’s tooth and as sharp as a razor,” or something like that.

He loved “Gunsmoke,” the triumph of virtue, the White Hats versus the Black Hats. The hero who can’t be corrupted in any way. The sweet loyal wife who is at home waiting for him, that sort of thing. This was a symbol for him of the open plains, you know, where men are men. It was just playfulness for Strauss. I loved Strauss but I didn’t think that it would be possible to understand him if one invented, you know, a non-existent icon of a reincarnation of Plato or Aristotle or Socrates.

Stanley Rosen,
student at the University of Chicago from 1948-1955 and now professor of philosophy at Boston University