Lately I’ve been hearing from colleagues and friends that Leo Strauss helped birth neoconservatism and that Straussianism and neoconservatism belong together rhetorically and conceptually. Supposedly neoconservatism would not have existed in the form in which it took over the conservative movement in the 1980s if Strauss had not provided its essential ideas. Thus, so goes the argument, neoconservatives and Straussians are so intertwined that it may be futile to distinguish between them. This is an error which I fear my book, Leo Strauss and the Conservative Movement in America, may have unintentionally nurtured. It’s time to set the record straight by restating my argument, which only partly overlaps the interpretation provided above.