The part that confuses me is who was going to kill Strauss if he didn't talk in code? If the author is going to say he followed the lead of the ancient philosophers, shouldn't he attempt to show that he faced the same threats that they did, which would cause him to adopt the same approach?
LaRouche is clearly no expert on anything. Indeed, he's irrational or insane. Drury also goes overboard, too. We're told that democracy means tolerance, but the attitude of contemporary North American democrats toward critics of their ideology seems to be, "If your're not with us you're against us -- and a Nazi to boot." The earlier, not unreasonable belief that representative government needed responsible elites to guide it seems to have been expelled from democratic ideology and anathematized.
But where there's a real sense that a scholar regards himself and his students as part of a chosen group with privileged insights into reality that may serve as a warrant for worldly influence, it's inevitable that hostility and mistrust will arise. In some way Strauss communicated this elite consciousness to his students and some took it to heart. Drury and others assume that they will never be such an elite themselves and consequently bitterly reject and condemn Leo Strauss. While a thinker may have nothing of the totalitarian about him, the idea of secret teachings does provoke outsiders. And in the long run, it does pose dangers.
Strauss was presented as an opponent of Machiavelli, Heidegger and Schmitt. But lately there has been some debate about this. Strauss's own idea of hidden meanings and his students' riffs on that idea must bear some of the blame. Opposition can take many forms. One may find someone brilliant but disagree with their conclusions. One may agree with the diagnosis but reject the proposed treatment. One may accept the basic analysis but oppose the interests that make use of the philosophy. Or one may regard the philosophy as correct, but dangerous and worthy of suppression. Just what was the nature of Strauss's hostility to those thinkers?
It was always pretty clear that Strauss abhorred Locke. But his much respected student Harry Jaffa and the West Coast Straussians take Strauss for a supporter or admirer of Lockeanism. Go figure.