The story of John G. Roberts Jr., as told by those who know him, is the chronicle of a Supreme Court nominee foretold.

Looking back on it now, it's obvious that a president someday would pick Judge Roberts to sit on the highest court in the land, say his friends and associates. He was the smartest kid in high school, but never overbearing; at Harvard, he ran the Law Review with a craftsman's touch.

He's remembered as funny, a hard worker, intensely analytical. He's even got a high-court-ready hobby. His friend and mentor Chief Justice William Rehnquist is famously fond of the English comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan; Judge Roberts loves uber-Brit author P.G. Wodehouse, progenitor of Jeeves.

"With hindsight, it just seems perfect," says law school chum Charles Davidow, who's traded Wodehouse books with Roberts for years. "He is exactly what you would look for in someone going on to be on the Supreme Court."

In this inevitability he is different from the man who picked him to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. President Bush, by all accounts, drifted along until early adulthood, focused on his next party as much as the next step in his career. Even Vice President Cheney dropped out of Yale at one point, before beginning his rise to the top of the Republican establishment.

John Roberts never dropped out of any school to find himself. To the contrary, he appears to have been the most driven - if not the best - student in every school he was ever in.

And now he's preparing for the most important oral exam of his life: confirmation hearings. Judge Roberts spent last week in characteristic groundwork, meeting privately with Republican and Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Controversy may yet erupt over his nomination, but to this point it appears that the much-predicted battle over President Bush's first nomination to the Supreme Court is a fizzle.

A new Washington Post/ABC poll found 59 percent of respondents in favor of Roberts's confirmation, and just 23 percent opposed.

"The process is off to a good start," said President Bush in his weekly radio address.

John Glover Roberts Jr. was born in Buffalo, N.Y., on January 27, 1955. But his formative years were spent in Long Beach, Ind., a beautiful and affluent community on the Lake Michigan shore.

Developed in the 1920s, Long Beach was one of the first towns anywhere to be built around a golf course. Its town hall and first public grade school were designed by John Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright's son. Beachfront homes today sell for $1 million and up.

Roberts' father, John Roberts Sr., was a top executive at a new Bethlehem Steel plant in nearby Burns Harbor. John Jr. attended Notre Dame School. By all accounts it was a comfortable childhood in a corner of America that remained unroiled by the turmoil of the era.

"Things were different back then. You told the kids 'don't do this' and they didn't," says Teddy Liddell, who was principal of Notre Dame School in the 1960s.

In this environment the young John Roberts thrived.

He was "an outstanding student, but very quiet, low-key, never lorded his intelligence over others," says Mrs. Liddell.

After Notre Dame, John moved on to La Lumiere, a nearby independent Catholic boarding school named for the former owners of the bucolic wooded land on which it was built. Only a few years old at the time Roberts attended, La Lumiere had been founded by a group of Chicago-area and Indiana business executives. Courses included "great books," and, for seniors, "moral choices."

The young Roberts participated in virtually every activity of the small school, from athletics to student government to the newspaper and the drama club. Girls considered him a "hunk", says Joan Langley, a teacher whose own children attended school with the Roberts kids.

The Roberts and Langley families belonged to Sand Creek Club in nearby Chesterton, which was owned by Bethlehem Steel and had a pool, golf course, and tennis courts. But in the summer John Roberts, like most of his contemporaries, worked. "The boys had down and dirty jobs in the mill, but the pay was good and it gave them some spending money," says Joan Langley.

Page: 1 | 2