Judging Mr. Right

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But it was in class that he excelled, in a way that forced other boys and even teachers to raise their game. He dragooned the Latin teacher in 12th grade into helping him translate Virgil after he had finished all the course work. He was famously able to absorb information: "Somebody'd jokingly ask about some small detail, and John would say, 'That's the second stone of a ring the Pharaoh wears on his third finger,'" recalls his roommate Bob MacLaverty. "We'd go look it up, and, sure enough, he'd be right. He was careful about the little things most people blow past." As a kid, he almost seemed to get how adult minds worked: he helped devise a strategy to push the headmaster for major changes in curriculum in hopes of getting the smaller changes the students actually cared about, like losing the required suit jackets in favor of La Lumiere sweaters. One schoolmate, Carey Dowdle, who watched him stride to the podium next to the President last week, felt he had seen the first steps in that journey. "I thought, It's been 30 years, but he still walks exactly the same. He walked with that same air of confidence and determination 30 years ago," Dowdle says.

Roberts made it through Harvard in three years, summa cum laude, on his way to Harvard Law School. Cambridge in the mid-'70s was a less fractious place than it had been during the height of the war protests, and while Roberts was known for being personally conservative right down to his unvarying choice of chocolate-chip ice cream, he was never rigid or doctrinaire; a placid debater, he stood his ground but never paraded his intellect. "There was an older faction that we jokingly called the refugees from the '60s. And there were very large egos there. Humility was not exactly an admissions criterion at Harvard Law," says classmate Bill Kayatta, a lifelong Democrat. "But with John the debates never became ad hominem. He was a very good listener. And we even managed to convince each other to change our minds on issues every once in a while."

He rose to become the managing editor of the Law Review, sometimes sleeping overnight in the office, the one who made sure all the flights of genius came in safely for a landing without ever committing his own philosophy to paper. "There were a few people on the Law Review that were social conservatives, very strong views about abortion, separation of church and state. John was not one of them," recalls classmate Steve Glover. "John's approach, as I recall it, was very lawyerly, in the sense that he was very much focused on case law and the precedent that courts had set before." That mind-set prepared him well for the apprenticeship that followed Harvard and that he cherished above all: his clerkship with Judge Henry Friendly, a respected Second Circuit judge known for his careful, almost handcrafted, opinions and mindful of what his legal forebears had laid out. In some ways that training was even more informative than the clerkship that all but inevitably followed, with Justice William Rehnquist.

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