A Long and Winding Odyssey

In the summer of 1962, Robert Heron Bork, then 35, resigned his $40,000-a-year junior partnership in Chicago's largest law firm, loaded his wife and three small children into their Chevrolet convertible and drove east to a $15,000 job teaching law at Yale. Although some of his partners were shocked, his intimates understood. "He told me he didn't want to spend his life practicing law and cash in at the end, leaving nothing but a trail of depositions, briefs and money," recalls Economist John McGee, a friend from those Chicago days. "He wanted to leave something enduring."

The move committed Bork to the world of ideas -- "trying to figure things out," as he puts it -- and launched him on an intellectual odyssey that has led him from socialism to libertarianism to iconoclastic conservatism. Along the way he has demonstrated a willingness to mobilize overstatement to back up tentative thoughts that defy the prevailing wisdom. "Departing from conventional views of the time is the only way to evidence intellectual interest," says Aaron Director, a longtime University of Chicago free-market economist and an early Bork mentor. "He's always believed in advancing ideas forcefully and having them tested and criticized."

Even as a child, Bork delighted in running counter to the grain. He became a popular but bookish teenager who mystified his friends in the solidly Republican town of Ben Avon, a Pittsburgh suburb, by declaring himself a socialist. His father, a purchasing agent for a steel company, and his mother, a teacher, both thought the flirtation with socialism was crazy. "I read The Coming Struggle for Power, a Marxist analysis of capitalism by John Strachey," he recalled later. "It was powerful stuff and I thought it was probably true."

Sent to the exclusive Hotchkiss School in Connecticut for his senior year in high school, Bork took to intramural boxing and won the school championship as a 147-pounder. By his picture in the yearbook is a fitting quote for a pugilist: "Do you want a contusious scab, maybe?"

When Bork graduated in 1944, his parents refused him permission to enlist in the Marines. Bork retaliated by promising to volunteer as a paratrooper if he had to await the Army draft. His parents relented, but the war ended before he got out of Marine training camp.

On the advice of a high school teacher, Bork headed for the University of Chicago, which was bubbling with intellectual creativity under its young president, Robert Hutchins. The university encouraged independent thinking, and Bork flourished there. A Phi Beta Kappa, he was a poll watcher for a Chicago professor running for Vice President on the Socialist ticket.

Bork's ambition was to follow Ernest Hemingway into newspaper reporting and book writing. But because Chicago had granted Bork a B.A. in less than two years, Columbia University refused to send him a journalism school application. So he turned instead to Chicago's law school. The first classroom professor he encountered there was Edward Levi, an antitrust scholar who later became Attorney General and Bork's boss under Gerald Ford. "He was the most fantastic teacher I ever knew," Bork says. "He took the big ideas in the law and played with them, always by indirection." Levi's technique was to prove abrasively why more obvious explanations were wrong, an approach Bork adopted.