Midwestern Scholar With a Steady Conservative Bent

The steel executive had exacting standards, several former colleagues said, but according to James Johnson, one of the 11 first black workers hired at the plant, he treated employees fairly and "did not give a hoot" about their race.

But neither the plant nor Jack Roberts was isolated from the racial tensions of the time. In 1974, the year after his son left for college, Bethlehem and eight other steel companies were ordered by the government to correct race and sex bias in their hiring and promotion practices and to provide $30.9 million in backpay to women and minorites as compensation for past discrimination. Jack Roberts's duties eventually included overseeing an unusual storefront training program in Michigan City for women and blacks to help the company meet its court-ordered hiring targets.

In 1977, a year after Jack Roberts became assistant general manager of Bethlehem Steel's Burns Harbor, Ind., plant, it was hit by additional allegations of discrimination. A group of female employees filed a class action lawsuit and a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission seeking to overturn the plant's policy of requiring women suspected of pregnancy to undergo tests, and then to take a leave without benefits if the tests were positive, according to a local newspaper, the Post-Tribune.

Jack Roberts's views on the two cases could not be ascertained. But as a Reagan administration official from 1981 to 1986, John Roberts was a persistent critic of the EEOC and affirmative action.

Andersen writes that Jack Roberts imparted in John Jr. what she describes as "sky-high standards of attainment" that he did not share with his three daughters. He also made sure that his only son had the best high school education available -- La Lumiere School in La Porte, Ind., a rigorous boarding school founded in the early 1960s by a group of Catholic businessmen for their sons.

At La Lumiere, the boys studied hard, played sports and were secluded from the political strains of the era. James L. Coppens, who gave Roberts individualized instruction in advanced-placement Latin and was an impassioned liberal, said he did not discuss contemporary events with his star pupil, focusing instead on the difference between the Greek and Roman heroic ideal.

The only activism at La Lumiere the years Roberts was there, Coppens said, was a spontaneous general strike in May 1970 -- Roberts's freshman year -- the day after four students were killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University. About half the faculty observed the strike, Coppens said, but none of the students took part.

"Overall, our students were more conservative than liberal," said Chris Balawender, who was Roberts's football coach and taught him U.S. and European history, his favorite subject. "Many of our students came from affluent backgrounds. Most of their parents were probably Republican."

Roberts fit in. During his junior year of high school, he criticized the prospect of coeducation in the student newspaper, foreshadowing by many years his criticism as a federal lawyer of intervention in gender discrimination cases.

"The argument that girls will provide a new viewpoint in the classroom is probably valid, although I certainly can't imagine what points will be viewed," he wrote in the newspaper, the Torch. He said he would not want "the football team waiting on the sidelines for practice while the girls finish their field hockey or whatever. Game times should be interesting, too. Imagine the five cheerleaders on the sidelines, with block 'L's' on their chests, screaming 'Give me a 'L.' Give me a break!"

A Separate World

As it happened, La Lumiere enrolled its first three black students in Roberts's sophomore year. Two of them were Paris and Neil Barclay, gifted brothers recruited by the school's priest from a lower working-class neighborhood near Chicago.

Their presence, however, did not foster much political awareness. As an eighth-grader at a Catholic grade school, Paris Barclay said, he got into trouble for wearing a black armband. But after arriving at La Lumiere, he said, "I was really focusing on achieving and keeping my head down. . . . I didn't want to seem separate and apart. I was struggling to compete with these Lacoste [shirts and] blue blazers, and I was there with my Penney's stuff, trying to fit in."