Midwestern Scholar With a Steady Conservative Bent

If Roberts had gone to Michigan City's public high school, he would have been exposed directly to racial tensions bruising the community. During his teenage years, black students at Elston High staged walkouts to protest racism, Lootens said. One day, several hundred working-class white students walked out, too, complaining that troublemakers had gained the upper hand. Jesse L. Jackson came from Chicago, 60 miles away, to give a speech.

The tensions peaked the summer before Roberts's sophomore year of high school. On a Saturday night in July 1970, a race riot in Michigan City resulted in the governor calling in the National Guard.

It started, recalls Walter Gipsen, a popular black man in his twenties at the time, after he was arrested with two friends outside Sammie's Tavern on a disorderly conduct charge by local police, who gave him a hard time "because of my dating white girls."

As word of the arrests quickly spread, friends -- fed up with a climate in which certain jobs, restaurants and neighborhoods in the city were off-limits to blacks -- rushed to the tavern, according to Gipsen, local news accounts and others who were there. People began to loot and throw firebombs, and they torched a lumberyard. The governor summoned the Guard, the mayor imposed a curfew, and it was Tuesday before the city calmed.

The violence near downtown Michigan City took place less than 10 minutes from the Roberts home and a world apart. "I would assume, unless his parents were really activists or particularly progressive, [the riot] was just looked upon as an unfortunate thing that was happening -- and if those people would only stay in their place and not act crazy," said the head of Indiana's civil rights commission at the time, C. Lee Crean, who is white and was dispatched by then-Gov. Edgar D. Whitcomb to try to quell the unrest.

Nor did it touch Roberts's school. La Lumiere was so isolated, Barclay said, that he never heard of the riot that shook Michigan City less than two months before he arrived.

Unorthodox on Campus

The freshman roommate Bush remembers from Harvard's Straus Hall was witty, formal and surprisingly certain of what he wanted to study: Renaissance intellectual history. "There was no experimentation," Bush said.

Roberts and Bush arrived in Cambridge in 1973, four years after a campuswide strike in which students had taken over University Hall for days to protest military recruiting on campus. "Everyone was pre-something -- pre-law, pre-med; it was perceived to be pretty cutthroat," said Bush, who recalls several suicides in their pressure-ridden class.

Still, Cambridge remained a place of leftist causes. Peter J. Ferrara, a self-described libertarian Republican who went to Harvard and its law school the same time as Roberts, recalls joining the undergraduate newspaper and seeing a large poster of Karl Marx on the wall behind the desk of the student editor to whom he delivered provocative, conservative articles.

Roberts was quieter about his beliefs, but friends knew that he held what were, in that climate, unorthodox views. Bush, who favored equal pay for women, recalls that Roberts "was not the most liberal person when it came to women's issues." Bush said his roommate "hated" the 1972 Helen Reddy song, "I am Woman," a feminist anthem. "I remember having the impression it wasn't really her voice" that Roberts objected to, Bush said.

Roberts attended Catholic Mass regularly, a practice he continued through law school. "He didn't make a big deal of it," Scherer, his law school friend, said, "but there were times when a group of us were doing something, and he'd say, 'No, I am busy.' I'd later find out he had gone to church."

Roberts's ideological frame of reference in those days is evident in his paper that won the Bowdoin Prize, an essay competition, his senior year: "The Utopian Conservative -- A Study of Continuity and Change in the Thought of Daniel Webster." It portrays Webster as a leader, motivated by the interests of business, who was out of step with the prevailing conflicts of his day.