The Enigmatic Man

"They're merely allegations at this point," says Ashley L. Taylor Jr. He's an old friend of Allen's from the Virginia attorney general's office and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Reminded that Allen allegedly had admitted the Jan. 2 fraud, according to police, another friend, Jack Simonds of Durham, N.C., says: "Even if that's the case, this man has proven himself so many times over to me that I would certainly hope that it would turn out for the good in some way."

To these friends and colleagues, Allen has been defined by a trajectory of success. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Duke Law bar association president. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals law clerk. Baker Botts, the law firm of former secretary of state James A. Baker III. Virginia attorney general's office. Virginia secretary of health. Deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Nominee to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. White House domestic policy adviser.

He's an identical twin -- so identical that people routinely mistake him for his brother Floyd, and vice versa. Floyd Allen, of King George, Va., works in retail security. They were born in Philadelphia, then moved to Washington. Their father was a truck driver, their mother a school worker. They lived in an apartment on Missouri Avenue NW. The boys played in the Archbishop Carroll High School band in ninth grade.

Then the family moved to Raleigh, N.C., where the boys ditched class "a time or two," recalls Paul C. Ridgeway, a Sanderson High School pal of the twins and now a Raleigh lawyer. But each became a star in his own right -- Claude as student body president, Floyd as a football running back -- though in adult life, it is Claude who has succeeded more exceptionally.

People point to Allen's character as his strong suit. Taylor describes him as a leader who "wore power lightly. He didn't throw it around."

That may be because Allen didn't see power as his to own. In a 2001 interview in Sovereign Grace magazine, Allen called his busy schedule "the Lord's time." Speaking of his appointment as deputy secretary at HHS, he said, "I feel that God prepared me in Virginia to serve on a national level."

Allen also is defined by his heritage, his "Grandpa Ray." During the 2003 confirmation hearings for his failed nomination to the 4th Circuit, he spoke of the inspiration he received from Grandpa Ray, who was "one of 25 children, lived to be 114 years old, the first child in his family not to be born a slave."

Asked what his Grandpa Ray would say of his grandson, Allen replied: "My grandfather would say, 'A job well done, my grandson.' . . . I think my granddad would be very honored, very proud."

Always Unflappable

"There had to be something else beneath the surface." That's what Martin Ricciardi thought when he got to know Allen in the summer of 1987. Both were pursuing dual degrees (for Allen, a JD plus an LLM in international and comparative law).

Ricciardi attended Allen's wedding that year to Jannese Mitchell, a Smith College graduate in the travel business, striking and elegant, with a lilting accent from her native Barbados.

Ricciardi also was married. The couples sometimes went out to a movie or the theater.