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Roberts's Harvard Roots: A Movement Was Stirring

John G. Roberts Jr. arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1973, a nascent conservative from a Catholic boarding school in the Republican Midwest, transplanted to Cambridge, Mass., at a time when campus conservatism seemed to be in hibernation. Prep school Marxists blustered about armed struggle, and students picketed liquor stores for carrying a boycotted wine. Conservatives were casually dismissed as a joke.

Judge Roberts, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, spent the next six years at Harvard and Harvard Law after Watergate and before the election of President Ronald Reagan -when it was almost possible to graduate from Harvard without ever encountering a card-carrying conservative in a seminar or a dining hall or having seriously to confront a conservative position.

"Conservatives were like the queers on campus," said Eric Rofes, a classmate of Judge Roberts who later became an organizer on gay issues. "People made fun of them. They mocked them and saw them as jokers or losers. I don't think in the moment many people realized this was the start of an ascending movement. People felt it was like the last cry of the 1950's."

Read entire article at NYT