WASHINGTON -- The novelist John Updike could have had John G. Roberts Jr. in mind when he wrote that "in the end, each life wears its events with a geological inevitability."

	AP Photo/C-SPAN2
	U. S. Senate roll call vote for John Roberts confirmation as the 17th chief justice of the United States yesterday, is tallied up in this image from television.

It is tempting, looking at the new chief justice's resume, to see his swearing-in yesterday as the natural culmination of a lifetime of overachievement. But as Roberts savors his arrival, at the age of 50, at the pinnacle of the American legal system, he may owe his success as much to what he didn't do after he left the U.S. Solicitor General's Office in 1993 as to what he did do.

What he didn't do, his admirers from both political parties point out, is cast himself as a sort of house counsel for conservative causes, as some other Reagan administration alumni had done.

Instead, Roberts rejoined the Washington law firm of Hogan & Hartson and offered his talent as an advocate to clients of all kinds, all the while winning the friendship and loyalty of colleagues whose Democratic credentials were as unassailable as Roberts' Republican resume.

Roberts concentrated on cases, rather than causes, even after Senate Democrats in 1992 let the clock run out on his nomination by President George H.W. Bush to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a tribunal he joined nine years later thanks to the current President Bush.

After that defeat, Roberts could have salved his wounds by establishing himself as a "movement lawyer" and associating himself exclusively with conservative and Republican legal causes. Instead, he kept a low political profile during the past 12 years. That made it easier for him to argue at his confirmation hearings that he would bring no "agenda" or "platform" to the Supreme Court.

"People become lawyers for different reasons, all perfectly good and noble and legitimate," Roberts told the committee, using as examples people committed to the environment or civil rights. "I became a lawyer -- or at least developed as a lawyer -- because I believe in the rule of law."

Roberts' self-portrait as a lawyer's lawyer reduced his Democratic inquisitors to confusion, Georgetown University law professor Richard Lazarus, a longtime Roberts friend, told a Supreme Court seminar at William & Mary Law School last week.

"The hearing was as bipartisan as it gets these days," Lazarus said, because Roberts sounded "a consistent theme and an attractive theory: 'I'm not a politician, I'm not an ideologue. I'm a lawyer who respects the law.' "

The Democrats had difficulty establishing a competing theme."

When Democrats tried to portray Roberts as a legal automaton, he "refused to play," Lazarus said. "He was not going to wear his heart on his sleeve." Lazarus added that Roberts even found a way to blunt his critics' most potent weapon -- the voluminous and ideologically tinted memos from his career as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration. Roberts' tactic, Lazarus said, was to underline just how old those 1980s memos were.

"He'd say, 'Give me the date of that memo, Senator.' He knew the date."

Of course, not every Democratic senator was placated by Roberts' self-portrayal. Several senators scoffed at his insistence that his comments in the memos embracing conservative positions reflected the administration's positions and not his own.

Had that paper trail not existed, several Democrats made clear, they would not have been able to ask Roberts to rebut the presumption they created -- that he might still be the Ronald Reagan disciple who had criticized "judicial activism," referred to a "so-called right to privacy" and opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.

But even Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who eventually voted against Roberts, took comfort from Roberts' more recent career as an advocate.

"You seem to be a lawyer above all," he told the nominee. "You've devoted your entire life to the law and it's clear that you love it. Most people in that position tend not to be ideologues."

Nor, unlike some members of the current Supreme Court, do they typically commit themselves to constitutional views in a profusion of academic writings. In what only sounded like a left-handed compliment, Harvard Law School professor and former U.S. Solicitor General Charles Fried responded this way when Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., asked him to characterize Roberts as a practitioner and a scholar:

"As a practitioner, he's the best. As a scholar, he doesn't exist. He doesn't purport to be a scholar. He hasn't written scholarly articles.

"That's not his business. And in that respect, he is very much like some of the greats. ... So it does not denigrate Judge Roberts to say 'scholarly' is not what he has done."

At other times in American history, Supreme Court nominees who had focused on "causes" rather than "cases" did not suffer in the confirmation process.

When Thurgood Marshall was nominated to the court by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967, Marshall was famous less for his service as U.S. solicitor general than for his key role in the historic case of Brown v. Board of Education. Arthur J. Goldberg, named to the court by President John F. Kennedy in 1962, was a former general counsel of the United Steelworkers union and later Kennedy's secretary of labor.

But as Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, pointed out yesterday, Supreme Court nominations these days are more politicized and polarizing than they once were. Despite that, Specter noted, Roberts was confirmed by a vote of 78-22. That margin of victory surely would have been narrower if Roberts' had spent his post-Reagan years as a lawyer who was more interested in causes than cases.