Hugh Hewitt is not impressed with the New York Times' effort to make it look like conservatives at Harvard at the time John Roberts was there were part of an oppressed minority.

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."

In fact, a striking number among the small cluster of conservatives at Harvard in Mr. Roberts's era went on to become important figures in the conservative resurgence, which began gaining momentum around the time of the 1980 election. Some of them now say that being a part of that often ridiculed minority left them with skills that have been essential in their movement's subsequent success.

Hewitt objects to the depiction of his experiences as the beginnings of a partisan divide that left the conservatives feeling oppressed. Not being a Harvard grad myself, I have no idea what the atmosphere was. Perhaps some people felt ridiculed and others felt comfortable. Some of the people in the article seem to glory in their memories of being part of a derided conservative minority.

There does seem to be no indication that John Roberts was one of the more dogmatic or active conservatives in that environment.

In marathon doughnut-fueled discussions around the conference table in Gannett House, the law review building, Mr. Kayatta said, impressions of other people's politics took shape.

"I would have described John as on the conservative side but with really no sense of sort of a dogmatic approach," he said. "He was someone I found not only persuasive but eminently persuadable. John was the type of person who, if in a conversation you raised a point that caused him to rethink his position, his immediate reaction was to smile. He would actually enjoy the sense of 'Aha, that's a new way to look at something.' "

Robert Kantowitz, who as executive editor of the law review shared an office with Mr. Roberts the year he was managing editor, said, "What he projected was, 'I may have some strong feelings, and they may influence the way I think about things, but I'd much rather convince you on the basis of legal argumentation than on the basis of political philosophy.' "

Gee, sounds like the very qualities we'd like like to see in a judge.