John Robert Bolton II was born in Baltimore and studied at Yale, graduating in 1970, a year in which the campus news was dominated by Black Panthers and draft dodgers. Bolton neither took to the streets with his protesting classmates nor traveled in the same partying circles as his campus contemporaries George W. Bush and Howard Dean. Bolton seems instead to have lived the life of a classic conservative political nerd. His senior yearbook notes that he served in the conservative party of the political union, as editor in chief of the Yale Conservative, as a four-year member of the Yale Young Republicans, as "floor leader of the right," and as executive emeritus of the campus conservative party.

After college, Bolton earned a law degree at Yale and moved in and out of the private sector, helping at one point on the campaign of a Texas attorney general candidate named James Baker. With the help of Baker, a future secretary of state, Bolton moved into the big time when he joined the Reagan administration in 1981. By the beginning of the president's second term, Bolton was an assistant attorney general.

His first forays onto the national stage were appropriate for someone with his hard-edge conservative background. The New York Times first mentioned Bolton when he was conducting a review for the Justice Department about whether any senior Reagan officials played a role in supplying arms to Nicaraguan rebels. He next popped up in the Times while serving as the Justice Department's point person in the contentious and partisan Senate battle over the Supreme Court nomination of Robert Bork. He joined the State Department in the first Bush administration and has worked in international politics ever since, first in the administration and then with conservative think tanks, his most prominent position that of vice president of the American Enterprise Institute.

During that time, and during his early tenure in the second Bush administration, Bolton's first priority appears to have been to roll back public international law so it isn't used against us by other nations as they battle for power in a dark, Hobbesian world. At its most extreme, this view has led him to say that "if the U.N. Secretary Building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn't make a bit of difference," and to support former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet against the international courts that hope to bring him to trial on charges of gross human rights violations.

More generally, four years ago, Bolton said: "It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so -- because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States."

Mark Falcoff, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, charitably sums up his former colleague's worldview as follows, "He rejects completely the notion that foreign policies are good to the extent that the Belgians like them."

Bolton is surely "an ideologue's ideologue," as his frequent sparring partner Joseph Cirincione, at the mainstream Carnegie Foundation, describes him. But it's also not quite that simple.

For one, unlike most ideologues, particularly hard-charging ones on the right, Bolton gains power from his pleasant demeanor, much as Jesse Helms does. During the Florida recount, Bolton was a confident and calm professional. Ron Asmus, a Clinton deputy assistant secretary of state, calls Bolton "friendly, charming and interesting" even while pointing out that Bolton often advocates positions that make Asmus' jaw drop.

He is also extremely smart -- another trait conspicuously absent in many ideologues. At Bolton's confirmation hearings, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., said, while criticizing the nominee: "This is not about your competence. My problem with you over the years has been you have been too competent. I mean, I would rather you be stupid and not very effective."

But he has been effective, and his star has risen very quickly . One conservative fantasy has him becoming National Security Advisor in a second Bush administration, after Condoleezza Rice takes over the State Department, and Colin Powell moves back to his farm.

But his competence has ultimately allowed Bolton to do much harm, scuttling the international agreements and treaties that make up much of the legal basis for international order and security. With Bolton's tireless leadership and assistance, the Bush administration has undermined the International Criminal Court, the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, and a potential international treaty on small arms trafficking -- while also opposing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

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