Washington ? John G. Roberts Jr. complements his legal brainpower and squeaky-clean image with an equally important asset – an ego that friends say he keeps firmly in check.

“A great, self-deprecating sense of humor,” says Patrick J. Schiltz, a professor at University of St. Thomas School of Law and a friend of Roberts.

“Very easy to get along with,” says Los Angeles attorney and author Ed Lazarus, an expert on the Supreme Court.

Speaking briefly after the president made his nationally televised announcement, Roberts called the nomination “very humbling” and spoke of his regard for the high court, where he has frequently appeared to argue cases before the justices.

At age 50, Roberts is a relatively young nominee for the Supreme Court, where eight of the nine justices are over age 65. And yet, his arrival on the federal bench was a long time in coming. In fact, it was the first President Bush who first tapped Roberts for the federal court of appeals.

That first time around, Roberts never was given a hearing by the Democratic-controlled Senate. The current President Bush tapped him for a second time in 2001, but that nomination died, too.

Bush nominated him again in January 2003 and the Senate ultimately confirmed him in 2003 on a voice vote without serious opposition.

Roberts is something of a lifelong court insider – he clerked for then-Associate Justice William Rehnquist from 1980-1981, and served as principal deputy solicitor general from 1989-1993, appearing often before the high court.

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“That, more than anything he had in some brief that he signed when he was in the solicitor general’s office, says to me that he is going to be an institutionally committed moderate conservative,” said Emory University Law Professor David Garrow, an expert on the Supreme Court.

Roberts and his lawyer-wife, Jane, are the parents of a son and a daughter – 4-year-old Jack and 5-year-old Josie – whom they adopted.

A native of Buffalo, N.Y., Roberts grew up in Indiana, where he worked summers in a steel mill to help pay his way through college. From the beginning, he set himself apart – captain of the high school football team, top of his class at Harvard Law School.

William P. LaPiana, now a professor at New York Law School, recalled Roberts’ joking about the effect of a top grade he received in a course on American Intellectual History.

“I remember him walking into the room and saying, ‘Gee, maybe I can get my head through the door,'” LaPiana said.