"Just the mere fact you have pictures of the president on TV embracing grieving mothers, embracing pastors of churches that have been destroyed," Allen said. "That speaks about the personal character of our president, who is truly concerned about healing our nation."

During his confirmation hearing, Senate Democrats quizzed Allen about a comment he made in 1984 when he served as spokesman for the reelection campaign of then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.). He told a reporter that then-Gov. James B. Hunt Jr., Helms's Democratic opponent, was vulnerable because of his links to the "queers."

Critics charged that Allen used the word to disparage gays. But during his judicial confirmation hearing, Allen told skeptical members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that he intended the word to convey "odd, out of the ordinary, unusual," not to denigrate gays.

Robert G. Marshall, a Republican state delegate in Virginia, worked closely with Allen when the nominee served as Virginia's health secretary. Together, they fought - and lost - a battle to prevent the family of Hugh Finn, a popular TV news anchorman from Kentucky, from removing his feeding tube when he was sick in a Virginia nursing home. Marshall and Allen insisted there was not enough evidence that Finn was in a permanent vegetative state, despite that conclusion from several doctors.

"The media made it look like we were pumping air into a corpse, but I knew my duty and Claude knew his," recalled Marshall, who says Allen rightfully put a state's duty to protect life above public pressure. "I want a federal judge who protects human rights, despite public opinion being whipped up."

But Finn's wife, Michele, wrote a scathing letter to the Judiciary Committee this summer, saying Allen was "unsuitable" for the bench and had tried to "impose his personal agenda and beliefs over the legal and moral rights to which my husband was entitled."

After his nomination was announced, some of Allen's fraternity brothers from Chi Psi, a mostly white and liberal frat at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, called each other to talk about a man who they felt might have always inflated his conservative views.

"Some people have considered that, maybe, when he worked for Helms, he thought that by being an African-American male who holds these views, he could move up fast as a Republican," said Donald Beeson, one of the fraternity brothers. "But I disagree. I don't think he is someone who would do that.