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Boies' certifying moment in the mythology of this particular generation came on Nov. 20, one week after he arrived in Florida. Emerging from his first oral arguments before the state supreme court, he stood in a room off the state senate chamber and presided over a press conference with a virtuosity news cameras hadn't seen since General Norman Schwarzkopf's famous briefing at the end of the Gulf War. As Boies carefully articulated the Vice President's positions in a Midwestern rasp--he grew up in small-town Illinois--his hands, a foot or so apart, moved as if he were gently shaking a box to see what was inside.
Calmly walking his audience through the intricacies of the case, Boies introduced Americans to a previously undiscovered species of superstar lawyer. He showed none of the self-regarding intellectual pretension of an Alan Dershowitz or the preening, macho strut of a Johnnie Cochran. Unlike his Democratic colleague Warren Christopher, he did not whine. Unlike his Republican opponent James Baker, he did not bully. Instead he explained--lucidly and persuasively.
Those who have been listening for even a year knew that this was characteristic Boies. During the long Microsoft epic, months before he won the devastating verdict against the company last April, they had heard him discuss the company's monopoly. "This is not about creative legal arguments," he said at one point. "It's not about creative economic arguments. It is about common sense. It is about facts, and it is about what the real world demonstrates." No matter how well you know Boies, these words, the phrasing, the syntax, give no clue to the setting where he is speaking. In court and out, he speaks a brand of English so simple and direct that he sounds like the high school teacher he once thought he would become. It's the way Boies speaks when addressing a judge, the way he speaks in his press conferences, the way he speaks over dinner. "Part of the reason he does so well," says ex-wife Judith Boies, also a lawyer, "is that's really him you're seeing in court."
Mary Boies says her husband approaches the world with such seemingly unaffected calm "because he comes from nonfancy people." His parents were both teachers. In 1954 they packed David, 13, and their three younger children into the family Plymouth and moved from Illinois to California. Although undiagnosed dyslexia had prevented him from learning to read until he was in the third grade, by high school David was a pretty good student, an excellent debater and so proficient a bridge player that he hired himself out as a paid tournament partner for adults trying to rack up master points.