It was all going so well. The first of President Bush's cabinet nominees were national heroes, respected business or academic figures, technocrats, experienced old hands. The President was being as good as his word, creating an administration that could reach out across the bitterness left by the election.

And then came the words "Ashcroft for AG", and a sharp nationwide intake of breath. In John Ashcroft (58), a former senator and both Missouri attorney general and governor, Mr Bush could scarcely have found a more colourful and controversial nominee. No moderate he; indeed he has spoken disparagingly of the middle of the road as "a place that you find only moderates and skunks." He once described judges as "ruffians in robes".

Within days, an unprecedented alliance of more than 200 organisations was rallying to block a nomination they considered a knock-down capitulation by the President to the far-right. His supporters rallied too, on Wednesday delivering to the Senate petitions containing 262,000 signatures. Antiabortion, pro-gun, pro-death penalty, anti-gay, anti-affirmative action, pro-school prayers, Ashcroft has crusaded for all the causes of the right and has a voting record hailed as perfect by such groups as the Christian Coalition and National Rifle Association.

His success on Thursday in winning Senate confirmation propels into its most senior political position a member of the evangelical movement, a passionate adherent of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God Church, who wears his faith in the literal truth of the Bible on his sleeve - and lives it too. Ashcroft, who proclaims that he has been born again, neither drinks nor dances. But he does sing and writes Gospel music and has even toured with a band. His working day as a senator began with a voluntary Bible class for the staff. On the day in 1995 when he was sworn in, he met friends and his ailing father in a home near the Capitol, where the ageing Rev Robert Ashcroft, a highly regarded preacher, knelt beside his son and anointed him with cooking oil because they had no olive oil to hand. John Ashcroft later wrote that the anointing was akin to that which Saul and David received.

Ashcroft draws much of his inspiration from his father, himself the son of a preacher. He wrote in his book, Lessons from a Father to his Son, that he woke every day to hear "the magisterial wake-up call of my father's prayers". "Dad's prayers were not the quiet, whispered entreaties of a timid Sunday school teacher. My father prayed as if his family's life and vitality were even then being debated on high as he bowed low," he wrote.

In the US, the Assemblies of God is its largest white-majority denomination and represents an important current in the Protestant movement. Globally the Pentecostalists claim 500 million members.

John Ashcroft was born in Chicago, the middle son of the family which moved to Springfield, Missouri, to be closer to the headquarters of the church. It was a deeply conservative town, the hotbed of Republicans even in the days when the state sent nothing but Democrats to Congress.

Home life was strict, but it was a discipline from which Ashcroft never appears to have wavered. No smoking or alcohol and Sunday observance was the norm - prayer and study. A bright student, he went to Yale University, where he enjoyed a much more sober life than his new boss, George Bush. He played rugby and wrote home every day. At law school at the University of Chicago, he met his wife Janet.

Back in Springfield he taught law for five years, seizing an opportunity to run unsuccessfully for Congress in 1972.

In 1975 he was named an assistant state attorney general, working closely with Clarence Thomas, who later rose in controversial circumstances to the Supreme Court. Then much more liberal and with a penchant for the nightlife, Thomas would tease Ashcroft, matching him quote for quote with biblical references which contradicted those of his prim friend.

From 1977, and then as attorney general for Missouri, Ashcroft became an increasingly controversial and paradoxical figure. Despite his political extremism, he was elected to public office five times and was a popular governor who worked well on issues like education with Democrats. He was defeated for the US Senate last autumn largely because of a sympathy vote for his opponent's widow after he died in an air crash on the eve of the election.

His critics, however, accuse him at least of racial insensitivity, at worst of cynically playing the race card for political advantage. However, his many friends on both sides of the Senate, critics of the nomination among them, insist he is not a racist and quote a strong record of support for some minority causes, although some have argued that his policy stances opposing desegregation and black voter registration moves were all the more inexplicable for that fact.

He argued against desegregation of the St Louis schools on grounds of states' rights, knowing well that he was pushing all the right race buttons for his conservative constituency. Later his successful, largely single-handed scuttling of the appointment of Missouri Supreme Court member Ronnie White to the federal bench, if not based on racial grounds, is explicable only in terms of rather petty political revenge on a man who, as a legislator, had scuttled an anti-abortion bill Ashcroft supported.

Although widely described as a deeply honourable man, Ashcroft was caught out at least twice during the confirmation hearings with versions of events that departed significantly from reality. He tried unsuccessfully to argue that his opposition to the appointment of an openly gay ambassador, James Hormel, had not been based on his opposition to homosexuality despite on-the-record comments dredged up by opponents that indicated the opposite.

And his denial both that he knew of the racist policies of the Bob Jones University, where he accepted an honorary degree in 1999, or of the extremism of the magazine Southern Partisan, whose work he praised in an interview, are scarcely credible.

There is a deeply stubborn streak to his character. Even when faced by apparent contradictions or past dangerous links, he refused at the hearings to back down, to apologise or condemn those with whom he had been associated.

He was like a dog with a bone as state attorney general, pursuing legal battles up through the courts long after there was any chance of winning them, including one against women's organisations for restraint of trade after they organised an economic boycott of the state over its refusal to implement equal rights legislation.

As Pat Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee, put it, the theme of the hearings was "no regrets". This is a man of few doubts.

Evan Bayh, the liberal Democratic senator from Indiana, denied this week that Ashcroft was as bad as he was seen, explaining that he would vote against him because Ashcroft "would encourage in others the unyielding extremism they perceive in him".

AS THE country's top prosecutor, the attorney general wields broad powers as head of a 100,000-employee Justice Department encompassing the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Immigration and Naturalisation Service and the network of US attorney's offices nationwide.

He has wide discretion in advising the President on the appointment of judges and in shaping the state's case in actions before the courts. His critics have tried to claim that Mr Ashcroft's comments at the Bob Jones conferral that "we have no king but Jesus" mark him out as someone who will be incapable of putting his religious view to one side in using that discretion.

However, Ashcroft says he recognises the fundamentally different roles of legislator and enforcer of the law and has pledged to enforce the law as it stands without fear or favour whether he approves of it or not. At the hearings, he said that included the vigorous prosecution of those who obstructed the work of abortion clinics, as well as those in breach of gun laws that as a legislator he vigorously opposed. He could scarcely say anything else.

He has also promised to ensure funding for an ongoing study on the death penalty and has said that he will not seek to challenge the landmark Roe v Wade abortion ruling which he accepts the Supreme Court sees as settled law. He will not, he says, apply an anti-abortion litmus test to judicial appointments.

Yet, why then does a man of such passionate views and commitment to their enactment want the job? Why would he accept such constraints? Is he really capable of changing his spots? By a small majority the Senate believes he is - or doesn't care.