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Blessed and Bewildered

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As an only child, moving every year or two, Rosenthal never made a lot of young friends. "I think the only thing [tough] about growing up that way is that I made a lot of adult friends; I was kind of friends with my folks' friends rather than having a lot of kid friends," he says.

By the early 1960s, Rosenthal's father had made it to Schlumberger's corporate office in Houston, eventually becoming a vice president. The family decided to join Second Baptist Church and, hearing that the church was about to erect a complex in what was then Houston's unpopulated Wild West of Voss and Woodway, they built a home nearby.

Rosenthal went to Lamar High (as did his predecessors Vance and Holmes). He was a few years behind Holmes but dated the future D.A.'s sister and hung around some with his brothers. He graduated with no great career plans, but for lack of anything more interesting he went on to Baylor and got a degree in psychology.

As the Vietnam War heated up he decided he wanted to become a navy pilot. He went through all the tests, but when he arrived in Dallas for the final step -- his physical -- he was rejected because he had the skin condition psoriasis. (When he got a draft notice a few months later, he showed up for the physical and kept his condition a secret, but it was detected again and he was classified 1-Y, never joining the military.)

Rosenthal found himself back in Houston, again without any burning desire for any particular line of work. He had a degree in psychology, but that field didn't appeal to him. "I didn't like what psychologists did, so I decided to go into something else," he says. "It seemed everyone I knew had an MBA, so I went instead into law school."

He enrolled for night classes at South Texas College of Law, back in the days when the professors were all practicing prosecutors or attorneys moonlighting for extra bucks. To pay tuition, Rosenthal worked in the personnel department of Methodist Hospital and for a headhunter who tried to convince people to take jobs in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries.

He graduated in 1977, at 31 years of age. "I still felt like I owed somebody some government service, so I decided I would come [to the D.A.'s office] and work for three years and then go out and make some money," he says.

Instead, he found another home and -- finally -- a calling. He discovered he loved getting in front of juries.

He claims he had never even been in a courtroom before his first day as a prosecutor. "After kind of signing the insurance papers and things, they sent me right to County Court at Law No. 8," he says. That court's two prosecutors were tied up, so within hours of walking in the door as a newly minted lawyer he was picking a jury for a resisting-arrest case.

"I got up there and started talking to these people in the jury pool and it just kind of felt like I was in the right place," he says. "I liked trying cases. I went around and if someone was sick or unable to try a case I'd kind of step in and do it."

"He is definitely a homicide detective's prosecutor -- he got into the mud with them and learned the job," Chip Lewis says. "He's always had a very close relationship with the police department -- the homicide detectives thought a whole lot of him and still do."

An affable, charming guy -- at least when he's not talking to the media in crisis-management mode -- Rosenthal was considered a loose cannon by some colleagues. There was an infamous incident when an after-hours office gathering resulted in fireworks exploding in a stairwell, and cops being called in to investigate.

"He always had these kind of harebrained, half-cocked schemes," says one former associate. "They weren't always the most well-thought-out things."

He also showed some aversion to taking care of the administrative side of his job as he moved up the hierarchy, obviously preferring trial work.

More seriously, he got in trouble for authorizing an HPD cop to pose as a defense attorney while accompanying the wife of a kidnapping suspect to a jail visit. Defense attorneys were stunned at the move and filed complaints with the State Bar of Texas and the U.S. Department of Justice; both were dismissed without action against him.

Despite the mishaps, he continued to win cases that were high-profile at the time. However, he never -- significantly, to his detractors -- got tabbed as first assistant, the No. 2 position in the office under Holmes. But he headed up one of the four felony trial divisions and was thought of as a top prosecutor.

His personal life was also taking a turn. He met his wife, an FBI agent, when they were both working on a kidnapping case in 1986. The victim was a kid Rosenthal had coached on Second Baptist's basketball team.

"When he was rescued, I called the family and had them meet us down in the basement of the federal courthouse, and they put him in the closest car, which happened to be my [future] wife's car," he says. "And we were kind of there for the reunion, and I took her out to breakfast and fell in love."

He was married to someone else at the time, but that 19-year marriage was sputtering to a close. Five years later, he and new wife Cindy were married and now have two daughters, ages 11 and eight.

She is voluble where he is reticent. "Chuck's a pretty quiet guy," she says. "People say he married me because he didn't like to do the talking."

She says he takes the current deluge of bad publicity better than she does. "I'm the one who reads the paper and says, 'I don't need coffee this morning to get me going,' " she says. "There are days when you can see that it gets to him, though."

Things began to change for Rosenthal when Holmes asked him, apropos of nothing much, "What would you do if I decided not to run again?"

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