William Rehnquist

Early life and education

Rehnquist was born William Donald Rehnquist on October 1, 1924, and grew up in the Milwaukee suburb of Shorewood. His father, William Benjamin Rehnquist, was a sales manager at various times for printing equipment, paper, and medical supplies and devices; his mother, Margery (née Peck)—the daughter of a local hardware store owner who also served as an officer and director of a small insurance company—was a local civic activist, as well as a translator and homemaker. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Sweden.

Rehnquist graduated from Shorewood High School in 1942, during which time he changed his middle name to Hubbs. He attended Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, for one quarter in the fall of 1942 before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Forces, the predecessor of the U.S. Air Force. He served from 1943 to 1946, mostly in assignments in the United States. He was put into a pre-meteorology program and assigned to Denison University until February 1944, when the program was shut down. He served three months at Will Rogers Field in Oklahoma City, three months in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and then went to Hondo, Texas, for a few months. He was then chosen for another training program, which began at Chanute Field, Illinois, and ended at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The program was designed to teach maintenance and repair of weather instruments. In the summer of 1945, Rehnquist went overseas as a weather observer in North Africa. He was honorably discharged with the rank of sergeant.

After leaving the military in 1946, Rehnquist attended Stanford University with financial assistance from the G.I. Bill. He graduated in 1948 with Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in political science and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Pi Sigma Alpha. He did graduate study in government at Harvard University, where he received another Master of Arts in 1950. He then returned to Stanford to attend the Stanford Law School, where he was an editor on the Stanford Law Review. Rehnquist was strongly conservative from an early age and wrote that he "hated" liberal Justice Hugo Black in his diary at Stanford. He graduated in 1952 ranked first in his class with a Bachelor of Laws. Rehnquist was in the same class at Stanford Law as Sandra Day O'Connor, with whom he would later serve on the Supreme Court. They briefly dated during law school, and Rehnquist proposed marriage to her. O'Connor declined as she was by then dating her future husband. Rehnquist married Nan Cornell in 1953.

Law clerk at the Supreme Court

After law school, Rehnquist served as a law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson from 1952 to 1953. While clerking for Jackson, he wrote a memorandum arguing against federal court-ordered school desegregation while the Court was considering the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which was decided in 1954. Rehnquist's 1952 memo, "A Random Thought on the Segregation Cases", defended the separate-but-equal doctrine. In the memo, Rehnquist wrote:

To the argument that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are [...] I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by "liberal" colleagues, but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.

In both his 1971 United States Senate confirmation hearing for Associate Justice and his 1986 hearing for Chief Justice, Rehnquist testified that the memorandum reflected Jackson's views rather than his own. Rehnquist said, "I believe that the memorandum was prepared by me as a statement of Justice Jackson's tentative views for his own use." Jackson's longtime secretary and confidante Elsie Douglas said during Rehnquist's 1986 hearings that his allegation was "a smear of a great man, for whom I served as secretary for many years. Justice Jackson did not ask law clerks to express his views. He expressed his own and they expressed theirs. That is what happened in this instance." But Justices Douglas's and Frankfurter's papers indicate that Jackson voted for Brown in 1954 only after changing his mind.

At his 1986 hearing for chief justice, Rehnquist tried to further distance himself from the 1952 memo, saying, "The bald statement that Plessy was right and should be reaffirmed was not an accurate reflection of my own views at the time." But he acknowledged defending Plessy in arguments with fellow law clerks.

Several commentators have concluded that the memo reflected Rehnquist's own views, not Jackson's. A biography of Jackson corroborates this, stating that Jackson instructed his clerks to express their views, not his. Further corroboration is found in a 2012 Boston College Law Review article that analyzes a 1955 letter to Frankfurter that criticized Jackson.

Private practice

After his Supreme Court clerkship, Rehnquist entered private practice in Phoenix, Arizona, where he worked from 1953 to 1969. He began his legal work in the firm of Denison Kitchel, subsequently serving as the national manager of Barry M. Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign. Prominent clients included Jim Hensley, John McCain's future father-in-law. During these years, Rehnquist was active in the Republican Party and served as a legal advisor under Kitchel to Goldwater's campaign. He collaborated with Harry Jaffa on Goldwater's speeches.

During both his 1971 hearing for associate justice and his 1986 hearing for chief justice, several people came forward to allege that Rehnquist had participated in Operation Eagle Eye, a Republican Party voter suppression operation in the early 1960s in Arizona to challenge minority voters. Rehnquist denied the charges, and Vincent Maggiore, then chairman of the Phoenix-area Democratic Party, said he had never heard any negative reports about Rehnquist's Election Day activities. "All of these things", Maggiore said, "would have come through me."

Justice Department

When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, Rehnquist returned to work in Washington. He served as Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel from 1969 to 1971. In this role, he served as the chief lawyer to Attorney General John Mitchell. Nixon mistakenly called him "Renchburg" in several of the tapes of Oval Office conversations revealed during the Watergate investigations.

Rehnquist played a role in the investigation of Justice Abe Fortas for accepting $20,000 (equivalent to $176,000 in 2025) from Louis Wolfson, a financier under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Although other justices had made similar arrangements, Nixon saw the Wolfson payment as a political opportunity to cement a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Nixon wanted the Justice Department to investigate Fortas but was unsure if this was legal, as there was no precedent for such an activity. Rehnquist sent Attorney General John N. Mitchell a memo arguing that an investigation would not violate the separation of powers. Rehnquist did not handle the direct investigation, but was told by Mitchell to "assume the most damaging set of inferences about the case were true" and "determine what action the Justice Department could take." The worst inference Rehnquist could draw was that Fortas had somehow intervened in the prosecution of Wolfson, which, according to former White House Counsel John W. Dean, was untrue. Based on this false accusation, Rehnquist argued that the Justice Department could investigate Fortas. After being investigated by Mitchell, who threatened to also investigate his wife, Fortas resigned.

Because he was well-placed in the Justice Department, many suspected Rehnquist could have been the source known as Deep Throat during the Watergate scandal. Once Bob Woodward revealed on May 31, 2005, that W. Mark Felt was Deep Throat, this speculation ended.

Associate Justice

Nomination and confirmation as associate justice

On October 21, 1971, President Nixon nominated Rehnquist as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, to succeed John Marshall Harlan II. Henry Kissinger initially proposed Rehnquist for the position to presidential advisor H.R. Haldeman and asked, "Rehnquist is pretty far right, isn't he?" Haldeman responded, "Oh, Christ! He's way to the right of Buchanan", referring to then-presidential advisor Patrick Buchanan.

Rehnquist's confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee took place in early November 1971. In addition to answering questions about school desegregation and racial discrimination in voting, Rehnquist was asked about his views on the extent of presidential power, the Vietnam War, the anti-war movement and law enforcement surveillance methods. On November 23, 1971, the committee voted 12–4 to send the nomination to the full Senate with a favorable recommendation.

On December 10, 1971, the Senate first voted 52–42 against a cloture motion that would have allowed the Senate to end debate on Rehnquist's nomination and vote on whether to confirm him. The Senate then voted 22–70 to reject a motion to postpone consideration of his confirmation until July 18, 1972. Later that day, the Senate voted 68–26 to confirm Rehnquist, and he took the judicial oath of office on January 7, 1972.

There were two Supreme Court vacancies in the fall of 1971. The other was filled by Lewis F. Powell Jr., who took office on the same day as Rehnquist to replace Hugo Black.

Tenure as associate justice

On the Court, Rehnquist promptly established himself as Nixon's most conservative appointee, taking a narrow view of the Fourteenth Amendment and a broad view of state power in domestic policy. He almost always voted "with the prosecution in criminal cases, with business in antitrust cases, with employers in labor cases, and with the government in speech cases." Rehnquist was often a lone dissenter in cases early on, but his views later often became the Court's majority view.

For years, Rehnquist was determined to keep cases involving individual rights in state courts out of federal reach. In National League of Cities v. Usery (1977), his majority opinion invalidated a federal law extending minimum wage and maximum hours provisions to state and local government employees. Rehnquist wrote, "this exercise of congressional authority does not comport with the federal system of government embodied in the Constitution."

Rehnquist rejected a broad view of the Fourteenth Amendment. In 1952, while clerking for Jackson, Rehnquist wrote a memorandum concluding that "Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be re-affirmed. If the Fourteenth Amendment did not enact Spencer's Social Statics, it just as surely did not enact Myrddahl's American Dilemma" (An American Dilemma), by which he meant that the Court should not "read its own sociological views into the Constitution." Rehnquist believed the Fourteenth Amendment was meant only as a solution to the problems of slavery, and was not to be applied to abortion rights or prisoner's rights. He believed the Court "had no business reflecting society's changing and expanding values" and that this was Congress's domain. Rehnquist tried to weave his view of the Amendment into his opinion for Fitzpatrick v. Bitzer, but the other justices rejected it. He later extended what he said he saw as the Amendment's scope, writing in Trimble v. Gordon, "except in the area of the law in which the Framers obviously meant it to apply—classifications based on race or on national origin". During the Burger Court's deliberations over Roe v. Wade, Rehnquist promoted his view that courts' jurisdiction does not apply to abortion.

Rehnquist voted against the expansion of school desegregation plans and the establishment of legalized abortions, dissenting in Roe v. Wade. He expressed his views about the Equal Protection Clause in cases like Trimble v. Gordon:

Chief Justice

Nomination and confirmation as chief justice

When Burger retired in 1986, President Ronald Reagan nominated Rehnquist for chief justice. Although Rehnquist was far more conservative than Burger, "his colleagues were unanimously pleased and supportive", even his "ideological opposites". The nomination "was met with 'genuine enthusiasm on the part of not only his colleagues on the Court but others who served the Court in a staff capacity and some of the relatively lowly paid individuals at the Court. There was almost a unanimous feeling of joy.'" Thurgood Marshall later called him "a great chief justice".

The nomination was submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 20, 1986. This was the first confirmation hearing on a chief justice nominee to be opened to gavel-to-gavel television coverage. During the hearing, Senator Ted Kennedy challenged Rehnquist on his unwitting ownership of property that had a restrictive covenant against sale to Jews (such covenants were held to be unenforceable under the 1948 Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer). Along with senators Joe Biden and Howard Metzenbaum, Kennedy called Rehnquist "insensitive to minorities and women's rights while on the court." Rehnquist also drew criticism for his membership in the Washington, D.C. Alfalfa Club, which at the time did not allow women to join. On August 14, the Judiciary Committee voted 13–5 to report the nomination to the Senate with a favorable recommendation.

Despite various Democrats' efforts to defeat the nomination, the Senate confirmed Rehnquist on September 17. After cloture was invoked in a 68–31 vote, Rehnquist was confirmed in a 65–33 vote (49 Republicans and 16 Democrats voted in favor; 31 Democrats and two Republicans voted against). He took office on September 26, becoming the first person since Harlan F. Stone to serve as both an associate justice and chief justice. Rehnquist's associate justice successor, Antonin Scalia, was sworn into office that same day.

Rehnquist had no prior experience as a judge upon his appointment to the Court. His only experience in presiding over a case at the trial level was in 1984, when Judge D. Dortch Warriner invited him to preside over a civil case, Julian D. Heislup, Sr. and Linda L. Dixon, Appellees, v. Town of Colonial Beach, Virginia, et al. Rehnquist oversaw the jury trial involving allegations that police department employees' civil rights were violated when they testified in a matter involving alleged police brutality against a teenage boy. Rehnquist ruled for the plaintiffs in a number of motions, allowing the case to go to the jury. When the jury found for the plaintiffs and awarded damages, the defendants appealed. The appeal was argued before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on June 4, 1986–16 days before Rehnquist was nominated as chief justice. Forty-three days after Rehnquist was sworn in as chief justice, the Fourth Circuit reversed the judgment, overruling Rehnquist, and concluding that there was insufficient evidence to have sent the matter to the jury.

Tenure as chief justice

In his capacity as chief justice, Rehnquist administered the Oath of Office to the following presidents of the United States:

George H. W. Bush in 1989

Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1997

George W. Bush in 2001 and 2005

Rehnquist tightened up the justices' conferences, keeping justices from going too long or off track and not allowing any justice to speak twice until each had spoken once, and gained a reputation for scrupulous fairness in assigning opinions: Rehnquist assigned no justice (including himself) two opinions before everyone had been assigned one, and made no attempts to interfere with assignments for cases in which he was in the minority. Most significantly, he successfully lobbied Congress in 1988 to give the Court control of its own docket, cutting back on mandatory appeals and certiorari grants in general.

Rehnquist added four yellow stripes to the sleeves of his robe in 1995. A lifelong fan of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, he liked the Lord Chancellor's costume in a community theater production of Iolanthe, and thereafter appeared in court with the same striped sleeves. His successor, Chief Justice John Roberts, chose not to continue the practice.

Scholars expected Rehnquist to push the Supreme Court in a more conservative direction during his tenure. Many commentators expected to see the federal government's power limited and state governments' power increased. However, legal reporter Jan Crawford has said that some of Rehnquist's victories toward the federalist goal of scaling back congressional power over the states had little practical impact.

Rehnquist voted with the majority in City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), and referred to that decision as precedent for requiring Congress to defer to the Court when interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment (including the Equal Protection Clause) in a number of cases. Boerne held that any statute that Congress enacted to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment (including the Equal Protection Clause) had to show "a congruence and proportionality between the injury to be prevented or remedied and the means adopted to that end". The Rehnquist Court's congruence and proportionality theory replaced the "ratchet" theory that had arguably been advanced in Katzenbach v. Morgan (1966). According to the ratchet theory, Congress could "ratchet up" civil rights beyond what the Court had recognized, but Congress could not "ratchet down" judicially recognized rights. According to the majority opinion of Justice Anthony Kennedy, which Rehnquist joined in Boerne:

Legacy

Jeffery Rosen has argued that Rehnquist's "tactical flexibility was more effective than the rigid purity of Scalia and Thomas." Rosen writes:

In truth, Rehnquist carefully staked out a limbo between the right and the left and showed that it was a very good place to be. With exceptional efficiency and amiability he led a Court that put the brakes on some of the excesses of the Earl Warren era while keeping pace with the sentiments of a majority of the country—generally siding with economic conservatives and against cultural conservatives. As for judicial temperament, he was far more devoted to preserving tradition and majority rule than the generation of fire-breathing conservatives who followed him. And his administration of the Court was brilliantly if quietly effective, making him one of the most impressive chief justices of the past hundred years.

In The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist, biographer John A. Jenkins was critical of Rehnquist's history with racial discrimination. He noted that, as a private citizen, Rehnquist had protested Brown v. Board of Education, and as a justice, consistently ruled against racial minorities in affirmative action cases. Only when white males began to make reverse discrimination claims did he become sympathetic to equal protection arguments.

Charles Fried has described the Rehnquist Court's "project" as "to reverse not the course of history but the course of constitutional doctrine's abdication to politics". Legal reporter Jan Greenburg has said that conservative critics noted that the Rehnquist Court did little to overturn the left's successes in the lower courts, and in some cases actively furthered them. But in 2005, law professor John Yoo wrote, "It is telling to see how many of Rehnquist's views, considered outside the mainstream at the time by professors and commentators, the court has now adopted."

Personal health

After Rehnquist's death in 2005, the FBI honored a Freedom of Information Act request detailing the Bureau's background investigation before Rehnquist's nomination as chief justice. The files reveal that for a period, Rehnquist had been addicted to Placidyl, a drug widely prescribed for insomnia. It was not until he was hospitalized that doctors learned of the extent of his dependency.

Freeman Cary, a U.S. Capitol physician, prescribed Rehnquist Placidyl for insomnia and back pain from 1972 to 1981 in doses exceeding the recommended limits, but the FBI report concluded that Rehnquist was already taking the drug as early as 1970. By the time he sought treatment, Rehnquist was taking three times the prescribed dose of the drug nightly. On December 27, 1981, Rehnquist entered George Washington University Hospital for treatment of back pain and Placidyl dependency. There, he underwent a monthlong detoxification process. While hospitalized, he had typical withdrawal symptoms, including hallucinations and paranoia. For example, "One doctor said Rehnquist thought he heard voices outside his hospital room plotting against him and had 'bizarre ideas and outrageous thoughts', including imagining 'a CIA plot against him' and seeming to see the design patterns on the hospital curtains change configuration."

For several weeks before his hospitalization, Rehnquist had slurred his words, but there were no indications he was otherwise impaired. Law professor Michael Dorf observed that "none of the Justices, law clerks or others who served with Rehnquist have so much as hinted that his Placidyl addiction affected his work, beyond its impact on his speech."

Failing health and death

In October 2004, the Supreme Court press office announced that Rehnquist had recently been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Few details about his diagnosis were revealed, but it was confirmed that he had undergone a tracheotomy at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and was receiving radiation therapy and chemotherapy for his cancer, which led to public speculation that he had an aggressive type of thyroid cancer. After his diagnosis was announced, Rehnquist did not appear in public until he administered the oath of office to President George W. Bush at his second inauguration on January 20, 2005, despite doubts about whether his health would permit it. He arrived using a cane, walked very slowly, and left immediately after the oath was administered.

Rehnquist missed 44 oral arguments before the Court in late 2004 and early 2005, returning to the bench on March 21, 2005. He remained involved in Court business during his absence, participating in many decisions and deliberations.

On July 1, 2005, Justice O'Connor announced her impending retirement from the Court after consulting with Rehnquist and learning that he had no intention to retire. To a reporter who asked whether he would be retiring, Rehnquist replied, "That's for me to know and you to find out."

Rehnquist died at his Arlington, Virginia, home on September 3, 2005, at age 80. He was the first justice to die in office since Robert H. Jackson in 1954 and the first chief justice to die in office since Fred M. Vinson in 1953. He was also the last serving justice appointed by Richard Nixon.

On September 6, 2005, eight of Rehnquist's former law clerks, including John Roberts, his eventual successor, served as pallbearers as his casket was placed on the same catafalque that bore Abraham Lincoln's casket as he lay in state in 1865. Rehnquist's body lay in repose in the Great Hall of the United States Supreme Court Building until his funeral on September 7, a Lutheran service conducted at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle in Washington, D.C. President George W. Bush and Justice O'Connor eulogized Rehnquist, as did members of his family. Rehnquist's funeral was the largest gathering of political dignitaries at the cathedral since President John F. Kennedy's funeral in 1963. It was followed by a private burial service, in which he was interred next to his wife, Nan, at Arlington National Cemetery.

Replacement as Chief Justice

Rehnquist's death, just over two months after O'Connor announced her impending retirement, left two vacancies for President Bush to fill. On September 5, 2005, Bush withdrew the nomination of John Roberts of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to replace O'Connor as associate justice and instead nominated him to replace Rehnquist as Chief Justice. Roberts was confirmed by the U.S. Senate and sworn in as the new chief justice on September 29, 2005. He had clerked for Rehnquist in 1980–1981. O'Connor, who had made the effective date of her resignation the confirmation of her successor, continued to serve on the Court until Samuel Alito was confirmed and sworn in on January 31, 2006.

Eulogizing Rehnquist in the Harvard Law Review, Roberts wrote that he was "direct, straightforward, utterly without pretense—and a patriot who loved and served his country. He was completely unaffected in manner."

Family life

Rehnquist's paternal grandparents immigrated separately from Sweden in 1880. His grandfather Olof Andersson, who changed his surname from the patronymic Andersson to the family name Rehnquist, was born in the province of Värmland; his grandmother was born Adolfina Ternberg in the Vreta Kloster parish in Östergötland. Rehnquist is one of two chief justices of Swedish descent, the other being Earl Warren, who had Norwegian and Swedish ancestry.

Rehnquist married Natalie "Nan" Cornell on August 29, 1953. The daughter of a San Diego physician, she worked as an analyst on the CIA's Austria desk before their marriage. The couple had three children: James, a lawyer and college basketball player; Janet, a lawyer; and Nancy, an editor (including of her father's books) and homemaker. Nan Rehnquist died on October 17, 1991, aged 62, of ovarian cancer. Rehnquist was survived by nine grandchildren.

Shortly after moving to Washington, D.C., the Rehnquists purchased a home in Greensboro, Vermont, where they spent many vacations.

Selected works

Books

Rehnquist, William H. (1987). The Supreme Court: How It Was, How It Is. New York: William Morrow & Co. ISBN 0-688-05714-4.

— (1992). Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson. New York: Knopf Publishing Group. ISBN 0-679-44661-3.

— (1998). All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime. New York: William Morrow & Co. ISBN 0-688-05142-1.

— (2001). The Supreme Court: A new edition of the Chief Justice's classic history (Revised ed.). New York: Knopf Publishing Group. ISBN 0-375-40943-2.

— (2004). The Centennial Crisis: The Disputed Election of 1876. New York: Knopf Publishing Group. ISBN 0-375-41387-1.

Articles

Rehnquist, William H. (1970). "The Constitutional Issues—Administration Position". New York University Law Review. 45 (Special): 628–39.

— (1974). "Is an Expanded Right of Privacy Consistent with Fair and Effective Law Enforcement?". Kansas Law Review. 23 (1): 1–22.

— (1976). "The Notion of a Living Constitution". Texas Law Review. 54 (4): 693–706.

— (1976). "Chief Justices I Never Knew". Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly. 3 (3): 637–56.

— (1986). "The Changing Role of the Supreme Court". Florida State University Law Review. 14 (1): 1–14.

— (1986). "Constitutional Law and Public Opinion". Suffolk University Law Review. 20 (4): 751–70.

— (1987). "The Legal Profession Today". Indiana Law Journal. 62 (2): 151–57.

— (1993). "Seen in a Glass Darkly: The Future of the Federal Courts". Wisconsin Law Review. 1993 (1): 1–12.

— (2004). "Judicial Independence". University of Richmond Law Review. 38 (3): 579–96.