William Rehnquist

Rehnquist grew up in Milwaukee, the son of a paper salesman and a civic-minded mother, both grandchildren of Swedish immigrants on his father's side. He left Kenyon College after a semester to join the Army Air Forces in 1943, served three years, then used the GI Bill for two degrees at Stanford, a master's at Harvard, and finally Stanford Law, where he graduated first in his class in 1952. That record won him a clerkship with Justice Robert Jackson in 1953. While clerking, he wrote a memorandum defending Plessy v. Ferguson and separate-but-equal, arguing the Court should not overturn it in what became Brown v. Board of Education. He told the Senate decades later the words reflected Jackson's views, not his own — Jackson's own secretary said otherwise.

He practiced law in Phoenix for 16 years, advised Goldwater's 1964 campaign, and was accused by witnesses of challenging Black and Hispanic voters at the polls, a charge he denied under oath. Nixon brought him to Washington in 1969 to run the Office of Legal Counsel, where he built the case that pushed Justice Abe Fortas to resign. Nixon then nominated him to the Court, and the Senate confirmed him 68 to 26 in 1971 over renewed objections to Plessy. He spent 33 years narrowing federal power against the states, writing the majority opinions in Lopez and Morrison, and joined the majority that stopped Florida's recount in Bush v. Gore. Reagan made him chief justice in 1986, and in 1999 he presided over Clinton's impeachment trial, summarizing his role: "I did nothing in particular, and I did it very well."

For nine years, starting in 1972, a Capitol physician kept Rehnquist supplied with Placidyl, a sedative, for insomnia, and by 1981 he was taking triple the recommended dose. He checked into George Washington University Hospital that December to detox and, according to FBI files released only after his death, hallucinated and tried to walk out in his pajamas, at one point believing there was a plot against him from his hospital bed. None of it surfaced publicly at the time. He returned to the bench and, five years later, was elevated to chief justice with his history intact and his addiction still unknown to the senators who confirmed him — a justice who spent his career interpreting due process, medicated for a decade in a way nobody outside a small circle was allowed to examine.

Rehnquist administered Bush's second inaugural oath in January 2005 leaning on a cane, with a tracheotomy tube in his throat from the thyroid cancer diagnosed three months earlier. He died at his Arlington, Virginia home on September 3, 2005, the first chief justice to die in office since 1953, and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery beside his wife Nan, who had died of ovarian cancer in 1991. John Roberts, his former clerk, succeeded him and called him a patriot "utterly without pretense." The scholarly verdict has stayed split — praised by some for administrative discipline, criticized by others for a record on race that grew notably more sympathetic to discrimination claims once the plaintiffs were white.

William Rehnquist's life against the full span of the corpus.

• National League of Cities v. Usery case
  Majority opinion limiting federal power over state employment 1977
• The Supreme Court book
  His own account of how the Court works 1987
• Grand Inquests book
  On the impeachment trials of Samuel Chase and Andrew Johnson 1992
• United States v. Lopez case
  Struck down a federal gun law as exceeding the Commerce Clause 1995
• Bush v. Gore case
  Joined the majority halting the Florida recount 2000
• Centennial Crisis book
  On the disputed election of 1876 2004

• October 1, 1924 aged 0 Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• 1943 aged ~19 Leaves Kenyon College to join the Army Air Forces
• 1952 aged ~28 Graduates first in his class at Stanford Law and clerks for Justice Jackson
• 1969 aged ~45 Nixon appoints him Assistant Attorney General over the Office of Legal Counsel
• December 10, 1971 aged 47 The Senate confirms him as Associate Justice, 68 to 26
• December 1981 aged 57 Detoxes from a decade-long Placidyl dependency at GW Hospital
• September 17, 1986 aged 61 The Senate confirms him as Chief Justice, 65 to 33
• 1999 aged ~75 Presides over the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton
• September 3, 2005 aged 80 Dies at home in Arlington, Virginia

• Robert H. Jackson 1892–1954
  Justice, attorney general, and chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg who influenced constitutional law and international criminal justice. clerked for
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. appointed him to the Court
• Antonin Scalia 1936–2016
  Justice whose advocacy of originalism and textualism transformed American legal interpretation. closest ideological ally on the bench
• John Roberts b. 1955
  Chief justice during major decisions on health care, elections, executive power, abortion, and administrative law. former clerk, successor as chief justice
• Barry Goldwater 1909–1998
  Senator and presidential nominee whose 1964 campaign helped create the modern conservative movement. advised his 1964 campaign