Who the hell is that clown?” President Richard M. Nixon asked White House counsel John Dean after meeting William Rehnquist for the first time. It was July 1971-a low point in the history of men’s fashion-but assistant attorney general Rehnquist’s attire was appalling even by the standards of the day: loud pink shirt, Hush Puppies, and a garish psychedelic tie. “Is he Jewish?” Nixon mused. “He looks it. That’s a hell of a costume he’s wearing, just like a clown.” Six months later, Nixon would nominate “that clown” for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Rehnquist would remain there, his fashion sense scarcely improving, for the next thirty-three years. A right-wing revolutionary in Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired robes, he brought theatrical flair to the cause of strict constructionism.
William Hubbs Rehnquist grew up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, where his father sold paper wholesale and his mother worked as a translator for local export businesses. The product of a rock-ribbed Republican family, the young Rehnquist set his sights on a career in government. When his elementary school teacher asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, he replied, “I’m going to change the world.” Before he could do that, though, he had to find his path. He dropped out of college after one quarter because he didn’t find it intellectually challenging enough, then spent three years working during World War II as a weather observer for the Army Air Corps in Egypt and Morocco. Apparently the climate suited him. “I wanted to find someplace like North Africa to go to school,” he recalled. That place turned out to be Stanford, where he enrolled on the GI Bill. (The absence of marauding panzer divisions might have been part of the draw as well.)
After graduating at the top of his class from Stanford Law School in 1952 (and briefly dating Sandra Day O’Connor), Rehnquist clerked at the Supreme Court for Justice Robert Jackson. Always seeking sunnier climes, he relocated to Phoenix in 1953, joined a local law firm, and struck up a sideline as a right-wing gadfly. In 1957, he wrote an article for U.S. News & World Report decrying the influence of liberal Supreme Court clerks on the Warren Court, with their “extreme solicitude for the claims of Communists” and other undesirables. During the 1964 presidential campaign, he wrote speeches for Republican candidate (and fellow Arizonan) Barry Goldwater. That same year, he spoke out in opposition to the Phoenix city council’s proposed public accommodations law, arguing that it would interfere with “the historic right of the owner of a drug store, lunch counter, or theater to choose his own customers”- that is, to refuse to serve black people.
All this agitprop endeared Rehnquist to influential conservatives in the Republican Party. When the GOP returned to power under Richard Nixon in 1969, Rehnquist was rewarded with the plum job of assistant attorney and head of the Office of Legal Counsel. In this job, he was constantly in the president’s ear and managed to win Nixon’s confidence, despite his muttonchop sideburns and ghastly taste in ties. In 1971, when Nixon was casting about for a Supreme Court appointee to replace the departing John Marshall Harlan, he tapped Rehnquist. It was a surprising, and somewhat controversial, choice.
Democrats groused about his dismal record on civil rights. Nevertheless, after a spirited debate in the Senate, Rehnquist was confirmed by a vote of 68-26. Arriving at the Court, Rehnquist admitted feeling “like I’d entered a monastery.” It took him a year or two to get his sea legs, and even then he often found himself swimming against the ideological tide. Newsweek dubbed him “The Court’s Mr. Right”; the New York Times called him “the Court’s most predictable conservative member.” But those designations meant little if he was unable to persuade the Court’s liberal majority to vote with him. During his early years, he dissented so many times, and so often by himself, that his clerks gave him a Lone Ranger doll as a gift. By the end of the decade, however, the tide had turned. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 ushered in a golden age of American conservatism, and Rehnquist was ideally situated to lead its judicial auxiliary. In 1986, Reagan nominated him as chief justice, to replace the retiring Warren Burger. Once again, the confirmation hearings were bruising, with Democratic senators raising the issues of Rehnquist’s erstwhile opposition to school desegregation and allegations that he had harassed black voters while working as a Republican Party official in Phoenix. Rehnquist’s nomination prevailed by a less than overwhelming 65-33 vote.
As chief justice, Rehnquist managed to earn the respect of his colleagues, no matter what their political persuasion. He toed a strict conservative line in his votes, but he allowed every justice to have a say, and he ran the Court’s conferences smoothly and efficiently. Substantively and stylistically, he was seen as a breath of fresh air when compared with is dour, pompous predecessor. Having long since toned down his hideous ’70s wardrobe, Rehnquist allowed his natural eccentricities to come to the fore. He displayed an impish sense of humor and a fondness for trivia, often starting his morning meeting by asking clerks to name the five largest U.S. states in order of surface area. While sitting on the bench, he and Justice Harry Blackmun would pass Trivial Pursuit questions back and forth on notepaper. A devotee of musical theater, Rehnquist loved to lead the Court in sing-a-longs, using a conductor’s baton given to him by one of his clerks. Occasionally, his flair for frivolity got him in trouble. He famously warbled a few choruses of “Dixie,” the Confederate marching song, at a federal judicial conference, angering the African American judges in the audience. And his hostility to homosexuality was deep rooted. He repeatedly compared gays to measles patients and suggested they should be quarantined. For all his eccentricities, Rehnquist is widely regarded as an effective chief justice. Even if he failed in remaking the Court along conservative lines, as he’d intended, at least he returned some of the popular cachet that had been lacking in the grim Burger years. What would the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton have been like, for instance, without the sight of Rehnquist morbidly presiding over the festivities in a bespoke robe inspired by a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta? When Rehnquist died in September 2005, after a long battle with thyroid cancer, eight of his former law clerks-including his eventual successor, John Roberts-served as pallbearers, a testament to the high regard in which he was held by the extended Court family.
Get Me Bill Rensler!
President Nixon eventually came to understand that Rehnquist was not Jewish, as he’d originally suspected, but he never quite mastered his assistant attorney general’s name. Nearly a month after being introduced, Nixon was still calling Rehnquist “Renchburg.” Several months later-and less than three weeks before nominating him for the Supreme Court-he referred to him as “Bill Rensler” several times during a telephone conversation with Senator Barry Goldwater. (To his credit, Nixon did mention that “Rensler” was “an excellent man.”)
Perhaps someone in the White House could have provided President Nixon with a mnemonic. Rehnquist is the grandson of Swedish immigrants. In Swedish, his surname translates as “reindeer twig.”
A Dip In the Pool
Not since Felix Frankfurter had such a world-class gambler sat on the Supreme Court. Rehnquist had a special fondness for betting pools. Every year without fail he ran the Court pools on NFL football, the NCAA basketball tournament, and the Kentucky Derby, and every four years he arranged a pool on the U.S. presidential election. During President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1998, he even ducked away from the proceedings periodically to take part in an impromptu poker game with his law clerks in the Senate cloakroom.
Pill Popper
On the list of qualities one might want to see in a Supreme Court justice, “addicted to sedatives” and “prone to hallucinations” would probably fall somewhere near the bottom of the list. Yet, for the better part of a decade, Rehnquist gulped down enormous quantities of a powerful drug that reportedly made him see and hear things that weren’t there. Only the intervention of some conscientious doctors saved America from having its highest court presided over by a stark raving loon.
The trouble started in 1971, when Rehnquist went to see Congressional physician Dr. Freeman H. Cary about his chronic back pain. Cary prescribed Placidyl, a potent sedative-hypnotic developed to help people suffering from insomnia. The drug worked-all too well. By 1977, according to a 1986 medical report, Rehnquist was addicted to the stuff, and he remained so for the next four years. He was known to consume three month’s worth of Placidyl in one month’s time, then return to Cary to refill his prescription. He was also, by his own admission, popping four Valiums a day.
By the end of 1981, the then associate justice was showing some serious side effects. He slurred his way through speeches, stumbled over hard-to-pronounce words, and routinely lost his train of thought. That December, he checked himself into George Washington University Hospital, ostensibly for back pain but ultimately for a little forced detoxification. According to the hospital’s official records, Rehnquist was pretty much bouncing off the walls the whole time. A nurse noted that Rehnquist told her he could hear “voices outside the room . . . saying they’re going to kill the president.” At one point, a doctor told investigators, the justice went “to the lobby in his pajamas in order to try to escape.” On another occasion he bolted from his room in horror, screaming, “There is gas coming out of the radiator!” Hospital security nabbed him before he could get on the elevator and escorted him back to his bed. In the end, doctors determined that Rehnquist’s withdrawal symptoms were so severe that they started giving him the drug again. They then slowly weaned him until he stopped taking it entirely by early February 1982.
Let There Be Lite
Once Rehnquist conquered his Placidyl habit, he returned to less mind-altering vices-and practiced them in moderation. He smoked precisely two cigarettes a day-one in the morning while opening his mail and one in the afternoon with his lunch. A man of fixed routines, he invariably ordered the same thing every day: a cheeseburger and a light beer, which he referred to (incorrectly) as a “Miller’s Lite.”
At Least He Didn’t Dress Like Buttercup
As if President Bill Clinton’s 1998 impeachment trial weren’t surreal enough, Rehnquist had to add his own antic touch. Inspired by a costume he saw worn by the Lord Chancellor in a local Washington D.C. performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, he decided to outfit himself for his role as presiding judge by donning a black robe with four gold stripes on each sleeve. “We thought it was a joke,” said Justice Sandra Day O’Connor after Rehnquist first showed up wearing the comic opera get-up. But Rehnquist was all too serious. A huge Gilbert & Sullivan fan, he drew inspiration from the whimsical composers throughout the impeachment experience. Three years later, in an interview for PBS, he even quoted from Iolanthe when assessing his own part in the spectacle: “I did nothing in particular, and I did it very well.”
Throw the Book at Him!
Rehnquist was the perfect person to preside over Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial-and not just because he knew how to dress for the occasion. As the author of the 1992 tome Grand Inquests: The Historic Impeachments of Justice Samuel Chase and President Andrew Johnson, he was one of the world’s foremost experts on the subject.
No Friend of Bill
Rehnquist’s problems with Bill Clinton began long before the impeachment trial. At Clinton’s second inaugural, the chief justice stunned the reelected president by concluding the swearing-in ceremony with the cryptic warning, “Good luck. You’re gonna need it.” When rumors circulated that Clinton was thinking of naming his wife Hillary to be attorney general, Rehnquist could barely contain his glee. “They say Caligula appointed his horse consul of Rome,” he joked.
Pulling Rank
Like his predecessor, Warren Burger, Rehnquist was a bit of a stickler for ceremony. He often snapped at lawyers who addressed him as “Justice Rehnquist.” “That’s Chief Justice!” he bellowed.
He Got Game
Warren Burger may have liked to treat his clerks to gourmet lunches and glasses of fine Bordeaux, but Rehnquist had decidedly more plebeian tastes. Basketball was his game, and he was known for challenging his clerks to fiercely contested pick-up games in the Supreme Court building’s top-floor gymnasium, known informally as “the highest court in the land.” He was also responsible for the acquisition of an official Court ping-pong table. However, some of Rehnquist’s other proposed democratic innovations, like opening up the justice’s dining area to clerks, were overruled by his colleagues.
Too Much Information
Rehnquist once admitted to a clerk that he had been “pretty lousy about flossing my teeth,” having made his dentist a wealthy man as a consequence.
Party On!
An unrepentant party animal, Rehnquist savored every opportunity to get together with fellow justices for a little tippling and light entertainment. The Court’s annual Christmas party was an especially raucous affair, during which Rehnquist invariably indulged his love of musical comedy. In 1975, he and one of his clerks composed an entire light opera from parody Christmas carols. The standout number, sung to the tune of “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” mocked the Court’s liberal majority for its continued support of the rights of criminal suspects as set forth in Miranda v. Arizona: “Liberals from the realm of theory should adorn our highest bench / Though to crooks they’re always chary / at police misdeeds they blench.” The chorus then dropped to its knees and sang “Save Miranda, save Miranda, save it from the Nixon Four”-the four justices, including Rehnquist, appointed by former President Richard Nixon. Some years later, at another Rehnquist-hosted affair, the chief justice mesmerized guests by acting out the film All Quiet on the Western Front during a spirited game of charades. His histrionics included crawling under the coffee table, pantomiming rifle fire with his fingers, and mouthing the sound of gunshots.
