The Partisan The Life of William Rehnquist

The most influential justice in recent history gains that accolade not from his individual opinions, many of which were minority ones, but because his entire judicial effort succeeded in moving the Supreme Court to the right. The current court is unimaginable without the helmsmanship of William Hubbs Rehnquist. Rehnquist came of age as a lawyer in the Nixon White House, where Henry Kissinger and H.R. Haldeman considered his candidacy for the Court like this: Kissinger: "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. He was. Rehnquist was a lifelong conservative with a well concealed iconoclastic streak, which is how he came to be arrested for camping out on courtroom lawns, long before the idea of Occupy protesting was commonplace. As a 28-year-old clerk to Robert Jackson, Rehnquist wrote a memo to Justice Jackson in 1952 as the justices were considering Brown Vs Board of Education declaring that separate but equal schools for whites and blacks, still legal then, are "right and should be affirmed." He never wavered in his conservatism, and in particularly in his enmity for Ted Kennedy. When the Roe v Wade decision was handed down in early 1973, Rehnquist was one of two dissenters, with Justice Byron R. White. But Rehnquist made steady inroads against Roe, eventually gaining, in 1989 and thereafter, decisions of the Court that make abortions more difficult to get. Rehnquist survived a bruising confirmation battle as chief justice, with 33 senators voting against him - a record for a chief justice. He presided over two epic public showpieces -- the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton and the resolution of Gore v Bushwhich settled the 2000 Presidential Election. Extraordinarily there has never been until now a book to consider fully the life and times of Justice Rehnquist, who was famously closed off to the media. In his life he gave one interview, to a young journalist on the New York Times Sunday Magazine: John A. Jenkins.

John A. Jenkins is president and publisher of CQ Press. His work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, GQ, the Washington Monthly, and the American Lawyer. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association's Gavel Award Certificate of Merit, the highest award in legal journalism.