As a young lawyer practicing in Arizona, far from the political center of the country, William Hubbs Rehnquist’s iconoclasm made him a darling of Goldwater Republicans. He was brash and articulate. Although he was unquestionably ambitious and extraordinarily self-confident, his journey to Washington required a mixture of good-old-boy connections and rank good fortune. An outsider and often lone dissenter on his arrival, Rehnquist outlasted the liberal vestiges of the Warren Court and the collegiate conservatism of the Burger Court, until in 1986 he became the most overtly political conservative to sit as chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Over that time Rehnquist’s thinking pointedly did not––indeed, could not––evolve. Dogma trumped leadership. So, despite his intellectual gifts, Rehnquist left no body of law or opinions that define his tenure as chief justice or even seem likely to endure. Instead, Rehnquist bestowed a different legacy: he made it respectable to be an expedient conservative on the Court.

The Supreme Court now is as deeply divided politically as the executive and legislative branches of our government, and for this Rehnquist must receive the credit or the blame. His successor as chief justice, John Roberts, is his natural heir. Under Roberts, who clerked for Rehnquist, the Court remains unrecognizable as an agent of social balance. Gone are the majorities that expanded the Bill of Rights.

The Rehnquist Court, which lasted almost twenty years, was molded in his image. In thirty-three years on the Supreme Court, from 1972 until his death in 2005 at age 80, Rehnquist was at the center of the Court’s dramatic political transformation. He was a partisan, waging a quiet, constant battle to imbue the Court with a deep conservatism favoring government power over individual rights.

The story of how and why Rehnquist rose to power is as compelling as it is improbable. Rehnquist left behind no memoir, and there has never been a substantial biography of him: Rehnquist was an uncooperative subject, and during his lifetime he made an effort to ensure that journalists would have scant material to work with. John A. Jenkins has produced the first full biography of Rehnquist, exploring the roots of his political and judicial convictions and showing how a brilliantly instinctive jurist, who began his career on the Court believing he would only ever be an isolated voice of right-wing objection, created the ethos of the modern Supreme Court.

About 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.

Editorial Review

Famously distrustful of the press, William Rehnquist (1924–2005) divulged little about himself during his three decades on the nation’s highest court. CQ Press president and publisher Jenkins (Ladies’ Man: The Life and Trials of Marvin Mitchelson, 1992, etc.) uncovers some nuggets about the private man, some amusing—he loved making small wagers on almost any proposition; he drafted a novel repeatedly rejected by publishers—some startling—during the early 1980s “he was desperately, abusively addicted to prescription pain killers.” The author credits Rehnquist with high intelligence and good humor and persuasively argues that his temperament most closely resembled his ideological counterpart, the iconoclastic William O. Douglas. He uncovers the origins of Rehnquist’s conservatism and explores his law school career, his clerkship under Robert Jackson, his rise in the Goldwater and his tenure in the Mitchell Justice Department under Nixon. But when he turns to Rehnquist’s jurisprudence, Jenkins unrelentingly scorns the man he blames for the court’s current politicization. He flays Rehnquist as an unprincipled conservative who looked first to the desired result and only then to the reasoning, who valued efficiency over justice, who ignored precedent, who favored broad governmental power over civil rights, who lacked any “consistent constitutional theory” save for his own consistently “reactionary ideology.” Many of our laws later conformed to the famously lone dissents of Rehnquist’s early career, but Jenkins attributes this not to the chief’s leadership, but rather to the court’s changing composition. As with many court commentators, Jenkins equates “maturation” or “growth” with change, almost always a change from right to left. That Rehnquist “could not evolve,” the author takes as a huge black mark against the man who “made it respectable to be an expedient conservative on the Court.” – Kirkus Reviews

‘The Partisan’ an opinionated biography of William Rehnquist

The Los Angeles Times Book Review – October 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was a curious man. He could be courtly and gracious, elegant in argument and a brilliant advocate. He also was a ferocious adversary, a relentless conservative and, as John A. Jenkins makes clear in his new biography, a determined partisan.

One sample of his paradox: Rehnquist was a respected leader of the court, appreciated even by those whose politics he abhorred, and yet he secured his position in part by perjuring himself at his confirmation hearing.

From before he came to the court, Rehnquist was a provocative, pugilistic conservative. As a young man, he relished challenging seemingly settled ideas: He defended a hanging judge and the vigilance committees that substituted for conventional police in Gold Rush San Francisco. He followed the misguided scholarship of his Stanford mentor, Charles Fairman, who postulated that the 14th Amendment, which promises all Americans the equal protection of the law, meant something other than what it said. [Read the full article...]

The Justice Dissents - ‘The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist,’ by John A. Jenkins

The New York Times Book Review – November 16, 2012 (Excerpt)

When Jimmy Lee Gray was sent to the Mississippi gas chamber in 1983 the procedure went horribly wrong. He gasped for breath and convulsed wildly, slamming his head against a metal pole hard enough to shake the room. The episode caused widespread revulsion, and Mississippi eventually switched from gas to lethal injection.

Weeks after the botched execution, Justice William Rehnquist lamented the Gray case in a speech at the University of Arkansas. Rehnquist was not troubled by the gruesomeness. He was disturbed by the number of times the condemned man had been allowed to challenge his sentence in federal and state court.

This focus on speeding the machinery of death, and unconcern about how it functioned, was fully in character. Rehnquist — who served on the Supreme Court 33 years, 19 as chief justice — was a man on an ideological mission. Richard Nixon had handpicked him to do battle against the framework of rights that liberal judges had created in the 1960s. In a phone call congratulating him on being confirmed by a skeptical Senate, Nixon had offered a grim benediction: “Just be as mean and rough as they said you were.” [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist’ by John A. Jenkins

The Washington Post Book Review – December 7, 2012 (Excerpt)

“I’m going to change the government,” vowed William H. Rehnquist. He made this promise not to President Richard Nixon, who appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1971, nor to President Ronald Reagan, who elevated him to the chief justiceship in 1986, but to his elementary school class in Shorewood, Wis., back in the 1930s. Rehnquist’s ambitions were already set — as were his ideology and sense of certitude. Young Bill harbored a deep hostility to governmental power and was determined to do something about it.

Which he did, manifestly, during his 33 years on the Supreme Court. It is possible to draw a continuous line between the unyielding boy — a Roosevelt-hater in knee pants — and the unyielding justice, a man whom Nixon, approvingly, called a “reactionary bastard.” In “The Partisan,” John A. Jenkins, a legal journalist and the publisher emeritus of CQ Press, traces that life’s journey and concludes that Rehnquist never traveled far from where he began — that he was “flash frozen” early on. [Read the full article...]

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