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Rehnquist: A Personal Portrait of the Distinguished Chief Justice of the United States

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This personal memoir of Chief Justice Rehnquist reveals a side of the former Chief Justice that could only have been known to his family and his colleagues on the Court. Obermayer's long friendship with "The Chief," from their tennis days until Justice Rehnquist's debilitating illness, provides the platform for an examination of his personality and character that illuminates his judicial career. By the end of this book, I felt that I had not only gotten a personal view of the Chief Justice, but also a better understanding of the mindset that produced his decisions and his stewardship of the Court...

There are many fine studies of the Rehnquist Court that have emerged since his death in 2005. What we don't have is a full-scale comprehensive biography such as that recently published by Melvin Urofsky on Justice Brandeis (reviewed on Amazon). By comprehensive I mean a study both of the subject as a Justice as well as a private individual. Given that only Rehnquist's papers through 1974 have been released by the Hoover Institution at Stanford that houses them, it looks like we will have a long wait for a full-scale biography. In keeping with the Chief's wishes, no further papers will be released that involve Justices he served with until they depart. Given the relative youth of someone like Justice Thomas, it is going to take a while.

What this book provides is an informal look at Rehnquist the individual by a close friend of nearly 20 years. I have been reading Supreme Court biographies since 1966, and I have never seen a book like this. It is as if your best friend, after your demise, sat down and wrote his recollections of your friendship. A lot of the material consists of the mundate elements of our daily lives, but nonetheless portions are quite interesting and add to our understanding of Rehnquist. It is clear that Rehnquist was well able (unlike most prominent officeholders here in Washington) to separate Rehnquist the Chief Justice from Rehnquist the person. I encountered him on several occasions in the informal setting of meetings of the Supreme Court Historical Society and he came across as a nice guy (in Hush Puppies) who also happened to be Chief Justice of the United States--surprisingly friendly and down to earth. This book confirms my impressions. We learn that Rehnquist was frugal, a heavy smoker, punctual to the second, loved movies and watching sports on the tube, was addicted to friendly small wagering, played tennis, enjoyed his Vermont second home, was devoted to his family, and introduced himself to the folks he met as just "I'm Bill Rehnquist."

While not a detailed biography, we do learn a bit about his growing up, his years at Stanford, his law practice and political activities in Phoenix, his appointment to the Court, his four historical books (his "second job", and some of his judicial activities. But the focus is upon Bill Rehnquist of Arlington, Virginia, a generally comfortable suburb of Washington just across the river. The book has some poignant sections, particularly relating to the last year-and-a-half of his life when his cancer forced him to move into the basement of his home since he was too weak to move around. Yet he still dragged himself to the Capitol on a cold January morning to swear in W for his second term. The author is a retired newspaper publisher and editor who writes quite well and makes only a few historical mistakes. What we have here is a good start on one half of a comprehensive biography--Rehnquist the person and his private life. Eventually we will have the full biographical story, Court and private life, but until then, this book affords a limited look at the personal side of this influential Chief Justice.

REHNQUIST: A PERSONAL PORTRAIT OF THE DISTINGUISHED CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE UNITED STATES is a pick for any library strong in biographical sketches of political figures. It provides a personal account of the Supreme Court justice and his strong political positions on various issues, surveying his impact throughout his reign and considering his private life as well - a closely guarded secret. The author's nineteen-year friendship with Rehnquist provides many personal details not available elsewhere and makes this a powerful recommendation for any political science collection.

This is the biography of a friendship. It is charming, honest and informative. Although it is about the man, not the Chief Justice, it will be an essential reference to any future biographer, since it reveals the man the way a more general biography would not.

One is amused by such things as the Chief Justice's taste in low brow movies (nothing too bad, just standard Hollywood junk). When Laurence Tribe was leading the smear campaign against Robert Bork, Democratic operatives broke into Bork's local video store to see what sort of movies he watched. Embarassingly for them, Bork's tastes ran to opera and highbrow cinema, but I wonder what would have happened if they broke into Rehnquist's video store instead?

Mr. Obermeier also points out that the Chief Justice was extraordinarily prescient about the books he wrote. He wrote about impeachment before he had to preside over a rare impeachment trial, about the conflict between liberty and wartime necessity before 9/11. Talk about being ahead of the curve!

The book generally stays out of politics, so much so that a good deal of the book could apply to a Justice on the left, but occasionally, the author mentions one of the major events the Chief Justice was professionally involved in and here the author excels. Interestingly, the Chief Justice believed, for instance, that there were times when it was right to impeach and also right to acquit after impeachment.

This is quite true. Mr. Obermeier doesn't discuss this, but although there was a delicious irony in the fact that President Clinton himself signed the law which gave courts the power to investigate all aspects of a person's sexlife, the impeachment was really as much about Monica Lewinsky as Al Capone's trial was about tax evasion. The real target was President Clinton's sale of military secrets to China for personal gain. Thereafter, the President was a blackmail victim of the PRC. One of the reasons why our relations with India were so strained by 2000 is that the Chinese government made Clinton side with them on everything from trade to nuclear testing. This couldn't very well be the stated subject of the impeachment, but the impeachment had the same effect. After 1999, China could no longer make President Clinton their puppet.

But this gets us well beyond the scope of the book, which tries, very successfully, to capture the essence of an important government official. In the process, it reveals the character of the author himself, who reveals himself to be kind but honest, brilliant but modest, an ideal friend. It says a lot about Chief Justice Rehnquist that he could attract a friend like Mr. Obermeier.