Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 80, Dies

After the war, he attended Stanford University and Stanford Law School, where he graduated first in his class in 1952. For 18 months after that, he served as a law clerk to Justice Robert H. Jackson on the Supreme Court.

Rehnquist met his future wife, Natalie "Nan" Cornell, at Stanford. They married in 1953; she worked at the CIA while he clerked for Jackson. Her death from ovarian cancer in 1991 was a devastating blow to Rehnquist.

As a young man, Rehnquist seemed to relish waging his own war of ideas against liberalism. Working for Jackson, he fired off tart memos to his boss including such remarks as, "I take a dim view of this pathological search for discrimination" against African Americans. He suggested that "drawing and quartering" would be a more appropriate punishment than the electric chair for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of atomic espionage for the Soviet Union.

As the court weighed Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark case that banned segregation in the public schools, Rehnquist wrote a memo defending Plessy v. Ferguson , the 1896 ruling that had established the now-discredited doctrine of "separate but equal." That decision, Rehnquist wrote, "was right and should be reaffirmed."

When challenged over the memo during his 1971 confirmation hearings, Rehnquist said it was intended to reflect Jackson's views, not his, and that he "unequivocally" supported Brown . Historians have taken a skeptical view of that explanation.

In Arizona, Rehnquist became active in the Republican Party. He served as general counsel of the state Republican committee and wrote speeches for Goldwater in his losing 1964presidential campaign.

Also in 1964, Rehnquist was one of three people to testify against a proposed ordinance to ban discrimination in public accommodations in Phoenix. When it passed, he wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper saying that "it is, I believe, impossible to justify the sacrifice of even a portion of our historic individual liberty for a purpose such as this."

He also repudiated that view during his 1971 confirmation.

By the time Republican Richard M. Nixon was elected president, in 1968, Rehnquist had made a good impression on a fellow Arizonan, Richard Kleindienst, who was heading east to join the Justice Department. Kleindienst helped Rehnquist land a job as assistant attorney general for legal counsel, a position in which Rehnquist advised the administration on constitutional law. He wrote a memorandum proposing a commission to draft constitutional amendments overturning the Warren Court's rulings on criminal law.

In 1969, as antiwar demonstrations raged in the streets, Rehnquist warned a Kiwanis Club in Newark of "the danger posed by the new barbarians," adding that "if force or the threat of force is required in order to enforce the law, we must not shirk from its employment."

He was serving at the Justice Department in October 1971, when Nixon selected him to fill a vacancy left by the retirement of Justice John Marshall Harlan. Rehnquist, then 47, was reportedly stunned by the choice, which was indeed somewhat serendipitous: Nixon had turned to himafter his judge-picking team, of which Rehnquist was a member, failed to produce a satisfactory alternative.

But Nixon was looking for a cerebral conservative, and Rehnquist did not disappoint.