Several former Rehnquist clerks and others who knew the Chief well have posted remembrances of him. I was an O’Connor clerk, so I had only limited interaction with the Chief. But I wanted to mention a couple of things that stand out in my memory of him.
The first is Rehnquist’s stern demeanor on the bench. As has been widely noted, he ran a tight ship, cutting off lawyers the instant their allotted time ran out, and making his disapproval of poorly-prepared lawyers painfully clear – after one infamous oral argument in which the Chief was especially harsh (he criticized the lawyer’s "totally inconsistent answers" and said that the performance made him "gravely wonder" how well prepared the lawyer was for the argument), the hapless lawyer reflected that he felt like he’d "dropped out of a tall cow’s ass."
Sadly, I did not attend that particular argument (though it was during my year at the Court), but I did attend one in which Charles Fried, one of President Reagan’s Solicitors General and subsequently a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and a Harvard Law School professor, argued a case about automobile airbag regulations. At one point during the argument, Fried referred to a particular document that, he said, helped his case. The Chief inquired where he might find this document. Fried sheepishly replied that the document could be found only "in the lodging," that is, the separate submission of documents that the other side had filed in the clerk’s office. Fried, in other words, was relying on a document that he had not included in his own brief, and that was available only by digging through a mountain of documents that Fried’s opponent had filed. The Chief, not pleased, told Fried that this state of affairs was "most unsatisfactory." Fried, his face drained of color, replied: "I wish it were otherwise." I’ll bet he did. Rehnquist and Fried are both generally considered to be conservatives and were undoubtedly in tune with each other on the merits of many issues (Fried advocated that Roe v. Wade be overruled when he was Reagan’s Solicitor General), but none of that mattered to Rehnquist when Fried didn’t meet Rehnquist’s standards for appearing before the Court.
My other, seemingly inconsistent, recollection is of what a truly affable guy Rehnquist was off the bench. Traditionally, each Justice’s clerks take each of the other Justices out for lunch once during the year, and our lunch with the Chief was perhaps the most enjoyable of all of them. I suspect that his colleagues’ statements regarding his death are heartfelt – that they really did see him as a friend as well as the "first among equals" on the Court, and that even the ones who usually disagreed with him genuinely liked him.
