Earlier this month, thanks to dogged efforts by the Associated Press, other news organizations and scholars, the FBI finally released more than 1,500 pages of documents on the late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
The documents cover a 15-year chapter of Rehnquist’s life in which he spent about two-thirds of the time becoming increasingly addicted to a powerful sedative-hypnotic prescription drug. Throughout that period — but for a harrowing month’s hospitalization to withdraw from the drug — Rehnquist heard and ruled on cases before our nation’s highest court.
The revelations contained in the FBI files are at once affirming and deeply disturbing.
The affirmation is of the Freedom of Information Act, the key that unlocked the Rehnquist files. Although the current presidential administration has worked hard to limit access to public documents and to narrow the scope of the FOIA, this priceless American fact-finding apparatus is still operable.
The deeply disturbing aspect of the Rehnquist files lies in several areas.
Not the least of these appears to be secret misuse of FBI agents for political purposes. The misuse involved two presidents who, as the Associated Press put it, “went to some lengths to discredit Rehnquist opponents.” Richard Nixon in 1971, then Ronald Reagan in 1986 directed the FBI to dig into the backgrounds of witnesses who were to testify against Rehnquist in senate confirmation hearings — first for Rehnquist’s appointment to the court, later for his elevation to chief justice.
The recently released documents also show that in 1971 the FBI knew Rehnquist owned a house in Arizona with a deed prohibiting him from selling to a person of color. That racist (and illegal) covenant did not surface publicly until Rehnquist went before the senate 15 years later as Reagan’s choice for chief justice. Rehnquist insisted in those ’86 hearings that the covenant was news to him and that he’d learned of it only a few days before.
Then there is the decade-long tango Rehnquist danced with a drug called Placidyl.
In 1982, the Washington Post broke the story of the justice’s December 1981 hospitalization for withdrawal from the drug. But the story had little shelf life outside the Beltway. When it reappeared during the 1986 senate hearings — with more details leaked to the news media — it was discounted and batted aside by Rehnquist’s supporters.
The drug problem was history, they said, a doctor had prescribed the medication, it wasn’t Rehnquist’s fault. He had only been, as Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah declared, “a very compliant patient.”
Rehnquist sailed into the chief justice’s chair.
When Rehnquist died in 2005, Slate’s Jack Shafer wrote that reaction to the chief justice’s addiction illustrated “the ugly double standards that excuse extreme drug use by the powerful, especially if their connection is a prescribing doctor, and condemn to draconian prison terms the guy who purchases his drugs on the street.”
Shafer scoffed at the idea that “one of the most brilliant jurists of his time was the victim of his rotten doctors for almost a decade!” Noting that Rehnquist often took three months’ worth of Placidyl in one month, Shafer wondered why the justice had never “in any way tried to educate himself about the drug he was taking in larger and larger quantities?”
The FBI documents released this month place Shafer’s criticism in even higher relief. Along with Placidyl — which the prescribing doctor told the FBI another doctor initially ordered for Rehnquist in 1970 — the justice took the potentially addictive Darvon and Tylenol 3 to combat back pain.
By the time Rehnquist checked himself into George Washington University Hospital in late-1981, his family, fellow justices and many reporters covering the court were aware of his slurred speech and sometimes erratic thought processes. As he went through withdrawal, the documents reveal, the justice tried to escape in his pajamas, heard voices and was convinced the CIA was plotting against him.
Slate’s Shafer wrote in 2005, “This was a watershed event in Rehnquist’s life. Did the experience — being dazed on drugs, humiliated in the press, getting off Placidyl — contribute to his jurisprudence? How could it not have?”
As we ponder the implications of that, it is even more chilling to consider another discovery in the newly released FBI documents: 207 pages are still unavailable to the public because they’ve been withheld under federal disclosure law. Worse, there were seven FBI files on Rehnquist; one of them is nowhere to be found.
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