214. Justice a Ga-Ga

Everyone should read the important piece over at Law.com detailing the contents of the late Chief Justice's FBI file.  It shows, first of all, that Rehnquist - by all accounts a charming, gregarious man off the bench, and certainly an intelligent one, possessed of a fine line in steamrolling reductionist prose - was addicted to powerful painkillers for most of his first decade on the Supreme Court bench.  (He had a very bad back - I've been told he had to stand up and walk around every 15 minutes or so even during ceremonial dinners.)

How addicted was our justice? 

The FBI's 1986 report on Rehnquist's drug dependence was not released at the time of his confirmation, though some Democratic senators wanted it made public. But it is in Rehnquist's now-public file, and it contains new details about his behavior during his weeklong hospital stay in December 1981. One physician whose name is blocked out told the FBI that Rehnquist expressed "bizarre ideas and outrageous thoughts. He imagined, for example, that there was a CIA plot against him."

The doctor said Rehnquist "had also gone to the lobby in his pajamas in order to try to escape." The doctor said Rehnquist's delirium was consistent with him suddenly stopping his apparent daily dose of 1400 milligrams of the drug -- nearly three times higher than the 500-milligram maximum recommended by physicians. The doctor said, "Any physician who prescribed it was practicing very bad medicine, bordering on malpractice."

The image of Rehnquist in a hospital gown, the back flapping open, rushing through the lobby ...  Some things don't bear thinking about.

On the other hand, it wouldn't have been delusional for Rehnquist to think the FBI was investigating him - it was -  so perhaps he was suffering from alphabet confusion rather than outright delusions.  The other revelation of the file is the FBI's role as Republican-administration heavies, trying to intimidate anybody preparing to testify against Rehnquist's nomination. 

There's something almost unbearably ironic about "liberal" jurists of the 1950s and 1960s telling us that all they wanted was to encourage more police forces to behave like the FBI.  Earl Warren said so: "The practice of the FBI can readily be emulated by state and local enforcement agencies."  Judge Jerome Frank said so, too, writing admiringly about "our most effective American police force, the FBI".  [222 F.2d at 704]  

Such remarks are, to my mind, even more indecently revealing than the hospital gown that Rehnquist may or may not have been wearing during his escape attempt: Warren and Frank confessed, in so many words, that they based their constitutional rulings on fraudulent FBI flackery.

David N. Atkinson's Leaving the Bench: Supreme Court Justices at the End is the only truly indispensable book about the Supreme Court.  It covers more ground that the title implies, containing biographies as well as necrologies.  But it does indeed detail the degrading endgame of more than one justice's life on the bench, including such details as William O. Douglas's secretary "follow[ing] his wheelchair, spraying Lysol unsuccessfully to mask the odor."

Our nation has had many incapacitated justices throughout its history, notably Grier, Clifford and poor Ward Hunt, who lost all ability to function years before he qualified for a pension.  (He finally resigned when Congress passed a special bill to provide for him.)  (Those names were once as familiar to Americans as Ginsburg, Kennedy and Souter are to us today.) 

Salmon Chase had a stroke while serving as Chief Justice, and I've wondered if Justice Scalia's increasingly erratic behavior might not be attributable to a not-so-transient ischemic attack.  All that fatty duck meat isn't good for a chubby elderly man's arteries, you know.

The justices keep many secrets, but this one is dangerous: our government regularly falls into the control of people who can't control their own bodies and minds, and we only find out about it years later. 

Comments

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