Not the usual solemn proceeding
on Sep 7, 2005 at 7:54 pm
Washington likes to do state funerals in the grand manner: big church, deep solemnity, soaring music, weighty homiletics. Of those, the funeral service of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist on Wednesday had only the church and the music: it was largely a family affair, filled with chuckles and some hearty laughs — capped by granddaughter Natalie Ann Rehnquist Lynch saying: “To us, he was Gramps.”
Even the majestic chorus from Handel’s “Messiah” was sung, not for its richness, depth or historic meaning, but because it was a personal favorite of Bill Rehnquist: for 50 consecutive years, he had made it a point to go to a “Messiah” performance every December.
Rehnquist would have appreciated the delicious irony at the opening of the service. Here it was, the seat of Roman Catholicism in Washington, the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle, a breathtakingly beautiful and holy place, but it was a plain Lutheran service (Rehnquist’s faith preference) and the first hymn was “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” written by Martin Luther, who had started the Reformation by tacking his grievances against popes and priests to the door of the Wittenburg Church.
For a public that may have grown accustomed to the Chief Justice’s reputation as a sometimes gruff courtroom superintendent, the services revealed other sides of Rehnquist: a father who offered “five bucks” to a daughter if she could remember when Queen Elizabeth I died (the daughter did — the year was 1603), who suggested to a daughter that she should look at reflections in a window to see what cards a playing companion was holding, a man who who quizzed his children and grandchildren endlessly about arcane geography, and who sang the National Anthem so lustily that it made a strong impression on President Bush, who delivered one of the “remembrances” (“I can tell you the man loved to sing!”)
One of the saddest moments in an otherwise joyous service had to do with Rehnquist and singing. His Lutheran pastor, the Rev. George W. Evans, Jr., recalled during his sermon that Rehnquist’s “first warning” of the thyroid cancer that would ultimately take his life came while he was singing in church. He told Evans: “I could not achieve a range. I knew something was wrong.”
A number of those who came to the lectern spoke of the Rehnquist who loved competition, and loved to bet. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, for example, recalled: “He enjoyed making wagers about most things: The outcome of football or baseball games, elections, even the amount of snow that would fall in the courtyard at the Court. If you valued your money, you would be careful about betting with the Chief.”
There was a generous sprinkling of reminiscences of the Chief’s sense of humor. Justice O’Connor’s recollection was perhaps the choicest: “As he was being examined in the emergency room of a local hospital in the final week of his life, the examining physician asked who was his primary care doctor. My ‘dentist,’ he struggled to say, with a twinkle in his eye.”
The Chief, a notorious devotee of efficency, would not have appreciated the two-hour length of the service. Nor would he have been pleased with the arrival of the hearse with his coffin, some five minutes late for the service. He might not have been entirely pleased with the too-long recollections of his lawyer son, James Cornell Rehnquist, who conceded that the Chief liked nothing less than being spoken about.
Not a one of the most significant of the Chief’s rulings for the Supreme Court got mentioned. There was a glancing, and somewhat sardonic reference to Rehnquist as a law-and-order Justice by his son James, who said his father had listened with tolerance to “my diatribes about practicing criminal defense under the law as he built it.” And one of his daughters, Nancy Rehnquist Sears, recalled that Rehnquist from time to time would mention at the dinner table a case before the Court, only to have the children warned by Rehnquist’s wife Nan about never sharing those revelations with their friends — an admonition that the young Rehnquists thought was absurd, given the complexity of what their father had discussed.
For a politically savvy Washington crowd of about a thousand, there was a recollection of a teasing comment by the Chief that seemed to be about Bush v. Gore. Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, who had loaned his Cathedral for the services and showed up in his flowing scarlet habit to take part, remembered a luncheon in honor of Rehnquist in January 2001 — “a time,” the Cardinal said, ‘”of some interest regarding the legal system of our nation after the vote in Florida.” As McCarrick walked with the Chief to the podium, “the Chief Justice told me that he was going to speak about the disputed presidential election. I was a bit worried about rehearsing this very sensitive point so soon after the election, when he announced his topic to the assembly and began, ‘It was Hayes versus Tilden and the year was 1876.’ ”
