Washington – As a Supreme Court law clerk to William Rehn quist decades ago, John Roberts learned how not to be chief justice.
Now that President Bush has chosen him for the position, he will, if the Senate confirms him, have the rare chance to put those lessons into practice.
His boss back in 1980-81 was an associate justice, one who often chafed under the leadership style of Chief Justice Warren Burger and who freed, even encouraged, his law clerks to poke fun at what they saw as the chief justice’s pomposity and penchant for self-aggrandizement.
Robert Weisberg, who clerked during the same term for another justice, said Monday that he would never forget walking down a corridor at the court and coming upon Rehnquist and his law clerks, who were all peering through a window into an inner courtyard, where Burger was supervising preparations for a reception.
“It was very funny to see Rehn quist and his clerks just spontaneously cracking up at the sight of the chief justice directing the proper placement of the silver,” Weisberg said.
After Roberts moved on to the White House counsel’s office, memos from that period show that he devoted considerable attention to knocking down various proposals from Burger, including one for a new tribunal to ease the Supreme Court’s workload.
In a 1983 memo to Fred Fielding, the White House counsel, he said a Burger request for authority to name an administrative “chancellor” for the federal courts was “the silliest” of various proposals, and added, in a reference to the Anglophilia for which the chief justice was well known around the court: “The bill does not specify whether the chancellor will wear a powdered wig.”
Rehnquist, upon becoming chief justice in 1986, promptly made changes that clearly reflected his own disapproval of how Burger had run the court. For example, he converted the job of administrative assistant to the chief justice into a two-year appointment rather than a permanent position, to avoid the empire-building that had become evident during the Burger years.
The very different Rehnquist management style, straightforward and unadorned, was much appreciated within the court, as reflected in the statements the associate justices issued after Rehn quist’s death Saturday night. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called him “the fairest, most efficient boss I have ever had.”
As a law clerk, Roberts, who now sits on the federal appeals court in Washington, would not have been in a position to observe the justices’ conference, the twice-weekly closed-door sessions that only the justices themselves attend. But he certainly knew how frustrating Rehn quist found the meandering and confusing way in which the conference proceeded under Burger’s leadership.
Among the papers that Justice Harry Blackmun left to the Library of Congress is a letter Rehnquist sent to Burger that began: “Dear Chief: I had a feeling that at the very close of today’s Conference we may have fitted Matthew Arnold’s closing lines in ‘Dover Beach’ wherein he refers to those ‘Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight / Where ignorant armies clash by night.”‘
Rehnquist then went on to “take the liberty of stating my understanding” of what had taken place. When he became chief justice, he streamlined the conference considerably, and justices rarely came away with any doubt about what had occurred.
Running the conference is only one of a chief justice’s many functions that are not visible to the public. Indeed, the job is somewhat like an iceberg, with much of it below the surface. And it is confusing: There is no one place to look for a definitive description of the job.