Rehnquist's delusions

I'm sure he wasn't the first chief justice to be addicted to pain killers, hear voices, and think there was a plot against him.

Doctors interviewed by the FBI told agents that when the associate justice stopped taking the drug, he suffered paranoid delusions. One doctor said Rehnquist thought he heard voices outside his hospital room plotting against him and had "bizarre ideas and outrageous thoughts," including imagining "a CIA plot against him" and "seeming to see the design patterns on the hospital curtains change configuration."

At one point, a doctor told the investigators, Rehnquist went "to the lobby in his pajamas in order to try to escape." Ultimately, the doctors concluded that the withdrawal symptoms were so severe that they began giving Rehnquist the drug again and slowly lowered the dosage until he quit taking it entirely Feb. 7, 1982.

But it sure does seem like Republicans have had a consistent history of using the FBI to hide such tales and intimidate any witnesses who might tell them. A history that didn't stop when that marriage made in Hell -- Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover -- ended.

By 1986, the files show, all the doctors interviewed by the FBI said the former drug dependence should not affect Rehnquist's future work on the court, and it did not become an issue in his confirmation as chief justice.

Alexander Charns, a lawyer in Durham, N.C., who was among the scholars and journalists who received the documents this week, said that in his view, they contain evidence of "the ongoing use of the FBI for political purposes, not only in the sixties and seventies but well into the 1980s."

Because the FBI withheld some documents on national security grounds and because many of the pages it released are heavily edited, "no one can be entirely certain what happened and why" when the FBI conducted its background investigations, Charns said.

But in the files that have come to light, he said, there is a clear partisan tilt. "You don't have Democrats calling up the FBI saying, 'We need to know what the Republican witnesses are going to say about Rehnquist' the way you have Republicans calling up saying, 'We need to know what the Democratic witnesses are going to say,' " Charns said.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson declined to comment on any documents released by the bureau. "We don't expand beyond what has been released, because that's all the information that's been released pursuant to the law," he said.

However, Bresson denied that the FBI's background investigations for judicial nominees are partisan in any way.

"We are not political; we are apolitical. We're just trying to find the facts," he said. "It's a very rigorous process that involves investigating both people who are going to say very favorable things and people who may not. We don't make suitability judgments. . . . We report the facts to the agency that has requested the background check, in this case the White House."

The files indicate that in 1971, the Nixon administration was deeply concerned about hostile witnesses to Rehnquist's confirmation after the Senate's rejection of two previous Supreme Court nominees, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell.

In an October 1971 memo, an aide to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover said Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst had telephoned to request a "criminal background check" on two Phoenix residents who were expected to testify against Rehnquist's nomination.

The Post reported at the time that the FBI was stirring controversy by questioning potential witnesses against Rehnquist, including Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe. When a Harvard official complained that the interviews were "seriously intimidating," Kleindienst wrote back that the questioning was impartial and that "any assumption that interviews were conducted with a view toward 'intimidation' is completely unjustified."

In 1986, the FBI files show, Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked the FBI to interview witnesses who might testify about allegations that Rehnquist had "challenged" blacks waiting in line to vote in Phoenix in 1962. Rehnquist was a legal adviser to the local Republican Party at the time.

Thurmond's request was relayed to the FBI by John R. Bolton, who was then an assistant attorney general and who recently stepped down as ambassador to the United Nations after the Senate did not act on his nomination. Although an FBI official warned that the bureau might be accused of "intimidating the Democrats' witnesses," Bolton approved the request and wrote that he would "accept responsibility should concerns be raised about the role of the FBI."

John Bolton using intimidation? Say it ain't so.