Virginia note: Former editor recalls friendship with Rehnquist

He was born in Wisconsin, went to college in California and practiced law and politics in Arizona, but William H. Rehnquist spent much of his life in Virginia.

In 1969, he joined the Nixon administration as an assistant attorney general. Two years later, he was nominated for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court and took the bench in 1972. In 1986, he was promoted to chief justice and served in that capacity until his death at his home in Arlington County in 2005.

Rehnquist's life is remembered in Herman J. Obermayer's "Rehnquist: A Personal Portrait of the Distinguished Chief Justice of the United States" (280 pages, Threshold Editions, $27).

Obermayer is a former editor and publisher of The Northern Virginia Sun and shared a 19-year friendship with Rehnquist, among the most private of public men.

Obermayer writes, of course, of Rehnquist's long and distinguished, if often controversial, judicial career. But this is primarily the memoir of a friendship, and Rehnquist emerges as a likable guy who loved poker and other forms of betting, practiced frugality and was a genial and close friend.

-- Jay Strafford