His voice was distorted and strained by thyroid cancer and a tracheotomy, and inside the packed courtroom that day in June, there was a sense of unease. Deciding two controversial cases on whether states could display the Ten Commandments, the Supreme Court had divided into 10 separate opinions spread across 150 pages. Struggling to enumerate which justice had joined which opinion, Chief Justice William Rehnquist cracked, "I didn't know we had that many people on our court" Rehnquist's wry aside, which broke the tension, was typical of the man affectionately known to his fellow justices as "the Chief." Rehnquist was quick and funny, and he made his job look easy. He had time left over to run betting pools on sporting and political contests, preside over poker games with other Washington luminaries, play bridge and charades, paint, swim, sing hymns, quote poetry and the classics from memory, and write four books on Supreme Court history. He was respected and admired by his colleagues on both sides of the ideological spectrum. The late Thurgood Marshall, who opposed Rehnquist on almost any case, called him a "great chief justice." The Supreme Court is sometimes described as "nine scorpions in a bottle," but under Rehnquist's nearly two decades as chief, the justices generally got along.
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