Late Chief Justice William Rehnquist: Going senile or high as a kite?

January 6-7, 2006 -- The late Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist often astonished his fellow congregants at the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in McLean, Virginia. Some commented that during his last ten years on the bench Rehnquist seemed to be "going senile."

With the FBI's release of 1,561 pages of its investigation of Rehnquist's drug dependency, we now know that the Chief Justice, appointed to the court in 1972 and elevated to Chief Justice in 1986, was dependent on the highly-addictive drug Placidyl, a pain killer he used for his back problems. The files show that Rehnquist underwent detox at George Washington University Hospital in 1981 and suffered from paranoid delusions, claiming, at one point, that CIA agents were outside his hospital room and plotting against him. He tried to escape from the hospital in his pyjamas. (The first Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, committed suicide at Bethesda Naval Hospital in 1949 after uttering similar paranoid comments about the FBI and "Zionist agents" trying to kill him). The files also show that John Bolton, then a Justice Department official, gathered the names of anti-Rehnquist Senate confirmation witnesses in 1986 and turned them over to the FBI for investigation.
Late Chief Justice William Rehnquist: Going senile or high as a kite?

Although not a member of Rehnquist's congregation, Bolton is also a Lutheran. Although the FBI files state that Rehnquist was detoxed in 1981, that does not explain his strange behavior throughout the 1990s, an indication that his drug dependency may have continued long after his hospital stay in 1981.

Wayne Madsen Report