US:The late US Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist took a powerful sedative during his first decade on the court and grew so dependent on it that he became delusional and tried to escape from a hospital in his pyjamas when he stopped taking the drug in 1981, according to newly released FBI files.
The files also show that during both of Rehnquist's confirmation battles - first when named to the court by President Richard Nixon in 1971, and when President Ronald Reagan nominated him as chief justice in 1986 - the justice department enlisted the FBI to find out what witnesses lined up by Senate Democrats were prepared to say.
The FBI this week released 1,561 pages from its files on Rehnquist in response to Freedom of Information Act requests.
The fact that Rehnquist was hospitalised for a week in 1981 for back pain and dependence on a prescription drug was previously known.
Journalists had also noted that autumn that his speech was sometimes slurred on the bench.
But the files reveal dramatic new details about the length and intensity of the addiction. During its routine 1986 investigation of the judge's background, the FBI concluded that he began taking the drug Placidyl for insomnia following back surgery in 1971, the year before he joined the court. By 1981 he apparently was taking three times the usual starting dose every night.
The drug is not usually prescribed for more than a week at a time. It is not an opiate or a painkiller, but is addictive. Withdrawal can cause hallucinations and temporary memory loss.
Doctors interviewed by the FBI said that when the judge 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". At one point Rehnquist went "to the lobby in his pyjamas in order to try to escape".
By 1986, the files show, all the doctors said the former 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 who was among the scholars and journalists who received the documents, said in his view they contain evidence of "the ongoing use of the FBI for political purposes, not only in the '60s and '70s but well into the 1980s".
Because the FBI withheld some documents on national security grounds and many of the pages released are heavily edited, "no one can be entirely certain what happened and why" when the FBI did its background investigations.
"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'," Mr Charns says.
FBI spokesman Paul Bresson denies that the FBI's background investigations for judicial nominees are partisan. "We're just trying to find the facts," he says. "It's a very rigorous process that involves investigating both people who are going to say very favourable things and people who may not. We don't make suitability judgments."
The files indicate that in 1971 the Nixon administration was deeply concerned about hostile witnesses to Rehnquist, following the Senate's rejection of two previous court nominees. In an October 1971 memo, an aide to FBI director J Edgar Hoover said deputy attorney general Richard Kleindienst had phoned 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", Mr Kleindienst wrote back that "any assumption that interviews were conducted with a view toward 'intimidation' is completely unjustified."
In 1986, the FBI files show, the late Strom Thurmond, the Republican chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, asked the FBI to interview witnesses who might testify about claims that Rehnquist had "challenged" blacks waiting to vote in Phoenix, Arizona, 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 Bolton, then assistant attorney general. He has recently stepped down as US ambassador to the UN.
- (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)