William Rehnquist - Early Life

Early Life

Rehnquist was born William Donald Rehnquist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on October 1, 1924. He grew up in the suburb of Shorewood. His father, William Benjamin Rehnquist, was a paper salesman; his mother, Margery Peck Rehnquist, was a translator and homemaker. Rehnquist changed his middle name to Hubbs, a family name, because a numerologist told his mother he would be successful with a middle initial of H. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Sweden.

Rehnquist graduated from Shorewood High School in 1942. He attended Kenyon College, in Gambier, Ohio, for one quarter in the fall of 1942, before entering the U.S. Army Air Forces. He served from March 1943–1946, mostly in assignments in the United States. He was put into a pre-meteorology program and was assigned to Denison University until February 1944, when the program was shut down. He served three months at Will Rogers Field in Oklahoma City, three months in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and then went to Hondo, Texas for a few months. He was then chosen for another training program, which began at Chanute Field, Illinois, and ended at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. The program was designed to teach the maintenance and repair of weather instruments. In the summer of 1945, he went overseas and served as a weather observer in North Africa.

After the war ended, Rehnquist attended Stanford University with assistance under the provisions of the G.I. Bill. In 1948, he received both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts degree in political science. In 1950, he went to Harvard University, where he received another Master of Arts in government. He later returned to Stanford, where he graduated from the Stanford Law School in the same class as Sandra Day O'Connor, with whom he would later serve on the Supreme Court. They briefly dated at Stanford. It has been said that Rehnquist graduated first in his class, probably based on the fact that he was class valedictorian during graduation ceremonies, but Stanford's official position is that the law school did not rank students in 1952.