Rehnquist Will Preside--’Just Like the Queen’

Today will mark the first inaugural swearing-in carried out by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, a man far more attuned to intellectual work inside the Supreme Court than to the public, ceremonial aspects of his job.

When Rehnquist administers the oath of office to President-elect Bush, he will take over the duties long performed by his immediate predecessor, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, the stolid, white-haired figure who, by contrast with Rehnquist, seemed to relish the pomp of events such as an inauguration.

Rehnquist--a shy, somewhat awkward figure with a flat voice and a longstanding aversion to television cameras--will stand before Bush, leading him through the oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Rehnquist has grumbled good-naturedly that he sometimes feels “just like the queen of England” when he is obliged to carry out the ceremonial duties of chief justice. “No one cares what (the chief justice) says, they just want him there,” he observed two years ago.

Burger, who retired in 1986, swore in four presidents, and before him Chief Justice Earl Warren had also sworn in four. Neither of them came close to the record of the great Chief Justice John Marshall, who administered the presidential oath of office nine times.

Actually, there is nothing in the U.S. Constitution requiring that the presidential oath of office be administered by the chief justice of the United States.

When Calvin Coolidge took office after the death of President Warren Harding in 1923, for example, he took the oath from an ordinary notary public and justice of the peace: his own father, John Calvin Coolidge. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in by U.S. District Judge Sarah T. Hughes in Texas.

But except for special circumstances after a presidential assassination or death, the tradition, unbroken for nearly two centuries, has been for the chief justice to do the job. The custom dates back to 1797, when Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth swore in President John Adams.

On occasion, the inaugural swearing-in ceremonies have brought together a chief justice and a President-elect with little love for one another.

The most recent example was in 1969, when Chief Justice Warren swore in President Richard M. Nixon. The two men had been implacable enemies since their days in California, where Warren, a Republican governor, and Nixon, a Republican senator, had been political rivals.