Thomas: For my biography, I had the full cooperation of Justice O’Connor and her family. How did you find out it existed? And how did you track it down for the book? She said that after O’Connor resigned from the court in 2006, she told Helms that Chief Justice Rehnquist, who died in 2005, had asked her to marry him when they were in law school.Ĭillizza: The proposal letter. Thomas: Both Sandra O’Connor and William Rehnquist had publicly said that they had “dated” in law school and “gone to a few movies together.” But about three years ago, when I began interviewing Justice O’Connor’s friends for a biography ( to be published by Random House in March), one of her close friends, Cynthia Helms, told me that the relationship had been more than that. Our conversation, conducted via email and lightly edited for flow, is below.Ĭillizza: How much did you know about the relationship between Sandra Day and William Rehnquist before this book? (Who wouldn’t?) So I reached out to Thomas to talk about the marriage proposal, the two justices and how they co-existed on the nation’s highest court for more than two decades. (The proposal wasn’t totally out of the blue Day and Rehnquist had dated for a time when they were both at Stanford Law School.)
Day, who was by then dating a man named John O’Connor who she would go on to marry, declined. “To be specific, Sandy, will you marry me this summer?” Rehnquist wrote in the letter from 1952. In an excerpt of his book “ First ” - a biography of Sandra Day O’Connor - author Evan Thomas unearthed something amazing: A letter from William Rehnquist to Sandra Day asking her to marry him.