PBS today re-ran a Mar. 11, 2004 interview between Charlie Rose and Chief Justice William Rehnquist. In the interview, Rehnquist shows that he's a very smart, amiable, and -- yes -- funny guy:

CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me about the experience of [presiding over President Clinton's impeachment] for you. Was it trying, was it -- what?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: It's not easy to describe. There's a sense...

CHARLIE ROSE: You wish you didn't have to do it?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Yes, it was certainly a distraction from my regular work, but the Constitution says you do it, so you do it. And the chief justice has much less to say about what goes on in an impeachment trial than an ordinary judge in an ordinary criminal case, because it's the Senate that determines the procedures, and they decided that they didn't want to have any live witnesses. And so what you had was about, you know, 16 hours of opening statements and 16 hours of closing statements. And not much in between. So there just wasn`t a great deal for the chief justice to do, and I feel I did a perfectly adequate job of it.

CHARLIE ROSE: Adequate?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, you know ...

CHARLIE ROSE: You did what you had to do.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: I did what I had to do, yes. And I think, you know, both the majority leader and the minority leader gave me a trophy when I left.

CHARLIE ROSE: A trophy?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, some sort of deal, or, you know.

(LAUGHTER)

CHARLIE ROSE: A trophy. For surviving.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, maybe so, maybe so, you know, a cup.

CHARLIE ROSE: A cup? Oh, I see. Where do you keep it?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: With my other trophies.

CHARLIE ROSE: Where might that be?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: In the trophy room.

(LAUGHTER)

CHARLIE ROSE: Is it a large room or a small room?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Medium-sized.

Charlie Rose kept trying to ask him very big, larger-than-life questions, but Rehnquist was very down to earth about his role as chief justice. In this quotation, Charlie Rose has asked Rehnquist what he (Rehnquist) thinks his legacy might be:

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, OK. I like to think that the court over which I have presided has been a relatively smoothly functioning court, where people or the members of the court have been treated fairly by me, and where it`s my views have prevailed a fair amount of the time, though certainly not all the time, and that I will turn over to my successor the most important institution in the third branch of the government, which is the Supreme Court of the United States.

CHARLIE ROSE: You've done that. What else.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, I haven't ...

CHARLIE ROSE: You've done that.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: ... turned anything over to my successor.

CHARLIE ROSE: I know. But so far - so far -- if it ended tomorrow, you could say this what is I have achieved.

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Right, yeah, right.

CHARLIE ROSE: What else?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, I think that's enough.

CHARLIE ROSE: No, it's not. It's not enough. I mean, that's just saying I had a smoothly functioning court, without rancor, you know ...

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, but that isn't the easiest thing in the word to do. I mean, you're dealing with, you know, some personalities who are - you know, they have their own ideas about how things should be run, and to accommodate all of that and try to get everybody working harmoniously together is not a small feat.

Rehnquist also gave his opinion as to what the chief justice's most important job is:

CHARLIE ROSE: The most important power of the chief justice is what?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: The authority to assign the opinions. The chief justice goes first at conference, to discuss, but I`m not sure that makes a great deal of difference.

CHARLIE ROSE: Why not?

WILLIAM REHNQUIST: Well, you know, I will say something, state my views at conference, and other people have different views, some people who agree with me -- I'm not at all sure that the fact that I said something, even though they say they agree with me, agree with me because I said it, they may have reached that conclusion just on their own.

Interviews with justices are unusual. It's interesting that the justices are very private people. Whenever they speak at functions, they usually ask that those functions not be filmed. The justices stay out of the spotlight. Does it have anything to do with the fact that they don't have to parade themselves in public all the time to get re-elected? Could be. This means that they're concerned with their integrity, or at least the perception of integrity. Charlie Rose tried to get Rehnquist to explain the Bush v. Gore decision, but Rehnquist answered, "Well, you know, our decision, Bush against Gore, of course was our final decision on that, and we simply don't comment or try to justify or criticize opinions that we participated in." Rehnquist also refused to discuss the criteria he would use in recusing himself from a decision, since it was obvious that Charlie Rose was referring to the then-current event of whether or not Antonin Scalia would recuse himself in Cheney v. U.S. District Court of Washington, D.C.

As an interview, it was mediocre. Charlie Rose asked some dumb questions, and there were times when Rehnquist didn't seem to be interested in the questions, but it provides a rare insight into a Supreme Court justice, both as a person and a justice. Did you know he used to be "a ferocious ping-pong player"? I bet you didn't.