Rehnquist graduated a semester early and went to Washington for a Supreme Court clerkship. In a letter to Day, who had already begun dating John O’Connor, Rehnquist said he wanted to see her and discuss “important things,” author Evan Thomas told NPR.
Rehnquist later wrote: “To be specific, Sandy, will you marry me this summer?”
Thomas discovered the letters while conducting research for a biography of O’Connor, who was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to the nation’s highest court in 1981.
O’Connor’s son, Jay, told NPR that news of the proposal was a surprise to his family members, though they had known that his mother had dated Rehnquist.
“Dating was pretty innocent in the ’50s,” Jay O’Connor told NPR. He added that “multiple men proposed to my mom when she was in college and law school, and ultimately my dad was the one who was the real deal.”
She would instead end up marrying John O’Connor, becoming Sandra Day O’Connor in 1952. While her romance with Rehnquist never flourished, they remained close friends until he died in 2005; they even became neighbors at one point.
“It was just an amazing accident of history that . . . my mom and her friend and law school classmate ended up on the Supreme Court together,” her son told NPR. “Not only did they have a wonderful working relationship for over 25 years on the court, they had a wonderful friendship their entire life.”
O’Connor served on the Supreme Court from 1981 until 2006. On Friday, she died in Phoenix at age 93.
A version of this story first ran on Oct. 31, 2018.
