"The Partisan - The Life of William Rehnquist," by John A. Jenkins - NYTimes.com Smithsonian Institution/Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States William Rehnquist is sworn in by Warren Burger as his wife and Ronald Reagan look on. When Jimmy Lee Gray was sent to the Mississippi gas chamber in 1983 the procedure went horribly wrong. He gasped for breath and convulsed wildly, slamming his head against a metal pole hard enough to shake the room. The episode caused widespread revulsion, and Mississippi eventually switched from gas to lethal injection. Weeks after the botched execution, Justice William Rehnquist lamented the Gray case in a speech at the University of Arkansas. Rehnquist was not troubled by the gruesomeness. He was disturbed by the number of times the condemned man had been allowed to challenge his sentence in federal and state court. This focus on speeding the machinery of death, and unconcern about how it functioned, was fully in character. Rehnquist - who served on the Supreme Court 33 years, 19 as chief justice - was a man on an ideological mission. Richard Nixon had handpicked him to do battle against the framework of rights that liberal judges had created in the 1960s. In a phone call congratulating him on being confirmed by a skeptical Senate, Nixon had offered a grim benediction: "Just be as mean and rough as they said you were." Rehnquist's struggle to reshape American law in his and Nixon's image is the central story line of John A. Jenkins's engaging and perceptive biography, "The Partisan." On a court in which justices often evolve away from the views they arrived with, Rehnquist was for years a conservative North Star. In the end, however, he never achieved his legal counterrevolution, because of a combination of being too fixed in his beliefs and, ultimately, not fixed enough. There does not appear to be any ­Rosebud- like explanation for how Rehnquist came by his far-right politics. He was, prosaically, a product of his time and place. He grew up in an ardently anti-New Deal family in Shorewood, Wis., a village outside Milwaukee. He attended the sort of conservative, all-white high school that could - and did, in his senior year - hold a Harlem-themed prom, complete with "decorations in the form of Negro heads." When he left Shorewood, Rehnquist began his conservative Pilgrim's Progress. He enlisted to fight in World War II and ­eagerly read "The Road to Serfdom," Friedrich A. Hayek's classic anti-­Communist manifesto. Later, as a Stanford undergraduate, he fell under the sway of a prominent conservative constitutional law professor. After a brief graduate school stint at Harvard - where he found the politics unpleasantly liberal - he attended Stanford Law School. It was while serving as a law clerk to Justice Robert Jackson that Rehnquist the partisan emerged. He arrived when the court was considering Brown v. Board of Education and wrote a vigorous memo urging the justices to reject the claim for integration and reaffirm Plessy v. Ferguson's "separate but equal" doctrine. In another memo, he argued against ending Texas" version of the "white primary," which prevented black voters from participating in elections in a meaningful way. Rehnquist settled in Phoenix, where he practiced law with a sideline in politics. He was one of just three people out of 33 to testify against a city ban on discrimination in public accommodations, and in election season, he was in charge of "ballot security" for the Republicans, challenging black voters at the polls on literacy grounds. When Arizona's native son Barry Goldwater won the Republican nomination for president in 1964, Rehnquist was firmly planted in the inner circle. Though that "choice, not an echo" campaign failed epically, Rehnquist was catapulted four years later to a top position in the Nixon Justice Department. As the assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel, he was point man for the administration's hard-knuckle response to anti-Vietnam War protesters - or, as he called them, "new barbarians." Adam Cohen, a former member of The Times's editorial board, is the author of "Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America."