“The future chief justice of the United States was proposing to the woman who, years later, would become the first woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.” Nina Totenberg: O’Connor, Rehnquist And A Supreme Marriage Proposal. “Some personal secrets are so well-kept that even family and friends are oblivious. So it is with the story of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s marriage proposal to a Stanford Law School classmate in the early 1950s.”