The passage of time did not soften Sen. Edward Kennedy’s hostility toward Chief Justice William Rehnquist, if Kennedy’s memoir is any indication.

Kennedy, in a memoir published posthumously this week, argues that Rehnquist might not have been confirmed as an associate justice in 1971 if the Senate hadn’t refused to confirm two of President Richard Nixon’s earlier Supreme Court nominees. The Senate, he writes, had “institutional reluctance to repudiate a president a third consecutive time.”