The chief justice's announcement, released without advance notice by his family, was completely unexpected and took the White House and Supreme Court officials by surprise. It first appeared on The Associated Press wire shortly before 9 p.m.
The statement said: "I want to put to rest the speculation and unfounded rumors of my imminent retirement. I am not about to announce my retirement. I will continue to perform my duties as chief justice as long as my health permits."
The White House welcomed the announcement. "The chief justice is doing an outstanding job, and we are pleased he will continue his great service to the nation," said Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman.
The 80-year-old chief justice, who learned in October that he had thyroid cancer, had returned hours earlier to his home in suburban Arlington, Va., after spending two nights at the nearby Virginia Hospital Center, where he was treated for a fever.
Photographers were camped out in front of the house as they had been for weeks, recording his daily trip to and from his chambers at the court and awaiting word of a retirement that was expected in many quarters to be imminent.
The prospect that the scene on his lawn, with its overtones of a ghoulish death watch, would continue all summer was evidently what drove the famously tight-lipped chief justice to issue his statement.
Last Friday morning, when a reporter shouted a question about retirement at him as he left for work, he replied: "That's for me to know and you to find out." The rumors that flooded Washington throughout the remainder of the day became almost comical, as when the columnist Robert D. Novak declared on CNN that the chief justice's retirement would be announced at 4:50 that afternoon.
The announcement Thursday night of Chief Justice Rehnquist's actual intentions freed the Bush administration to concentrate on finding a replacement for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who two weeks ago unexpectedly announced her intention to retire. Since then, many in official Washington and in the interest groups that are gearing up for a major confirmation battle had assumed that another shoe would soon drop in the form of a retirement announcement from the chief justice.
Inside the court, on the other hand, the assumption had been growing, in the absence of any concrete information, that Chief Justice Rehnquist intended to remain on the job and that he had communicated this decision to Justice O'Connor before she made her retirement decision final.
The chief justice's health has appeared relatively stable since he returned to the bench in March. The fever that sent him to the hospital in an ambulance on Tuesday night evidently did not represent a major setback.
Last fall, his cancer was treated with chemotherapy and radiation. It is not known whether he is currently under active treatment. He still has a tracheotomy, a hole in his throat that surgeons opened in October to help him breathe.
Even for the Supreme Court, an institution in which secrecy is prized and information is tightly controlled, the events of the past two weeks have been startling. Justice O'Connor informed her colleagues of her decision barely an hour before the public announcement. Her children learned about it from television. On Thursday night, court officials learned of Chief Justice Rehnquist's statement only when reporters began calling to confirm the Associated Press bulletin. It quickly became obvious that the chief justice had taken matters into his own hands.