(6 of 11)
O'Connor flew to Washington on June 29 for a breakfast the next morning with Smith in a secret hotel hideaway. That same day she met with Reagan's senior staff, including the troika of Meese, James Baker and Michael Deaver. On July 1 she was invited to the Oval Office by Reagan. The 10 a.m. meeting was unannounced and, like countless other private presidential meetings, went unnoticed by reporters. She moved quickly to break any tension in the talks by reminding the President that they had met a decade ago, when he was Governor of California and she was in the Arizona senate. They had talked about the kinds of limitations on spending being considered in both states, she recalled. Quipped Reagan with a smile: "Yours passed, but mine didn't." Then Reagan and O'Connor settled into two wingback armchairs and chatted for 45 minutes. "She puts you at ease," observed one admiring participant in the meeting. "She's a real charmer."
Like Reagan, Sandra O'Connor has spent many of her happiest days on a Western ranch, riding horses and even roping steers. Her parents, Harry and Ada Mae Day, operated a 260-sq.-mi. cattle spread straddling the New Mexico-Arizona border. Called the Lazy B, it had been in the Day family since 1881 —three decades before Arizona became a state. Her grandfather had traveled from Vermont to found it. Sandra, first of the Days' three children, was born in an El Paso hospital because the remote area in which they lived had no medical facilities; their ranch house had neither electricity nor running water. Greenlee County also had no schools that met her parents' standards, so Sandra spent much of her youth with a grandmother in El Paso, attending the private Radford School and later a public high school there.
"I was always homesick," O'Connor told TIME last week. But she loved her summers on the ranch, where she had plenty of time to read. A dog-eared Book of Knowledge encyclopedia, copies of the National Geographic Magazine and her father's assorted volumes from the Book-of-the-Month Club fed her curiosity. By the age often, she could drive both a truck and a tractor. "I didn't do all the things boys did, but I fixed windmills and repaired fences." Recalls her girlhood friend and cousin, Flournoy Manzo: "We played with dolls, but we knew what to do with screwdrivers and nails too. Living on a ranch made us very self-sufficient."
Sandra finished high school at the age of 16 and did something her father had always longed to do: attend Stanford. He had been forced to give up his college plans and take over the family ranch when Sandra's grandfather died. "I only applied to Stanford and no place else," said Sandra. She rushed through her undergraduate work and law studies in just five years, graduating magna cum laude and joining the honorary Society of the Coif, which accepts only the best law students. She won a post on the Stanford Law Review, where she met her future husband John, who was one class behind her. She ranked in the top ten in her class scholastically. So too did Rehnquist, who had graduated six months earlier.