In September 2022, Hannah McCarthy sat down with NPR Legal Affairs Correspondent for a show called Writers on a New England Stage. This is an excerpt from their conversation. Nina discusses her new book, Dinners with Ruth, focusing on her career as a journalist and her relationship with late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. You can catch the whole conversation at nhpr.org.
Transcript
Hannah McCarthy: This is Civics 101, I’m Hannah McCarthy. In September of 2022 for a program called Writers on a New England Stage, a partnership between New Hampshire Public Radio and the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. I got to step on stage with National Public Radio's legal affairs correspondent Nina TOTENBERG. Nina had just written a book about her experiences as a journalist, [00:00:30] especially covering the Supreme Court and perhaps most importantly, forming a lifelong friendship with the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. That book is called Dinners with Ruth. I want to share a part of that conversation with the civics one on one audience, because, come on, how often do you get this close to someone who gets that close to the Supreme Court? So here I am with Nina Totenberg for writers on a New England stage. Thank [00:01:00] you. And Nina, thank you so much for being here with us tonight.
Nina Totenberg: It's really my pleasure. And I hope everybody gives to their local public radio station.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, I know that when you first started covering the Supreme Court, it was not considered important enough to be your full time job.
Nina Totenberg: Well, when I first was assigned to cover the Supreme Court in my earlier days, I had many other jobs [00:01:30] in print first. And then when NPR hired me, we had only one news program, and it was an hour and a half. It was all things considered in the evening and started at five, not four. And my beat was the Supreme Court, the Justice Department, the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. Any major legal scandal that broke or and live hearings that covered those kinds of things. Confirmation hearings, of course, and the intelligence community. [00:02:00] Oh, and I covered presidential and vice presidential campaigns a little bit also.
Hannah McCarthy: Yet you made the conscious decision to carve out a space for yourself covering the Supreme Court. Can you talk about what that was like? You're especially as a young journalist, a woman, a non-lawyer. How did you approach covering the Supreme Court?
Nina Totenberg: Well, when I first got assigned to cover the court, I worked for the the late Great National Observer, [00:02:30] which was a weekly publication published by Dow Jones, which at the time also owned The Wall Street Journal. And it was a weekly. And that made it much, again, much easier in the sense that I had time to do research and I would call anybody any time, anywhere to ask any question. There's one good thing about being young as a reporter. You're you understand that if you're going to do anything, [00:03:00] you just have to be willing to ask any question at all. And if it's a stupid question, so be it.
Hannah McCarthy: Speaking of questions, it's 1971. You were covering a case called Reed V Reed, and you discover that someone named Ruth Bader Ginsburg had written a brief for the ACLU for this case that was supposed to go before the Supreme Court. And you see that this woman's number is right under her name at Rutgers University. And you call this professor up. She's a law [00:03:30] professor at Rutgers. And that conversation is one that Ruth Bader Ginsburg would look back on and say, you know, that was our first conversation and we have been dear friends ever since. What about that conversation? Compelled Ruth to look back and say that was the beginning of that dear friendship?
Nina Totenberg: Well, certainly it was the beginning, but we weren't dear friends yet. She probably thought this this girl is asking me dumb questions, but she never [00:04:00] treated any of my questions as dumb. And that day I really didn't understand the the point she was making in the brief that women were covered by the 14th Amendment guarantee to equal protection of the law, because, after all, women didn't even have the vote when the 14th Amendment was enacted. And she spent an hour answering my questions and explaining to me what I needed to know, which basically boiled down to the 14th Amendment covers all persons and women are persons.
Hannah McCarthy: And [00:04:30] you were compelled to continue to call her back over and over again. I know. Well, anybody.
Nina Totenberg: Who would spend that kind of time with me, somebody was completely new on the beat. And it was just the beginning of what became her battle and the the architecture that she wrought to build the fight for women's rights in the courts. [00:05:00] So I understood that this was somebody I should be in touch with and talk to regularly. And eventually we met. We met at a very boring conference. And it was so boring that we left and went shopping. And I don't remember anything about the shopping, but I do remember a lot about that afternoon. So it was a friendship that grew slowly. I mean, she lived in New York then, so I didn't [00:05:30] see her very often, but eventually she moved to Washington when she was appointed to the Court of Appeals. And we became closer and closer friends over the years, until the last couple of years of her life, we were incredibly close because she needed me at that point. There were earlier times when I needed her in my personal life, and she always stepped right up to the to the plate. And so my husband and I stepped up to the plate for the [00:06:00] last part of her life.
Hannah McCarthy: I'd love to talk a little bit about that. You've described Ruth as being consistently stoic and internal and in utmost control, and that it took you a very long time to find that you had, in fact, become intimate friends, friends who needed one another. What was it that led you to see that? When did you truly know how close you had become?
Nina Totenberg: It's a really good question, [00:06:30] and I'm not sure I can answer it fully. I do remember that when she turned 50, her husband made a book of. Letters that he asked her friends to write to her and. I was quite surprised. He asked me because I didn't realize I was that. Not much of a friend to her. And so when I was writing the book, [00:07:00] I didn't have a copy of the letter. And my impression always was that it was a really pretty stupid letter. But I called up her daughter and asked her if she had that book. And she did. And she sent me the letter. And to my really great surprise, it was a pretty good letter. But I did sign the letter for some unknown reason. To me, maybe I thought she knew more than one. Nina. I signed it.
Hannah McCarthy: Nina TOTENBERG And [00:07:30] there's one piece of advice that Ruth passes on to you that I believe she received from her father in law, which was, as she is considering becoming a lawyer herself. He says to her, essentially, if you can do it, you'll do it. And if you can't, you can't. And and she from there on out would always ask herself, well, is this worth it? And if I answer yes, I will proceed and do it. And I wonder if you have applied that same [00:08:00] piece of advice to your life.
Nina Totenberg: I think so. You know, you do things that you have to in a in a job. Some things you're thrilled to be able to do and other things just go with the territory. And I don't think it it's that different for a Supreme Court justice even, and that it's a very good piece of advice her father in law gave her her mother in law gave [00:08:30] her even better advice, I think, on the day of their wedding. Her mother in law sat her down. By then, Ruth's mother was had died quite a few years earlier, and she sat her down and she said, Ruth, I want to give you the secret to a happy marriage and successful marriage. And Ruth said, What's that? And she said, It always pays to be a little deaf. And Ruth always said that that [00:09:00] was true on the court as well.
Hannah McCarthy: I love that one of your takes of the relationships on the Supreme Court is that it's a little bit like a marriage that's not doing so well, that if you decide to stay inside of it, you find a way to communicate, even if you disagree.
Nina Totenberg: Yes, I think that's that's right. I don't know how well they're doing at the moment, but and my sense is they're doing less well than usual. And [00:09:30] that goes not just because just liberals versus conservatives. I think the conservatives are not getting along all that well either because they have different ideas about how to interpret the Constitution, how to interpret statutes. They they don't always agree about that. And what they, of course, would like is a lot of they would like a place in the sun, each of them. And that means that things don't always go. Smoothly, [00:10:00] I guess you would say.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, I want to sort of pivoting back to your career a little bit. You've got a lot of good journalism stories throughout this book, including one in which you end up with a retaliatory FBI file because of a profile on Hoover. But, you know, after telling what is a great anecdote and admittedly funny you say, you know, now this is funny to think back on, but I, I worked really hard in journalism. I worked really hard in my career. [00:10:30] And I wonder in particular how that hard work ethic applied to reporting on a court, which to so many people is obscure, is, as you call it, the Marble Palace. How did keeping your nose to the grindstone push your way through those doors?
Nina Totenberg: Well, first of all, it was fascinating to me. I was never I've never been bored covering the Supreme Court. I'm occasionally bored reading legal briefs because they go on [00:11:00] and on and on and on. But the cases are not boring. And in fact, I sometimes have to say to myself, All right, you're going to have to skip that one. It's interesting to you, but it will not be interesting to most people, at least in the argument stage may be when it's decided. So you have to sort of triage what you're capable of writing about and what people are willing to pay attention to. Even when I was younger, I [00:11:30] was you know, I was almost always until I went to work at NPR, the only woman every place I worked, or one of two women. And even when I was covering the court for NPR, there were when I first started covering the court, there was one other woman. Eventually then she retired and there was, you know, Linda Greenhouse was [00:12:00] the, you know, covered the court quite a bit later than I started covering the court. But I was thrilled when she was there. Now, there are just as many women covering the court as there are men, but that was not true for a very long time. And it was and I wasn't a lawyer, so all I could do was work really hard to make sure I didn't embarrass myself and that I could earn something of a reputation for doing good work. [00:12:30]
Hannah McCarthy: And now this book is peppered with dinners. Dinners with Ruth. Yes, but also dinners with your friends and dinners with justices.
Nina Totenberg: And where are my friends other times? Who are.
Hannah McCarthy: Your friends? Absolutely. But here's what I mean to say. What what compelled you? What gave you the confidence the first time you ever invited a Supreme Court justice over for dinner? As a young reporter.
Nina Totenberg: I have no idea. [00:13:00] When I when I went back and I thought about it and I thought, who was the first justice I ever invited for dinner? And it was Lewis Powell, who was a very distinguished Southern gentleman in his sixties, maybe even a little older. But when I invited him to dinner, probably his sixties and his wife, Joe, probably it was because Joe had been so nice to me and had treated me [00:13:30] like a. As they say in Guys and Dolls. A poison. And. And so for some ungodly reason, I called up Justice Powell, and I asked if he and Joe would come for dinner. I was single. I was in my twenties. I. I had a little house I bought that was 13 feet wide. I [00:14:00] had another invited another couple. And I can't remember who they who it was. I made the dinner and served the dinner. And I don't I mean, I'm amazed that they said yes, they came. And you would have thought that I was dining. You know, they were dining at Buckingham Palace. The way they treated me, it was incredibly gracious of them. He he was always very generous with his time. He, like other members of the court, were [00:14:30] happy to eat lunch or dinner with me and. Not to talk about what they were doing at the time, but how they did it, how they ran their chambers, how they thought about things, how they approached them. I mean, I remember a lunch I had with Justice Scalia when he was first on the Supreme Court.
Nina Totenberg: I had known him for a good ten years before that. And [00:15:00] I said, So what's different? He'd been on the Court of Appeals. I said, So what's different from the Court of Appeals? And and it was very interesting. What he said was different. He said, well, there are a whole bunch of subjects that I have not given any thought to that don't come before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. I've never I've never even thought about the 11th Amendment. Death penalty cases, by and large, don't come to the to the court. [00:15:30] And there were several other things. And I just had never even thought about that. And and he said, So I really have to think about them and think what I think for the first time. Of course, after a while, justices sort of know what they think about how to interpret this or that or the other thing. But situations change. In the early days when I covered the court, most of the cases were about civil [00:16:00] rights and and about the draft. Actually, there were a lot of big cases about the draft. Those cases don't those kinds of cases don't come up. They're different civil rights cases now. And there are all kinds of cases about now about that people are just starting to think about in a different way, about the First Amendment and technology and social media and the protections under the statutes, [00:16:30] subjects that the court deals with change over time, not just the personnel.
Hannah McCarthy: You're listening to an edited version of my conversation with Nina TOTENBERG, NPR legal affairs correspondent and close friend of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. We'll get right back to it after this break. But first, there is so very much that does not make it into the average Civics 101 episode. Luckily, [00:17:00] you don't have to miss any of it because our team puts it all together in the civics one on one newsletter. Extra Credit. You can subscribe at our website, civics101podcast.org. It's where all of the fun and or wildly tangential stuff goes that our executive producer, Rebecca Lovejoy, rightfully makes us cut from our episodes. Again, don't miss it. It's really good stuff. It's one of my favorite parts of our job Civics101podcast.org and subscribe to extra credit. We're [00:17:30] back and you're listening to a special episode of Civics one on one. I'm sharing part of my conversation with NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina TOTENBERG. Recorded for a live event called Writers on a New England stage at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And I asked Nina, essentially, what were conversations like with members of the court when she was not operating as a journalist?
Nina Totenberg: I think that most of [00:18:00] the members of the court lead. Relatively, relatively isolated lives. They don't call it, you know, the ivory tower for nothing. And some more than others, like social interaction and not just to talk about. Law, but to have friends and to talk about. Music and theater and maybe what's going on in in [00:18:30] sports, I mean, all kinds of things like that. I guarantee you, Justice Ginsburg did not want to talk about sports, however.
Hannah McCarthy: Even though she was quite a sporting woman.
Nina Totenberg: Oh, yeah. She was very she was quite the athlete. She was, you know, she golfed. She even went skydiving once. And Scalia said, I think it was in Italy someplace. And he said he saw her up there, this little bit of a thing, and he wondered how she was ever going to get down.
Hannah McCarthy: I [00:19:00] had no idea. I'm utterly terrified of skydiving, so.
Nina Totenberg: I would not even. It wasn't. It wasn't not skydiving. It was parasailing. It was worse. Okay.
Hannah McCarthy: I want to pivot for just a moment to an audience question here. In the early years at NPR. What was it like for you, for Cokie, for Susan, and for Linda working in a male dominated newsroom?
Nina Totenberg: It wasn't a male dominated [00:19:30] newsroom. It was a female dominated newsroom. And I have and I have often said that the reason was that it was it was so different from any other place I'd ever worked. And the reason was that they paid so little. No man would take most of those jobs. And, you know, there was a there came a time when we were so. Relatively powerful within [00:20:00] the structure of NPR, within the news structure that some of the guys referred. Cokie, Linda and I sat in a corner and we managed to commission a really old couch from somewhere else and put it in there so that other women would come and we would talk if there was an issue. And they were. And some of the men in the newsroom referred to it as the fallopian jungle. I always thought it was something of a compliment.
Hannah McCarthy: So [00:20:30] despite your dominance as women of this newsroom, you you still regularly benefited from the the support and the promotion of this sisterhood in the same way that Ruth Bader Ginsburg did from Justice O'Connor. Can you describe a bit what it was like to support one another, especially when sexism and misogyny were main stage in the workplace?
Nina Totenberg: I [00:21:00] never thought of it as misogyny. It was, but I never thought of it that way. I mean, because misogyny suggests you don't like women. Most of the men I knew liked women. They just didn't think that we should compete with them on an equal platform. And most of the men I encountered in the early years of my life in Washington did not consider me or any other woman that I knew as a person to be reckoned [00:21:30] with. They. And they did that at their peril because they said very stupid things. And we quoted them. But also, you know, I mean, you just had to deal with the fact that the sexism was, by today's standards, insane. I mean, nobody would dare, for the most part, do what members of Congress did, and you had to figure out a way to deal with it. So I would get catcalled [00:22:00] in the speaker's lobby when I would walk through and I would just ignore it. Or if sometime I had a very good source, a senator, who really was very helpful to me. And then one day I realized that he was pretty soon going to make a pass at me, and I had to figure out a way to deal with it. And I said to him, Oh, Senator, you remind me so much of my father.
Hannah McCarthy: I [00:22:30] read that, I thought I have to take a page out of this book.
Nina Totenberg: Yeah.
Hannah McCarthy: And. And can you just can you describe how how you and Cokie and Linda really did support one another, how you made sure that any attempt to keep women down was skirted by your efforts?
Nina Totenberg: I remember at some point Mara LIASSON was off on a fellowship. And, you know, she came to NPR and she was [00:23:00] in the beginning, she was a newscaster. And then I think she had just begun a little bit to cover Congress. And I can't remember the chronology of this, but she goes off on this fellowship and she's in Europe and they post a White House correspondents job. And I knew she would apply for that job if she were there, but I didn't know where she was. And I spent the better part of a day tracking her down in Germany. And I [00:23:30] said, they've just posted this job. They'll undoubtedly close it because you're gone for a couple of months. They'll close it before you come back. You fax me because this was the still the day you fax me your application. And I will take it to the vice president for news, who was, of course, a man. And that way they couldn't just ignore her.
Hannah McCarthy: I know this is a question you have been asked many times. Many people prior to my conversation with you said, Are you going [00:24:00] to ask this question? How can you balance a close friendship with a Supreme Court justice of which you had a handful and fair and even reporting on the Supreme Court? I don't want to know the answer to that question. I want to know, is it possible to do the kind of reporting that you did without close intimate relationships with the individuals?
Nina Totenberg: I'm not sure. I think my reporting was overwhelmingly enriched by knowing a [00:24:30] large number of Supreme Court justices and knowing them more than that person sitting up on the bench. And I've always I get this. You know, Justice Ginsburg was definitely my closest friend and my longest friend. I, I knew her actually longer than Cokie and Linda, but I had other friends on the court who I knew for for a long time before they were on the court. Some more [00:25:00] and more closer friends like Scalia and others were lesser. So like justice then Chief Justice Rehnquist, who I knew in the Nixon administration. So I had lots of friends on the court. And I'm always interested that people ask me about my. Liberal friend. Justice Ginsburg And they don't ask me, How could you be friends with Scalia? I could [00:25:30] be friends with both of them because they were both, frankly, rather lovable people on a personal basis. And knowing them as a reporter enriched what I did for a living and knowing them on a personal level enriched my personal self.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, I know you ask the question in your book. Could a a Ruth Nino, as he's affectionately called, relationship happen [00:26:00] today? Could a relationship between Scalia and yourself happen today? And what does the answer to that question tell us. What is your answer to that question?
Nina Totenberg: I don't actually 100% know. I do have conservative friends who who are judges and a couple who are now or in the past have been justices. But. I [00:26:30] never have expected that I could be 100% objective. I don't think anybody can be objective. We all have personal opinions, but what we do is a trade. I mean, I know people would like say, oh, journalism to profession. It's also a trade and a craft. And part of that trade is to be fair. And if you write a piece, you really want to get all the basic [00:27:00] viewpoints in. And if you don't do that, you're shortchanging your readers and listeners and you're shortchanging yourself as a professional.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, an audience member asks if you know of any current cross ideology friendships on the Supreme Court, anything like Ginsburg's and Scalia's?
Nina Totenberg: No, I don't. But. This is a pretty overall new court. [00:27:30] And I know that, for example, Justices Gorsuch and Sotomayor actually have gone out of their way to try to build some sort of a personal bridge. They do that through they both work on Justice O'Connor's. It's called I civics, which is to promote civic education. And I'm not sure how successful they've been beyond that. But you got to start somewhere. [00:28:00] And this is a court that is certainly the most conservative court that I've ever covered. But it's also remarkable in a different way. It's it's probably the most conservative court in 90 years, but it is totally different from any court I've ever covered because it has no center. There always were one, two or three justices who from time to time moved [00:28:30] to one side or another in ideological battles. And that is no longer true, by and large. The chief justice very occasionally does. Not side with the other five conservatives to the extent that he doesn't want to go as far as they do. But beyond that, there is no center, and that makes this a very different court.
Hannah McCarthy: And I wonder with a court where you have justices whose [00:29:00] homes are patrolled for fear of violence against their families, who are issuing decisions behind barricades, are relationships like those that you have had with members of the court possible today between journalists and Supreme Court justices?
Nina Totenberg: I guess we'll find out. I mean, I do have some. Some members of the court who I think of as friends, they're [00:29:30] not as close friends as I. The relationships are not as close as my relationship with Justice Ginsburg or Justice Scalia or Justice Powell or Justice Brennan, for that matter. But. They haven't been there that long. When Justice Stevens retired, I remembered covering his confirmation hearing. So I have been there a very [00:30:00] long time. So give me a little time.
Hannah McCarthy: I do want to ask about a moment with Ruth. She had been in the hospital and she hadn't explained to you much about why she was there, what she was ill with. And when she came out, she said, Well, Nina, I didn't want you to feel trapped between [00:30:30] your your commitment to your your job as a journalist and your friendship with her. And then you tell us that in the last 18 months of her life, you chose friendship. What did that mean practically for you?
Nina Totenberg: What it meant was that my husband, David, was Justice Ginsburg's medical confidante, and I knew that they had confidential conversations, and I knew that I [00:31:00] didn't actually even want to know what they were because I would be obligated to report them if I knew. But for 18 months. I knew that her health was precarious. I for a long time thought she might. As she had so often before be able to. Conquer cancer and live as long as she wanted to live, [00:31:30] which was definitely past the 2020 election. And I guess in the last couple of months I came to realize that was. Unlikely, although you could never be sure. I mean, we've all known people who we thought were going to die very soon and they didn't. And the one thing I could see with my own eyes was that her brain power was the same. She [00:32:00] was often frail, but her brain was not.
Hannah McCarthy: You describe a court greatly changed over the past ten years and especially recently. And yet you affirm that, like Ruth, you were optimistic. I wonder, do you feel that way today? Do you feel optimistic about the court, about the work that you'll be able to do reporting on it?
Nina Totenberg: Well, I'll be able to do reporting on it unless I get deathly ill or somebody [00:32:30] poisons me. But for a time anyway. But I don't actually know what's going to happen to the court. I think it's a very perilous time for the court and it has, at least for now, lost a good deal of the faith that people had in it, due in large part to the abortion decision. And one decision [00:33:00] is not going to end things for the court's cachet, so to speak. But even a decision is important as the Dobbs case. But as I said, this is a court that is more conservative than any other court, I think probably in 90 years. And that runs the gamut from social issues to technology issues to issues [00:33:30] of. Some people say weaponizing even the First Amendment to issues involving regulation and all kinds of other things that we don't have time to talk about tonight. And I think that the justices, as I said earlier, don't exactly love each other at the moment and that it's a very perilous time for [00:34:00] the group of them as a court. And I don't know where it's going.
Hannah McCarthy: This has been an excerpt from my conversation with Nina TOTENBERG, legal affairs correspondent for NPR, [00:34:30] longtime Supreme Court reporter and friend of the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who in part inspired Totenberg's 2022 book Dinners with Ruth. This conversation was recorded live before an audience at the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for writers on the New England stage. A longer version of this conversation will be available at npr.org. And a big thank you to everyone who helped put that show together. The musical executive director, Tina Satel, New Hampshire Public Radio president and CEO Jim [00:35:00] Schachter, New Hampshire public radio producer Sara Plourde, the Music Hall production manager. Gina morris The Music Hall Live Sound and recording engineer. Ian Martin, musical director and band Bob Lord and Dreadnought and the Music Hall literary producer Brittany Wasson. This episode was produced by me, Hannah McCarthy. Nick Capodice is my co-host. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Jackie Fulton is our producer, and Rebecca Lovejoy is our executive producer, producer, designer and all around great things person. Sara Plourde [00:35:30] helped produce the show at the Music Hall. Music in this episode by the writers on a New England stage is produced in partnership with the Music Hall in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and New Hampshire Public Radio, the production house of none other than Civics. One, two, one.