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Shumita Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation," from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, NPR journalist Nina Totenberg talks about her career and the complex friendships that came with it.
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Basu: Nina Totenberg has been covering the Supreme Court for about fifty years.
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Nina Totenberg: …the first black member was Thurgood Marshall, who later was elevated to the Supreme Court…
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Basu, Narrating: She came up in journalism during a time when she was often the only woman in the room.
That's one of the core things she discovered she had in common with a lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They became friends long before Ginsburg was seated on the Supreme Court. In her new book, "Dinners with Ruth$% A Memoir on the Power of Friendships," Nina reflects on her relationships, her reporting career, and Ginsburg's legacy.
Nina has had other close friendships with Supreme Court justices, including Antonin Scalia, and she talks about them in the book. In our conversation, I pressed her on the ethics of that, where and how she defines the line between friendship and sourcing, and whether she can be a fair judge of that line.
Nina Totenberg: There is no way that you can recuse yourself from a whole category of stories or a whole category of people. You would have no career. It doesn't work that way.
Basu, Narrating: We started by talking about how Nina and the some-day justice first met. It was 1971, Nina was reporting on a case before the Supreme Court, and she saw that the brief had been written by a law professor at Rutgers, a woman named Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
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Totenberg: I was a newbie reporter covering the court in my early twenties, and I didn't understand the brief that she'd filed, so I called her up and I got an hour-long lecture.
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Totenberg: And I could ask questions during the lecture, it was a great lecture, but that's how I first met her. And originally our friendship was a professional one, but over the years, nearly a half century, it grew to be a far more personal one.
Basu: Yeah, and I should say that that brief is the now famous argument that the 14th Amendment protects against discrimination on the basis of sex. So, tell us, if you could, a little bit more about that phone call, that argument you wanted to understand better, and really that introduction of Ginsburg into your life.
Totenberg: Well, the reason I didn't understand it is that it said that the 14th Amendment covered women and, of course, women didn't have the vote when the 14th Amendment was enacted.
Basu: Right.
Totenberg: And it was largely enacted to protect previously enslaved peoples, so how could this apply to women? And when I called her, we had a very lengthy conversation, but what it boiled down to is that the 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection of the law for all persons, and women are persons. That's essentially what it boiled down to. She didn't actually argue that case, she wrote the brief. And she won. And it was the first time that the Supreme Court said that the 14th Amendment did protect women, did include women, so it was a very, very important case. And over time, she was the architect of the battle for women's rights in the courts.
Basu: Right, right. A few years into your phone friendship with Ruth, you were hired by NPR. And this was in 1975, right?
Totenberg: I think so. [LAUGHS]
Basu: [LAUGHS] You're like "I'm pretty sure." And so, those early days, we think of the early women pioneers at NPR, of course it's your name, it's Susan Stamberg, it's Cokie Roberts, Linda Wertheimer. And you've often been asked if there was a sense of competition between the few women who were there at the time, but as you wrote in the book, and you've said before, you said no, there was a real friendship there. So, tell us a little bit more about that friendship you struck up with those women.
Totenberg: Well, we were of a generation in which there were almost no women in the workforce. Every place I ever worked in the beginning of my professional life, I was either the only woman or one of two women. And Ruth and I and Cokie and Linda, we were all women with our noses up against the windows saying essentially to the guys "Hey, let us in!" We weren't trying to break a glass ceiling, we were just trying to get a foot in the door. And so we understood, sort of instinctively, that we had to support one another, that we had a shared experience as working women, working wives, working mothers, that men in that era did not share because [LAUGHS] nobody ever thought that a man needed to go home to take care of his sick child in those days. And husbands were just learning that they had to make accommodations for women working. And so we really did support one another and it was very important.
Basu: You know, one thing I really liked in the book, reading about the description of Justice Sandra de O'Connor and Ginsburg's relationship when they were the only two women on the court. And obviously they were very different ideologically, but they clearly supported each other. Can you tell us more about their relationship?
Totenberg: Well, O'Connor, remember, was on the court as the only woman for twelve, twelve, years.
Basu: [CHUCKLES] Right, right.
Totenberg: And when she had to go to the bathroom, she had to go back to chambers, whereas the guys had a bathroom right there where the conference was, or the anteroom of where-- before they go to the robing room. And when Ruth arrived, they decided, well, maybe they better put in a second bathroom for the women. But O'Connor was very generous to her. And while O'Connor was definitely a conservative justice, a centrist conservative justice but a conservative, they did agree always, as far as I know, on the women's rights issues and the gender discrimination issues. When Justice Ginsburg got her first assignment from the chief justice it was what they call in the profession "a dog," and [LAUGHS] very difficult. And she went to O'Connor and said, What should I do? And O'Connor said, Just write it. Just write it and get it out as fast as you can so that he doesn't have an excuse to give you another dog. They considered themselves sisters on the court, I think, and the American Association of Women Judges actually gave them t-shirts, one said "I'm Ruth, not Sandra" and the other said "I'm Sandra, not Ruth," because male advocates before the Supreme Court kept calling one by the other's name. And believe me, these women did not look in the slightest bit the same. [LAUGHS]
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Basu: Oh, no!
Basu: They're so different. [LAUGHS] They're so different. That's so terrible. [LAUGHS]
Basu: Let's talk about a big moment in your career that you write about in the book. You broke the story of the Anita Hill allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. This was 1991, he was a Supreme Court nominee at the time, and it was still a few years before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was gonna be appointed to the Supreme Court. Can you talk a bit about the reaction to your reporting on Anita Hill's allegations and a bit more about what you went through at the time?
Totenberg: Well, part of my story was about Hill's allegations, but the other part of my story was that the Senate Judiciary Committee, which knew about her, did not really investigate her allegations at a time when, if they had, it might have become clearer who was telling the truth. And it wouldn't have been a "he said, she said," even though Hill had some corroborating witnesses who said that, at the time, she told them about it and that she was greatly distressed by it. But still, that's not the same as having an eyewitness, for example. But the committee had not done that. And it was really very interesting and awful that a lot of committee members, especially Republican committee members, were furious at me because I had been the messenger, and they--
Basu: Right. You were pointing out basically a lack of diligence in the process, right?
Totenberg: That's exactly what I was doing. And I don't think most of the Democrats were thrilled by me either, but they didn't wanna investigate me. And eventually the Republicans succeeded in persuading the Democrats that they should investigate this, quote, "leak." Of course there was an investigator appointed and he called me to testify and I refused to testify, and he asked that I be cited for contempt, which if convicted would've meant that I went to prison. So, eventually the Senate came to its senses and decided that was perhaps not the smartest thing to do, to blame the messenger, and the whole investigation just went nowhere, as many leak investigations do. So that was the end of that, but it was an extremely unpleasant time.
Basu: I understand that you also write about the sort of surprising responses that you got to your reporting from many women who saw it as an acknowledgement of something they'd experienced but hadn't seen talked about very much, openly.
Totenberg: Well, it was not so much talking to me, it was talking to the senators. I mean, the faxes, because that's the way people communicated in those days, instead of texts-- the fax machines were vaporizing from women furious that the committee had not looked into this. And what had turned out was that what Anita Hill was alleging had happened to lots of other women who had felt they had no recourse and, in fact, thought that they were the only ones, because people didn't talk about it. And, substantially, over the immediate years had followed, the numbers of sexual harassment complaints just skyrocketed.
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Basu: Mm. When you reflect back on that moment in time and how it shifted the conversation in many ways… I mean, help me draw some parallels to the more recent confirmation hearings. I'm specifically thinking of the time when Brett Kavanaugh was going through questioning. Where do you see overlap and where do you see distinct differences?
Totenberg: Well, I think it's actually-- As bad as the Hill-Thomas hearings were, they're more partisan and less substantive today. I mean, no nominee, Democrat or Republican, goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee unschooled in how to avoid answering questions.
Basu: Sure.
Totenberg: You get a really-- sort of a kabuki dance on everybody's part that produces no real knowledge about the nominee except what they're able to endure and how gracefully they do that.
Basu: Yeah. I think the big criticism of them is that we hear things in these confirmation hearings that fall completely out of line with later rulings that we've seen the court pass down.
Totenberg: That's why I mean it's a kabuki dance, because if you actually read the answers, the answers are fudgy enough that you could not say that the nominee misled the committee deliberately. They're very carefully crafted answers to leave wiggle room. They sound like they don't leave wiggle room, but they do leave wiggle room.
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Basu, Narrating: Nina has openly talked about her close friendships with Supreme Court justices. I mean, the book is called "Dinners with Ruth." She regularly had Ruth and her husband Marty over for meals. She describes how Ginsburg's friendship helped her through the grief of losing her first husband and how Ginsburg officiated her second wedding.
She also counted other justices as friends. including the late justices William Brennan and Lewis Powell and Antonin Scalia. In her book, Nina recounts inviting Scalia, his wife, and others for dinner. This was a few days after Scalia's ruling in a landmark case that declared a handgun ban unconstitutional under the Second Amendment. At dinner, Nina's husband put plastic squirt guns in everyone's soup bowls, which Nina says got a big laugh. I asked her, why tell this story?
Totenberg: My husband is a trauma surgeon. He very forcefully disagrees with Scalia on this subject, and Scalia certainly knows that, or knew that, but this was just an accident of time. We had this long-planned dinner and this decision had just come out and, in an odd sort of way, it was a laugh, but it also was a gentle ribbing of him.
I asked Nina to say more, because it's one thing to make the argument that friendship is inherently good, it's an entirely other thing to be friends with the people you're reporting on.
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Totenberg: The thing about having a Supreme Court justice as a friend is there are boundaries and they're very clear. It's not the same as having a politician or a White House person or a policy person as a friend, there are no lines, they blur. But a Supreme Court justice is not supposed to talk about a pending case or what's going on behind the scenes in a pending case, or, afterwards, what immediately had been going on about the pending case. Sometimes you can get a justice to talk about something that has gone on ten or 20 years ago, and after he or she has retired, but that's it. And so, while that justice is a sitting justice, they're not gonna talk to you about anything that's going on, and if you asked they would not be your friends. Ruth once asked me not to ask her questions about some inappropriate comments she'd made about then candidate Trump. And she said, Please don't ask me about that today, and I said, Ruth, I have to ask you about that, that's my job, and she didn't argue with me, she immediately understood that.
Basu: Mm, mm. I don't mean to sound naïve about how we learn things as reporters, I'm also a journalist, I came up in public radio, I have looked up to you and the other trailblazing women of NPR for all of my career, but where do you see the line between cultivating relationships with sources and cultivating friendships that might conflict with your ability to report fairly?
Totenberg: You know, I never had a real problem doing that. Now, maybe it was because I covered the court. And sometimes I wrote things that justices that I quite cared about didn't like. I mean, Justice Scalia was not very happy when I, along with other journalists, wrote about his hunting trips with Cheney at the time that the vice president had a case before the court. And it was only later, when he got truly annoyed with all of the coverage, that he explained why he didn't recuse himself. Being a reporter doesn't mean that you don't have friendships and that those friendships don't bear fruit in the sense that you know a great deal about this human being and that contributes to your knowledge of how that person interprets the law or why they're voting-- if they're in Congress, the way they're voting. And in a city like Washington, there basically are, you know, only a few categories of people. There are lawyers, there are politician, and by that I include White House personnel and senators and house members and their staffs, and there are there are judges and there are lobbyists. And then there are reporters who cover all of those people, and if you wanna be a good reporter, you have to get to know those people. And some of them you may not like terribly much, but you still have to get to know them if possible, and others, you will find, I think, that you do like them, even though you may disagree with them, personally, about many things. But that's not your job. Your job is not to agree or disagree with the people you cover, your job is to tell people more about these individuals, how they function and what they're doing. And I've never found that that was terribly hard. I suppose if I had learned something really dastardly about Justice Ginsburg, I might have had a problem. But the problem-- If I thought I couldn't write about it, I would've given the information to another reporter at NPR and said go to it.
Basu: Where is that line for you? How would you know when to sort of recuse yourself?
Totenberg: If you feel like you're holding back for some reason, you should not be covering this story.
Basu: Yeah. I mean, I'll say it seems like a really difficult thing to rely on yourself to be able to make that call or to be the judge of whether you're too close to a story or shouldn't be reporting that story for any reason. And I'll tell you, you know, what worries me as a journalist, trust in media is way down or, at the very least, it's very splintered depending on your ideology, and a lot of forward-thinkers in journalism right now talk about the importance of rebuilding that trust by being transparent about how we report stories. Do you see how your book could call some of that trust into question?
Totenberg: I got news for you. I have news for you. I have news for you. I have news for you. Trust in reporters has been way down for a very long time.
Basu: Yeah.
Basu: Sure it has. Sure.
Totenberg: And you just have to do your job. There is no way that you can recuse yourself from a whole category of stories or a whole category of people, you would have no career. It doesn't work that way.
Basu: But your career was specifically covering the Supreme Court.
Totenberg: It is, and I've done it rather well, I think. And I've never felt that I had a conflict. I never felt that, Geez, I either like or don't like this person and I can't report on them for that reason, any more than when you have a boss you don't particularly like, you still, you know, do what the boss tells you.
Basu: Sure.
Totenberg: There are rules-- There are rules in journalism, and there are people who don't follow those rules.
Basu: Sure, sure.
Basu: You know, it feels like there's been a shift in journalism where it's become more acceptable to talk about personal stakes as reporters, you know, the way that you can't separate your experience as a woman or I can't separate my experience as a woman of color from the way that we understand the world and report on it. And you write in the book about how in your early career, you didn't wanna be pigeon-holed into so-called women's issues. How do you think about personal stakes as a reporter today?
Totenberg: I really try to keep my personal views out of what I write about. I am not a person who believes in the kind of journalism where you reflect your views. I want people to trust what I tell them, and the way to do that is to be as fair as I possibly can and to discard, as much as I possibly can, my personal views, and to make sure that every basic angle that is defensible is in a story, and sometimes some ones that I personally think are not defensible but that is the argument that one side is making. And we're talking about very hotly contested issues. And if you take abortion as one of them, as just an example, people on both sides feel very passionately about it, and I really feel the obligation to make sure that both sides have their say.
Basu: Yeah, let's turn actually in our last few minutes to talk a little bit about abortion, but also Justice Ginsburg's legacy and sort of where the court is going from here. First, to just stop on the very end of Justice Ginsburg's life, what do you know about her decision to stay on as long as she did? And do you know if she ever came to regret her decision?
Totenberg: I don't know it. I mean, I sort of-- I'm sure that she regretted it in some ways, but, you know-- I did not know that President Obama had invited her to the White House for lunch in 2013, and sort of suggested that maybe, given the political calendar, she should think about retiring. She didn't do it. Knowing her, I understand why. She was at the top of her game, she wasn't sick, she was the senior liberal member of the court, meaning that she sometimes assigned opinions. And, you know, the way she saw things, at one point in one interview that I did with her, she basically said, and I don't wanna put words in her mouth, but it was pretty close to this: "Who better than me?" And you remember, at the time, the filibuster was still in place, and I think that by that she meant that she believed that Republicans would filibuster anybody who would be anywhere near representing the views that she represented. And I also think she expected that eventually Hillary Clinton would be president and then she wanted to give her the nomination of fulfilling her own seat. You know, it was a gamble, in some sense of the word, and she lost.
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Basu, Narrating: It's been only two years since Justice Ginsburg's death, but the court has changed dramatically. Today, conservatives hold a clear majority, six seats, and three of those conservative justices were nominated by President Trump, who lost the popular vote in the 2016 election.
In May of this year, a leaked draft of a Supreme Court majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, was made public by "Politico." It revealed that the court was ready to overturn the "Roe v. Wade" abortion decision, undoing 50 years of precedent.
The leak itself was unprecedented. The Supreme Court is a notoriously secretive institution, and Nina has reported on how this breach in protocol created a lot of distrust within the court and between the justices.
I asked Nina about how the court is functioning today and what that means for the future.
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Totenberg: Well, I think this court is clearly the most conservative courts in probably 90 years and that it is what one scholar has called the "YOLO court," you only live once, and it is reaching out for as many big issues as possible to resolve them. And it's a six-to-three court, meaning that the conservative majority can lose one member and still prevail, which is of course what happened in the Dobbs case, and I think that is indicative of where the court is. In addition to the fact that there was this extraordinary and unprecedented leak, it is an indication, I think, of how fraught things are at the court. I don't think they particularly get along, and by that I don't mean that the liberals don't get along with the conservatives, I think the conservatives don't necessarily get along with each other either. [LAUGHS] I've covered the Supreme Court for, you know, close to 50 years, and this is the only time in my coverage, and certainly if I look back in other contemporary history, in which there is no center on the court, no justice, or a group of justices, who can change the outcome because they are at the center of the ideology of the court.
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Basu: Yeah.
Basu: I mean, so what does that mean for us, that there's no real center on today's court? What does it mean to have a Supreme Court that is so out of step with public opinion on big issues like abortion access?
Totenberg: Well, I don't know, and I don't know whether public opinion will stay where it is. I mean, there have been times before where the court where public opinion was very critical of the court and it didn't last very long, so we can wait and see about that. But, you know, I always urge people to-- when you ask a question like "What does it mean that we didn't have a center?" Well, it means that there is very little accommodation, and if you wanna know how the other side feels and you are to the left of center, I know how you feel, but supposing you had six votes, what would you do? And if you had to accommodate a more conservative center, that would change the outcome, and it would mean that the decision was not as, for want of a better word, extreme.
Basu: Would you say that this court is revisiting precedent in a different way than past courts?
Totenberg: Well, as I said, it is the YOLO court. It is moving with great speed and often reaching out for cases and issues that have been decided, let's say, in one lower court, one court of appeals. And, you know, when I began covering the Supreme Court, what I learned was what the justices do is wait until there's a conflict in the court. And they like to wait as long as they can because they often learn more if they see what is happening in multiple courts. Well, that happens less and less today. And the other thing, of course, is that the court is reaching out to block lower court decisions, doing that without full briefing and argument, which has always happened to a limited degree, but now has become sort of a common practice that was initiated essentially in the Trump administration and by the Trump administration.
Basu: Right.
Basu: And how do you think Justice Ginsburg would be thinking of the court in this moment?
Totenberg: I think she'd probably do everything in her power to try to sand down the edges of discord.
Basu: And what would that look like? How would she have done that in the past?
Totenberg: Well, she often wrote dissents, for example, in recent years, that were not flaming in their language. They were pointed, but they were not the kind of language that the majority had in the Dobbs case. There are ways and ways of disagreeing, and I think she would've done what she always has done: do it in a very proper but pointed way.
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Basu: Nina Totenberg, thank you so much for giving us your time, giving us a glimpse into your life and your career. Really appreciate it.
Totenberg: Thank you for having me.
Basu, Narrating: You can read Nina Totenberg's book, "Dinners with Ruth," on Apple Books. You can find a link on our show notes page.
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