Nina Totenberg on NPR, RBG, and a 50-year friendship

When NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg first got to know the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the early 1970s, neither woman was well known. As Ms. Totenberg recalls in “Dinners With Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships,” “We were outsiders to the world in which we operated. We both had our noses pressed up against the windowpane, looking inside, and saying, ‘Hey, men in there, let me in!’” Of course, they each achieved remarkable success in their respective fields. Through their decadeslong friendship, they were there for each other through professional challenges and triumphs as well as personal joys and losses. In addition to RBG, Ms. Totenberg recalls friendships with her NPR colleagues Cokie Roberts and Linda Wertheimer, among others. She spoke recently with the Monitor.

Your relationship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg long predated her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, but how did you manage the potential conflict of being personal friends with her while covering the court?

It really wasn’t that difficult. We’d been friends for more than 20 years, and she then happens to get on the Supreme Court. You don’t divorce her over that. You maintain your friendship and you maintain your boundaries. And they’re pretty clear: I can’t ask about what’s going on inside the court, and she can’t dictate what I’m going to write, either. 

Early on, you and RBG were both women in extremely male-dominated fields. How important was that to the connection you formed?

I’m sure it had a great deal to do with it. That was true for me and Ruth, me and Cokie and Linda. We weren’t trying to break a glass ceiling when we started out – we were trying to get a foot in the door. We had a common experience as women in that era, when men dominated everything and could and did say almost everything to and about us in our presence. It was a really important thing that we had other women we could turn to who were our friends. 

You cover other important relationships in the book, including your long friendship with the late Cokie Roberts. What do you miss most about her?

I miss everything about her. I miss her good counsel, her laugh, our Saturday nights at the movies. I miss her riotous sense of humor and her goodness. 

Many people are familiar with RBG’s legal and judicial career and her devoted relationship with her husband, Marty. What do you want readers to know about her as a friend?

I knew her for almost 50 years, through a time when neither of us was the least bit famous, much less iconic, as she became. At some very critical moments in my life she gave me the best advice and the best care. She did that when my late husband [Sen. Floyd Haskell] was sick for years. She was amazing in how she would show up at just the right moment to offer a meal or a ticket to join her at the opera or the best advice imaginable.

RBG was famously close friends with her ideological opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia. You also had a friendship with Justice Scalia as well as other men and women with a range of political views. Do you think those types of relationships are still possible in our hyperpartisan times?

I’m not sure. I still have friendships with judges who are very conservative and very liberal. I think with politicians it’s much harder. When I used to cover Congress often, which I only do for confirmations now, I had lots of friends on the right and the left, Democrats and Republicans. I think that would be harder today, in part because Republicans in particular, but not exclusively, really shut out journalists unless they think they are partisans to their point of view. You can like people, respect them, and fairly represent their views without being partisans for them. I think some politicians just don’t believe that. 

Public confidence in the Supreme Court is at a low point. As an expert on the court, what are your thoughts on what the coming years might look like?

I think many people were shocked that Roe v. Wade was overturned. Once [former President] Donald Trump got three appointees and the 6-3 conservative majority, that was a foregone conclusion. For those of us who cover the court, the only question was how fast they were going to do it. There are a lot of other issues coming down the pike that will have a profound effect on American society, but they’re not as big a deal as abortion rights are. People may not notice what’s happening, but this is going to be a court unlike any we’ve seen in at least 70 years. It’s a very interesting story to cover. That’s the way I have treated it and will treat it.