And Cokie Roberts, my friend and colleague, showed up. She heard about it because she heard about it, and she just went tearing over to the hospital to be there so that Floyd could see somebody who was not a doctor or a nurse looking at him. You have real problems at the moment. You have to take care of this man, make sure everything goes right, and do your job.
Nina Totenberg: And it worked. And then Ruth Ginsburg gave me wonderful advice. Go back to work. And you will not be sucked into the maw of the hospital routine, and you will be better able to take care of him when he comes home.
Chitra Ragavan: Well, those days also, at least I was there to see it, showed your incredible discipline and work ethic. You would go to the Court. You would come back. You would file your stories. You would see him in the hospital, and in-between, I remember you crying in your cubicle. And I remember NPR had built a little privacy partition for you so you could-. Chitra Ragavan: … cry in private. And there was a lot of crying, but you never missed a deadline.
Nina Totenberg: Yeah, well, it is best for your own mental health to do that. That was absolutely true. Chitra Ragavan: So after a long illness and being in and out of the hospital, your husband passed away. And you subsequently met another wonderful man, a trauma surgeon, and you ended up on your honeymoon requiring a trauma surgeon. And on our honeymoon, I got run over by a little power boat. This is very difficult when somebody is bleeding, and thank God we never thought about sharks, neither one of us.
Nina Totenberg: And fortunately for me, everything turned out all right and I was fine. But I did recuse myself when there was a case about a similar boating accident that got to the Supreme Court. It was a tort case, and I went to my boss. Chitra Ragavan: That was a life-threatening moment for you. Did you change in any way after that? Nina Totenberg: Really, no.
Again, the family rallied. My husband at the time was chairman of surgery at one of the partners hospitals in the Boston area, and we went back to Boston and he had me checked out there. Chitra Ragavan: That you were able to keep your spirits up even at that moment I think is pretty remarkable.
Chitra Ragavan: You wanted to be a witness to history, and you have been a witness to history over these past few decades watching the Court grow and change in many ways. Looking at where we are now with the Court, what do you see? Can you make any predictions at all in terms of where we are going once the Court convenes? Nina Totenberg: Well, we know the direction. And they are not just solidly conservative. And Mitch McConnell has said he would push through a Trump nominee, even though that is contrary to what he did for President Obama when there was an unexpected vacancy then.
We could have a six-to-three majority, and then no single conservative justice would be the so-called swing justice. And that might extend as well to birth control and the availability of birth control.
What are your thoughts on his legacy and how that reflects on where we are today? Democrats have, by and large, named very establishment moderate liberals, but they are liberals. Make no mistake about that. They like the rules that have been laid down, up until now. The newer members of the Court definitely want to change those rules. Gun rights, essentially same thing. Totenberg maintains that personal relationships do not influence her reporting.
Perhaps best-known for reporting allegations of sexual harassment brought by Anita Hill, a law professor, against Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings for the court in , Totenberg has become a legend in Washington journalism.
She was born on January 14, , in New York City, the oldest of three children of Melanie Totenberg, a political activist and real estate broker, and Roman Totenberg, a Polish Jewish immigrant who was an acclaimed concert violist. She grew up with her sisters, Jill and Amy, in Scarsdale, New York, where she graduated from high school. All three Totenberg daughters attained success, with Jill engaging in marketing communications and Amy becoming a U.
District Court judge in Georgia. In the sisters received media attention when a Stradivarius violin stolen from their father by a music student 35 years earlier was returned to the family. Totenberg herself reported for NPR on the discovery of the famous instrument in the apartment of the thief after his death. In the process she surmounted attacks on her journalistic integrity, including charges of liberal bias and partisanship as she cultivated sources in highly placed circles.
She then became a general assignment reporter at the Peabody Times in Peabody, Massachusetts. Eager to cover politics, Totenberg moved to Washington in as the sole editor of Roll Call , a weekly covering Capitol Hill. She soon joined the staff of the National Observer, a now-defunct weekly, where she first began to report on the Supreme Court, brashly calling justices for off-the-record conversations that enabled her to produce award-winning stories.
In , Totenberg wrote a profile on J. Edgar Hoover, long-time head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that enraged the year-old director. Nevertheless, the next year Totenberg was fired for plagiarism, after writing a story using quotes from members of Congress without attributing them to the Washington Post , where they had been published. Her defenders said reprinting of previously reported quotes represented common journalistic practice of the day.
William L. Scott of Virginia, who headed the list, to hold a press conference to decry the appellation, drawing more ridicule to himself and further establishing Totenberg as a formidable reporter. Although she lacked broadcasting experience, Totenberg joined NPR in and found herself for the first time among other exceptional women journalists.
I refused to tell them much of anything, so the counsel hired by the Senate tried to cite me for contempt. But for the months that followed, it was extremely unpleasant. It was the earliest very bare-knuckles partisan combat that I recall and that I was right in the center of, and there was a certain amount of sexism to it all in addition. Thank God, by that point there were lots of women who covered the Senate.
Otherwise, it would have been even more unpleasant. When I broke the Anita Hill story , if Republicans savaged me, they certainly savaged her much more in ways that would be completely unacceptable today.
On looking back at her career: The story that I think is most indelibly ingrained in my brain is the Pentagon Papers case. I was very young, in my 20s. I had never imagined anyone would try to suppress publication of anything. I remember sitting in the Wall Street Journal offices in New York, because I had gone to New York to cover the Court of Appeals argument, and thinking to myself, This could be a very different country.
The free press could be a lot less free after this case. I remember that really clearly. This interview has been edited and condensed. Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected.
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