Chitra Ragavan: You won a lot of awards and earned national recognition when you broke and covered stories related to the sexual harassment allegations leveled by a University of Oklahoma professor, Anita Hill, against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Do you have any thoughts, just looking back at coverage of the Anita Hill controversy and how it was covered then and now? And I had no idea that they were doing what they were doing. Nina Totenberg: But there is a generational divide between people like me who were just glad to get the job and tolerated things that should not be tolerated and would not be tolerated today, and young people who have basically an execution-at-dawn mentality.
Nina Totenberg: And I think older women like me are more tolerant in that regard. There is a very discernible difference between the older generation of women who have been at work for at least 40 years and younger people who have been at work often for less than And I worry, I think we worry in the older generation, that if you get too militant, men will be unwilling to mentor you. I remember those days. Tell us a little bit about what it was like to manage a very difficult demanding beat and caring for your husband.
Nina Totenberg: Well, I found out I was stronger than I thought, but I also found out that all of my friends and family were just beyond essential for my ability to cope and my mental health. And they thought he was going to die, and I was racing back. 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.
You take care of him. You are always there for him if he needs you. Nina Totenberg: But so many people did their duty for me as well. My friends, who gave up lots of their time to help me, my family, who did the same thing. 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. Already a subscriber? Log in or link your magazine subscription. Account Profile. Sign Out. Tags: how i get it done work power careers.
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. Totenberg, Cokie Roberts, and Linda Wertheimer eventually became known at the three musketeers of NPR because they developed notable careers there at a time when other news organizations were less hospitable to women.
According to Totenberg, this was due partly to pay. At NPR Totenberg soon achieved recognition. In she reported on secret Supreme Court deliberations denying appeals by three top figures in the Watergate scandal that forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon. A decade later she received the Alfred I. This disclosure led him to withdraw his nomination. During the U. While another reporter, Timothy Phelps of Newsday, actually broke the story, Totenberg obtained a copy of the affidavit and gained as an exclusive interview with Hill, who had been ambivalent about making charges publicly.
With Totenberg as its anchor, NPR broadcast both the original and subsequent hearings from start to finish, for which it received the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award. For the Thomas hearings as well as commentary on the retirement of Justice Thurgood Marshall, she received the Joan S. Barone Award for Washington public affairs reporting. Conservative allies of Thomas, however, accused Totenberg of lack of objectivity.
One Senator, Alan K. Simpson, a Republican from Wyoming, criticized her reporting sharply as they both were being taped for appearances on Nightline , an ABC television news program. After Thomas gained confirmation, his supporters insisted the Senate appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the leak of the affidavit. Called to testify for four hours in , Totenberg refused to name her source on grounds of freedom of the press.
It oozed over every workplace, creating everything from heated discussions to an avalanche of lawsuits. In a biographical sketch, Totenberg credited her first husband, Floyd K. The couple was married in ; Haskell died in The justice officiated at the marriage in of Totenberg and Dr.
David Reines, a trauma surgeon, who treated Totenberg when she was hit by a boat propeller during their honeymoon. During a year career, Totenberg has been honoured seven times by the American Bar Association for excellence in legal reporting. She won the first Toni House award from the American Judicature Society for her entire body of work and was the first radio journalist designated as Broadcaster of the Year by the National Press Foundation.
She has received more than two dozen honorary degrees, although she never finished college.
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