Nina Totenberg, an award-winning National Public Radio journalist, spoke about her career path and experiences covering the Supreme Court on Tuesday night in Hendricks Chapel. Her talk was the first of the spring 2019 University Lectures series.

Totenberg has worked at NPR for 44 years and reported on the Supreme Court during critical points in United States history, including the resignation of President Richard Nixon and the congressional inquiry into law professor Anita Hill’s sexual assault allegations against Judge Clarence Thomas.

She was the first radio journalist to be awarded Broadcaster of the Year by the National Press Foundation, and the American Bar Association has recognized her seven times for excellence in legal reporting.

College of Law Dean Craig Boise moderated the lecture, asking Totenberg about her career, possible Supreme Court rulings and how the country’s highest court has changed over the past few decades.

Getting to where she is now wasn’t easy. Totenberg said she always had an interest in digging up the truth. She was 12 or 13 when she realized becoming Nancy Drew wasn’t a possibility. Working as a police officer was also off the table because there weren’t many women police officers at the time, she said.

“In my later teens I realized that I really did want to be a witness to history,” Totenberg said. “The best way for me to do that was not to be a casuist, as it were, but to be an observer.”

She graduated with a degree in journalism from Boston University, but many employers did not give her a chance. People were blunt in telling Totenberg that they did not hire women, she said.

Eventually, she got a job at a newspaper and from there worked at several publications, including the National Observer and the New Times magazine. In 1975, she was recruited by NPR.

Back then, NPR had a small staff, and the only program was “All Things Considered,” Totenberg said. She covered Supreme Court cases, the Justice Department, judicial nominations, the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and political scandals.

As NPR grew larger, her jurisdiction shrunk, and Totenberg mostly covered the Supreme Court.

Nina Totenberg’s talk on Tuesday night in Hendricks Chapel was the first of three University Lectures to be hosted this semester. Aaron Kassman | Staff Photographer

Her first major story at NPR focused on the appeal of three men who had been convicted as part of the Watergate scandal that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation. The court denied the appeal in a 5-to-3 vote — the three dissenting justices were Nixon appointees.

Totenberg also broke a story that tanked the Supreme Court nomination of Douglas Ginsburg in 1987. She revealed that Ginsburg had smoked marijuana with students while he was professor at Harvard Law School. At the time, President Ronald Reagan’s administration had a policy that the Justice Department would not hire any lawyers who had smoked marijuana after being accepted into the Bar Association.

“If it didn’t matter to the Republicans, he wouldn’t have withdrawn his nomination,” Totenberg said. “The Democrats thought it was hilarious, showing you the cultural difference between the two.”

Totenberg said when President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991, the first thing the Bush administration did was get out the fact that Clarence had smoked marijuana as a student. Three years earlier, Al Gore had admitted during his presidential campaign that he had smoked marijuana. Bill Clinton admitted the same in the 1992 campaign.

“It felt like a raining of confessions,” she said. “It’s a measure of the era we were in.”

Boise then asked Totenberg about the treatment of Anita Hill and how her situation differed from that of Christine Blasey Ford during the nomination hearings for Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

Totenberg said that, on the day the Senate Judiciary Committee was voting on the Thomas nomination, she noticed many people on the committee were looking at the same document from a manila folder.

Then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Delaware) said at the hearing that the committee would not address any allegations of character failures or misconduct by Thomas.

“I thought, ‘Nobody made any allegations of misconduct against him. What are they talking about?’” Totenberg said. “I just basically smelled a rat.”

She called dozens of people, trying to find people who knew about Hill and the allegations. In 1991, Hill gave Totenberg an exclusive interview about her allegations.

“(Hill) was treated by Republicans on the committee as if she was a lying and vindictive woman who had lusted after Judge Thomas,” Totenberg said.

She said Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee were anxious to not repeat the treatment of Hill while Ford gave her testimony in September 2018. Totenberg was shocked by Kavanaugh’s outbursts and conspiracy theories during his hearing.

“I have known Brett Kavanaugh for at least 15 years, and that is not a Brett Kavanaugh I have ever seen,” she said.

Boise shifted the lecture to ask Totenberg about hot-button legal issues that the Supreme Court could make decisions on in the future.

When asked about the future of abortion rights, Totenberg said the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion is in “peril” now that Justice Anthony Kennedy has been replaced by Kavanaugh. The court now has a conservative majority.

Totenberg said she doesn’t expect the court to overturn Roe v. Wade. Instead, justices may slowly strip away the abortion rights provided by the original ruling. In states like New York, where the Legislature has passed an abortion rights bill, the court’s ruling wouldn’t make a difference, she said.

“Where abortion is very unpopular politically, those state legislatures likely will enact the kinds of requirements for abortion clinics that will simply make it economically impossible for most of them to stay in business,” Totenberg said.

She said she does not expect the court to rule on partisan gerrymandering or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program from former President Barack Obama’s administration that provides a path to citizenship for people who arrived in the U.S. as children.

At the end of the lecture, Totenberg took questions from an audience of about 300 people. One person asked how she felt when women justices were appointed to the court.

Totenberg covered the court a long time before women were appointed, she said. The first was Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, appointed by Reagan in 1981.

“She always felt incredibly under the microscope, that everything she did could reverberate backwards and make it so that women could never succeed on the bench,” she said.

When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrived in 1993, it completely changed the equation for O’Connor, Totenberg said.

“She didn’t feel that the weight of the world was on her shoulders,” she said.

Published on March 6, 2019 at 1:24 am

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