Nina Totenberg
Nina Totenberg at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., May 21, 2019. (photo by Allison Shelley) Ep. 8 — An award-winning reporter struggles with balancing a demanding job and managing a family crisis and learns the true meaning of duty and family / Nina Totenberg, Legal Affairs Correspondent, National Public Radio (NPR) In this episode, NPR’s Nina Totenberg confesses that her youthful admiration for teen fictional detective Nancy Drew played a formative role in pursuing journalism as a career in an era when female reporters were a rarity. Totenberg reveals how she broke free from the confines of fashion and wedding news reporting via press releases and became one of the most acclaimed and celebrated legal reporters in the country. And she compares the challenges she and other working women of her generation faced to how women are handling sexual harassment today in light of the #MeToo movement. Totenberg describes what it’s like to have covered the U.S. Supreme Court for decades, and she reads the tea leaves on where this increasingly conservative court may be heading in the coming months. And she walks us through her difficult days holding down a high-profile job and taking care of her late first husband, Senator Floyd Haskell (D-Colorado), after he suffered a serious head injury from a fall and battled for his life for months in an intensive care unit. Totenberg shares with us the advice that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg gave her to help her through those trying times. And she talks about her own survival from a snorkeling accident when she was hit by a power boat during her honeymoon with her second husband, who just happened to be a trauma surgeon. Through these crises, Totenberg reveals how she came to have a renewed appreciation for friends and family and the importance of duty in life’s journey. Last but not least, Totenberg ends the conversation with a heartwarming anecdote about her virtuoso violinist father Roman Totenberg’s stolen Stradivarius. Transcript Download the PDF Chitra Ragavan: Hello, and welcome to When It Mattered. I'm Chitra Ragavan. On this episode, we will be talking to Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio's award-winning legal affairs correspondent. Totenberg's coverage of the Supreme Court and legal affairs have won her widespread recognition and acclaim and earned many awards. She's often featured in Supreme Court documentaries, most recently in RBG. As Newsweek put it, quote, "The mainstays of NPR are Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the créme del la créme is Nina Totenberg." Nina, welcome to the podcast. Nina Totenberg: It's my pleasure, Chitra. Chitra Ragavan: What was your path to becoming a reporter? Nina Totenberg: Well, when I was a girl, really a girl girl, I was a great fan of Nancy Drew, and Nancy could do everything. And, of course, she had no mother. Her mother was dead, so she didn't even have to compete for her father's affections. And she had a boyfriend, Ned, and a roadster, and she solved all kinds of mysteries and could do a jackknife dive. And I wanted to be Nancy Drew, and I thought the mystery part was something that I could do. And so I think that that made me, at first, interested in journalism. Nina Totenberg: And then later, when I was teenager, I read Theodore White's, The Making of a President, 1960, and I thought, "That's really what I want to do. I want to be ... " The elegant way of saying it is, "A witness to history." The inelegant way of saying it is, "I want to be a gossip," in the most regal sense. I mean, my colleague, Cokie Roberts, often says that, "Historians get it wrong. They make it boring." But history is gossip. It's what's going on and the story behind the story as well as the story in front of the story. And that's what I wanted to do from the age of about 16 on. Chitra Ragavan: So how did you go from being a fan of Nancy Drew to actually becoming a real reporter?