Note: The following transcript is created by both humans and AI, so despite our best attempts may contain errors.
Bull: And today is Wednesday, December 11th, 11:15am, Eastern Standard Time. This is Brian Bull, lead interviewer and director of the Public Radio Oral History Project. Today our guest is Nina Totenberg, who has served as National Public Radio's Legal Affairs Correspondent, largely focusing on the US Supreme Court, since 1975 -or nearly half a century- her work has garnered her many accolades, including the Long Island University George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism, the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Alfred I. DuPont Columbia University Silver Baton for her coverage of Supreme Court nominations.
Nina Totenberg, thank you so much for joining us. It's a genuine pleasure. Some basic biographical information first, please. When and where were you born?
Totenberg: I was born in New York City in 1944.
Bull: So it's been nearly 50 years since Bob Zoellick first hired you at NPR. What kind of person was nan tonberg back in 1975?
Totenberg: A lot more ambitious, probably because I had a lot to be ambitious about. I was a nobody for all practical purposes. I didn't care about being as somebody, but I cared about being as somebody in journalism and about breaking stories and doing stuff that, well, I like to describe what I do as being a - I realize this denigrates it a bit, but a high class gossip, and I'm also an explainer in the job I do about covering the Supreme Court, but really, for most of my tenure, I did way more than the Supreme Court because we didn't have as many pla- we didn't have a million platforms to serve.
I only sort of became completely focused on the Supreme Court once we had digital and podcasts and social media and all the other things you have to do. There's no way I could do what I did for most of my time at NPR, where I covered campaigns, in addition to covering the Justice Department and the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and just about every scandal that came down the line, I was the principal reporter or one of two principal reporters on. And in the beginning, I also covered the intelligence community. So I had, in those days, we had only one program, and it was an hour and a half. It was All Things Considered. And we had a later deadline, and I could do, I could cover a much bigger swath of territory than I can today.
Bull: When you were beginning your career, were there any particular journalists that you looked at for inspiration, any role models?
Totenberg: Well, there were so few of us women in the early days that there were, you know, I could probably name them all on one hand, you know, Nancy Dickerson was at CBS. Pauline Fredericks was - I'd listened to on the radio when I was a girl in broadcasting. That was pretty much it. And then there were some columnists, like Mary McGrory was a wonderful columnist, but they were very - they were like as - as rare as hen's teeth.
But there were men in the profession who were very kind and helped me. Peter Lisagor, who was with the Chicago -- I don't know if it was the Tribune or the Sun Times, he'd probably haunt me if he could come back for not remembering that. But he suggested to people that I be included in “Washington Week,” for example, and I used to do that, but there were so few women that, you know, when I finally did start doing TV in addition to radio, I did a weekly TV panel show, I was the woman - nobody ever thought of having two of us. The only place that had two or more of us, many more of us, was NPR. And of course, the reason was that no man would work for the salary we were paid in the beginning.
Bull: And was there a pretty big disparity in wages back then? I mean, we talked about the “glass ceiling” a lot.
Totenberg: Well, it wasn't, oh, but at NPR, we were mainly women because, really, because they paid so little, and we didn't really start getting decent wages until we organized a union, and that took a very long time to get recognized. We had to hold an election, and that's when the wages started to go up. And have at least maintained a pace with, to some extent, I think, with print journalists, not with TV journalists, but with print journalists. And there's, you know, there's no, as far as I know, there's no discrimination based on gender. There may be other kinds of discrimination, but I don't think -- you know, we still run the place for all practical purposes. If you look around and you see who the heads of departments are. They’re mainly women.
Bull:Rolling back just a little bit here, Nina, is it true that you had enrolled at Boston University back in 1962 but dropped out after three years because you weren't doing that well in your journalism major?
Totenberg: No, it's true that I dropped out, but it's -- I just didn't want to go to school anymore. I wanted to be a reporter. My mother asked me why I was so disinterested in my schoolwork. She said, “Well, why don't you try to go and do what you want to do?” So I did. I just left school. I wasn't doing that horribly. I just left. I was not the valedictorian, or, you know, magna cum laude, or anything like that. I just, and I had left all the courses I didn't want to take, which weren't journalism courses, but of course, they were still there, and I never did take them.
I now have, I think 27 or 28 honorary or, as I call them, “unearned” degrees. The only way you earn an honorary degree, most of the time is to give the commencement address, so I've gotten pretty good at that.
Bull: You are called one of NPR’s Founding Mothers, along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer and the late Cokie Roberts. What does that distinction mean for you?
Totenberg: We were all here at a very formative time for NPR, when it was very small and just beginning to break into the big time. Susan has been there the longest, actually, and maybe Linda even longer. And I actually brought Cokie in, although I didn't know her. That's a separate story. And when I came to NPR, Bob Zelnick recruited me. The truth is, you could get really qualified women in those days for very little money. We were all making $15,000 a year. That's what was our salary back then, barely enough to live on, barely and you had to be very abstemious.
So when we organized the union, I do remember one of the, the president or vice president saying, we were making, what, what secretaries were making. And he said, “Well, at NPR, everybody's a star.” And we thought, “Screw that. We got to do something.”
Bull: You say that you recruited Cokie Roberts, and I can't let that one slide. How did he you come to get Cokie into NPR?
Totenberg: Well, at that point, she and her husband Steve Roberts, had just returned from assignment in Greece. He was a reporter for the New York Times, came to the Washington Bureau, and she had been a stringer for CBS, covering even the overthrow of the government in Greece, and they had two small children. And Steve called me up one day and he said, “I understand that you might have an opening at NPR. And my wife, Cokie, is looking for a job”, and I said, “Bring me her resume right away.” And we have different memories of this, whether I met him on the street to get the resume, or whether he came upstairs and I met him in the lobby to get the resume. I got the resume. It turned out that Linda had known her at Wellesley and we brought the resume to our boss, Jim Russell, and we said, “You need to hire this woman.”
Well, in those days, you didn't get hired without working as a freelancer forever. They didn't have much of an HR department. So I think that I worked at NPR without being a quote “staff reporter” for quite a while before they finalized the fact that I was a staff reporter, and Cokie did the same. And she, you know, she stayed being only a radio reporter for quite a while. And we became - Linda, Cokie and I sat together, and we became the best of friends. We took care of each other. We went to the movies with our spouses on the weekends.
And there was one time when I remember when we - I think by then, Cokie was doing a lot of work for ABC, and we walked into the little Italian restaurant that we always used to have dinner at after the movies, and we heard somebody say, “Ooh, look, there's what's her name and what's her name and what's her name and there,” or maybe they said, “Oooh, there's Cokie Roberts and what's her name and what's her name!”, I don't know, but we had such a laugh over it.
Bull: That beautiful anonymity of being radio.
Totenberg: Yes.
Bull: It follows people.
Totenberg: Yeah.
Bull NPR had launched in 1970, five 5 years before you signed on, so you weren't exactly present at the creation, but I imagine you still got to see NPR go through its teething period and some baby steps. Did the organization at the time feel like it was still finding its way? And was that challenging to work with?
Totenberg: Well, it was challenging to work with because we didn't have, we were just tiny. And, I mean, I think the whole - we didn't even have overseas permanent reporters. I think Robert Siegel was our first permanent reporter in London, covering the whole continent of Europe, basically. But we were like 15 people in the whole - it was the Washington Bureau, and then we had to depend on stations, and the stations were really not very strong. And they're very strong now we have some very strong reporters across the country at stations and stations that produce people that end up in Washington or not, and are real presence in their own backyard, so to speak.
But then we did two ways all the time, because news would break and we, we didn't have people on the ground. So you would call somebody up, the host would call somebody up and interview some people about what's going on there, instead of actually having a reporter on the ground. So it was very -- “bare bones” understates it really, in fact, it totally understates it.
Bull: Did you ever yourself cut tape of the razor blade and mark it up with the grease pencil?
Totenberg: Absolutely, I did that, and I have the scars to prove it! (laughs) The very first time I -- you know, in the beginning when you learn to cut tape, and there were these big reels and on a big cutting block, and I made the mistake that people often make is, I instinctively tried to stop the reel before I had actually turned it off. And I have a huge scar on my thumb. I ended up in the ER. I just, I just was -- there was blood all over the place. (laughs)
Bull: When was this?
Totenberg: Very early on. And in fact, one of the guys, I think took me over to the GW ER because they said, “You know, you can't just stand there with a with a - with cotton around it. We got to get you to the hospital.” So I think they might have taken a couple of stitches in my thumb. I really don't remember. That’s the truth.
Bull: Did that scar at all? Do you have any–
Totenberg:Yeah, I have a scar. I have a scar to prove this, right there, right right there.
Bull: Oh, okay, you put me to shame. I have all these little, tiny nicks in my fingertips where I went a little too quick with the razor and, yeah, never went to the ER, for it.
Totenberg: No, I never did. I never hurt myself with a razor. I hurt myself because I reached to try to stop the, ---
Bull: Oh, this was on the edge of the spinning–
Totenberg: -- yeah, just…[makes ripping sound] yeah, exactly. It didn't take the nail off it, but it sure sliced up my - my thumb. So I never did that again. Let's put it that way.
Bull: You've made legal affairs reporting your niche. I could have spent another five minutes just detailing your other awards, honors and recognition for it. So what drew you specifically to this beat and what has kept you on it for so long?
Totenberg: Well, I don't know that I picked it, is the truth. I mean, I started winning awards for it when I worked for the late National Observer. And, you know, I turned out to be good at two things. I turned out to be good at explaining complicated legal issues, because I'm not a lawyer and I was fearless at and unembarrassed to ask questions, and therefore I got to understand very complicated things as if I'd been to law school, but in much more, in - on my terms, in term, in legal terms and not legal terms that normal people use.
I still don't understand why lawyers have this legalese. Why do they say unlawful instead of illegal? I don't know, but they do, and that makes it very complicated to listen to. And so the idea was to develop a - if we're talking about the Supreme Court, my - I did something nobody else did. Not TV, not print obviously, nobody else did. We did not, in those days get - there was no audio that was available, and there was no transcript either.
So we would come down from an oral argument, for example, and sort of compare notes and agree that's what so and so said, and that's what so and so said. And then I would create a four- or five-minute piece, or even six-minute piece, in which I sort of regurgitated what the argument was, and I did it as if it were a play, and I perfected that.
And when we finally started getting audio a few years ago in a contemporaneous manner, there were people who wrote and said they missed my rendition. And it was easier. I have to say it was easier, because I could just pick the best little parts. I didn't have to edit it with a razor blade. I didn't have to do an explainer. I would just say Justice Scalia. That sounds like nonsense to me.
Bull: It becomes radio theater, in a sense.
Totenberg: It becomes radio theater in a sense, exactly.
Bull: All right.
Totenberg:It turned out I'm a good explainer, yeah, it turned out I'm a good explainer, and that is, you know, people have different talents. A poet. I am not.
I don't consider myself a beautiful writer. I consider myself a clear writer, and that matters. And I'm a good narrative writer, and that matters.
Bull: One thing that we discuss a lot at the J school back at the University of Oregon, is that we work with a lot of new and coming reporters among our students who believe or not find it very hard to talk to strangers. That's a common fear that gets brought up and we keep saying back to them, well, you can't interview your roommate for every story you're going to do there. You need to find the courage, and you need to, you know, speak truth to power. And I think that you are an outstanding example of someone who does that. Was that ever anything that you struggled with just just asking strangers sometimes very difficult questions?
Totenberg:I think that it's, it's - it's hard, and you just have to force yourself to do it. And if I had to go out and do political reporting and just walk up to people, let's say at a Trump rally and ask them questions, or even - or a Harris rally, I might have trouble. You know, in your head, you I'm - people find it very odd that I think of myself as shy, but you just have to force yourself to do it. It's the job.
I mean- and when I was a young, young reporter in my early 20s, the worst thing I ever had to do was I was working for the times in Massachusetts, and a child was killed, ran across the street, was killed in an accident, and my editor said, “Go get a photograph of the kid.” And I had to go to the house. Fortunately, a priest answered the door. I never had to go inside. But I said, “I'm here because I need a photograph of this boy for tomorrow's newspaper.” And he went and got me one.
But it were, I just had to do it, and I think women have an even harder time than men, much harder time than men. I think we are brought up as slightly more deferential, and I think women suffer from imposter syndrome more than men do. And so I was in my late 40s before I finally accepted the fact that I was not a fraud and that I would - I was not going to be discovered as not knowing anything and not being able to do anything. I sat in front of that computer often when I had a big or complicated story that I'd worked on for several days, thinking, “Oh, my God, this time they're going to find out I don't actually, I can't do this,” and you just have to work. You just have to blow through it and say, “Well, I have a deadline. Go!”
Bull: That's great advice and I will share that with my students. You know talking about gender issues and related matters - one of your most notable stories came about 1991 when you broke the news about Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual harassment against then Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, and this reporting earned you widespread recognition, and brought a lot of attention to those confirmation hearings. So what were some of your takeaways from the Anita Hill case, in which the media did or didn't believe the victim?
Totenberg: Well, you know, I still have people who ask me, “Who did you believe?” And I never answered that question. That wasn't my job. I kept noticing there was something odd going on, and I started to push the door to try to figure out what it was. And when I finally figured out what it was, and she finally agreed to give me an interview after I got a copy of her affidavit that she’d given, that nobody knew existed, but I found that she told me that if I had the affidavit, she would find she would give me an interview. So I did get the - I found the affidavit. I got the affidavit.
And I - it was a for me, personally, a terrible time in an odd sort of way. It was - certainly made, made my career much more prominent, that's true, but I was the subject of attack for weeks, if not months. The Senate appointed an independent counsel to investigate the so called leak. I never considered it a leak, since nobody came to me with the information and said bingo, here's - here's something for you to write about, and it cost NPR a fair amount of money, although much less than it would otherwise, because Floyd Abrams, who still is a great first amendment lawyer, but certainly the leading first amendment lawyer of his time, represented me for a discount. Let's put it that way. And - and he saw me through the process of being investigated and being yelled at, and I often think as bad as it was, it would be much worse today.
Bull: What do you think motivated those acts?
Totenberg:Well, you know, it made the confirmation very difficult. Clarence Thomas was confirmed by just two votes basically, and I assume that maybe, maybe Bob Dole had another vote in his pocket if he needed it, but he had, he had a couple of votes of people who didn't want to vote really to confirm, but were part of the Republican caucus and agreed to it if, if he needed the votes and Thomas was confirmed. It was at the time, it was the closest vote ever. I think the Kavanaugh vote was, I think, I think Thomas was 52-48, I think that Kavanaugh was one vote closer, but don't hold me to it.
It was a very - it was a huge story. That’s the other thing. I remember walking into the rotunda. This was the second bunch of hearings. He'd already been approved by the committee when my story broke, and they had to call off the vote on the nomination on the floor and convene new hearings almost on the spur of the moment, and when I walked into the Russell Senate office building the first day of those hearings, I was gobsmacked, because every network was carrying these hearings live, which I don't think they do today, actually.
They actually wouldn't cancel their soaps to do that, but in fact, they got higher ratings at one point than, I think, the World Series. This was a huge, huge deal. It's hard to imagine today that - the sort of, there weren't a ton of news cable channels in those days. There were the four major networks, and everything was focused on that story and that story alone while it happened. I’ve often thought how lucky I was, really, that I was in my 40s at the time, and had a fair amount of experience and knew how to be disciplined about not talking to people, just trying to do my job, not being scared off of covering the story because I had broken the story, etc, etc, etc.
Bull: You talked about how this would be an even more difficult story to do today, I presume because of the advent of the internet and social media, where everyone can sandbag and form coalitions of opinion or attacks against a certain entity or individual, is that what you think kind of would happen today, if you broke the same story?
Totenberg:Oh yeah, I would be constantly doxed I'm sure. I wouldn't be surprised if I would have threats on my life, because at the time I would walk into NPR, I think that my phone held 36 call messages. When I would get to the office at the end of the hearings at night I would push the button on my phone that called up all my messages, and I would just sit there and - and it would be people saying “Miss Totenberg, you are the worst awfullest, you're a - I hope you die and go to hell” and and much worse, and I would just go delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.
Well, today we have a lot of journalism that’s opinion journalism, whether it's Fox or MSNBC or radio shows that are very popular, that are principally -but not exclusively- right wing. And I think that, I think Rush Limbaugh was around then, but there that was, that that was the extent of it.
And my lawyer Floyd Abrams said to me, “You have to do every show that asks for you, every TV and big radio show that asks for you, because we need your view out there about the First Amendment and your right to report and to find stuff out.”
That was not that hard to do. I did the Today Show I did, I just did - you know. There were really only eight or 10 interviews I had to do in all. And today I would be bombarded with people who didn't like the messenger because of the story she broke, and it would be much harder to navigate.
Bull: Many more networks, a lot of podcasts, a lot of other areas that, if you needed to be a representative, that you would just be stretched thin I think.
Totenberg: Right, you’d be stretched thin. The instinct of my employer undoubtedly would be to say nothing. And I did say nothing - during the hearings. I just did my job - I didn’t do any interviews at all. I just said nothing and just did my job.
And I remember one day, I was doing TV and radio simultaneously, so we did it jointly with WETA here in DC, and so- NPR would carry the audio, and we did carry audio and video. So I've got John Danforth there and we’re interviewing him, and I think it was Paul Duke was back in the studio - or I think he was back in the studio, and I was there in the rotunda. And I'm sitting there, and Jack Danforth looks at me like he would like to literally eat me up for breakfast and spit me out. And I'm thinking, “Just do your job. Just do your job.” That’s it. That's all you could do.
Bull: There does seem to be a lot more confrontative attitudes towards journalists - I mean over the last five/ten years, I've been hearing more of journalists being punched. Now President elect Trump had made reference to journalists between him and his audience but if an assassin opened fire, he would have to shoot through the journalists. It just seems like there's this really open season on reporters for just basically doing what they're supposed to do. It must be a very environment to work in anymore. Is there any encouragement you can give journalists to kind of feel powerful and not feel threatened by even big politicians like the president-elect?
Totenberg: Well, it's very hard not to feel threatened, but you just have to - again just say, “I’m doing my job, I’m doing it the best I know how,” and don't give politicians an excuse to attack you by not doing your job well, not representing everybody's opinion. I mean, I don’t think that stories are particularly interesting unless you have a conflict of opinions.Not a conflict - personal conflict, but a conflict of opinions. If you do a story that doesn't give both sides their due, you're not doing your job, and you’re also - cheating your audience and you're cheating yourself a way of being able to write a really compelling narrative. It's not interesting to hear people who are all one-sided. You really do want to hear both sides.
Now there are times when there is a side that is so repulsive, you just think you can't do it. And I think you have to call those as you see it, and consult with your editors, because you don't say something like “Mr. Hitler maintained blah blah blah” without saying “maintained falsely” or “without evidence.”
But we actually didn't have to do that until I would say Trump, the first Trump Administration, because politicians would be caught saying things that were completely untrue, and they would lose because of it. Trump managed to survive quite well through things that would have killed other politicians at any point. Trump managed to maintain support. Even though he got caught in a lot of significant lies, it didn't matter. And that's what makes him so difficult to deal with.
Bull: It reminds me because I remember, Gary Hart the senator was making a presidential bid and all it took was a photo of him with that–
Totenberg: Donna Rice. She was a lobbyist. Donna Rice. Point is he was married, and he was off on a boat with this chickie and it did not bode well for him, it ruined his presidential ambitions and it was - for all practical purposes, the end of his political career.
And that would have been the case for most people up until Trump. And a lot of people have emulated and imitated Trump in the sense that they just deny, deny, deny or they say, “So what?” And most of them still can't get away with it, but every once a while, it doesn’t seem to matter.
Bull: Yeah, it's a surprising turn of events in politics. At what moments, Nina, were you proudest to be working in public radio?
Totenberg:Oh, I've had many moments. You know, we really do great work here. We really do believe in both informing and entertaining people - and doing it in a way that doesn't leave anybody in the dust, and making sure that everybody is fairly represented. Now that's not to say that we don't make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes, and journalists make mistakes, and even institutions make mistakes, and they put something on the air they shouldn't have or it turns out something is wrong that you didn't know was wrong. There's nobody who has had a pure performance forever.
But in the greater scheme of things, we are not commercial. You not only don't have to listen to commercials, you don't have to cater to commercial enterprises. We don't make money. We'll be lucky if we make our budget, and we have a wonderful foundation that tries to help offset the money, especially for stations that don't get enough money, particularly smaller stations.
When you look at the NPR model, I don't think we get more than about 1% of the federal money for us, but our stations do get money, and they get money prorated, both on population and on need. So smaller stations get the bulk of the money. Bigger stations get some of the money. You know, 10%,15% of their budget might be from the feds, but there are stations that are in areas that are uncovered by any other journalistic institution that get 40% of their money from the federal government. And that, you know, we have 800 or 900 stations, depending on how you count them, and that is a wonderful asset that we have in this country without making it a government owned and operated facility.
Bull: Were there any particular stories or coverage that you've done that you feel particularly proud of or happy with?
Totenberg:Well, you know, I thought it was important to break the Anita Hill story, and believe me, it was not easy. We actually held it for about a day because I couldn't get then-Senator (Joe) Biden to reply. I kept calling his staff, and they wouldn't reply when I asked them what was going on, that they had this information and they hadn't made it public. And finally, we just - my boss and I made a judgment that we couldn't wait any longer, and we did the story on a Sunday morning.
So I was very proud of the fact that we broke that story. I'm proud of other big stories I've broken over the years, and I'm proud of the fact that NPR gives me, you know, it gives me less time than I used to have. That's sort of the format of our shows, but it gives me four or five, even occasionally, six, minutes to cover big legal stories at the Supreme Court. And nobody else in broadcasting has that kind of time, nobody, and it allows me to really explain things much more clearly and why something is important.
We now have a court that is probably the most conservative court in, I don't know 80 or 90 years, and so you really you want to be able to explain that to people and why it's important, regardless of what - whether you are very pleased or very offended by by that fact, you need to know what the justifications are and what the consequences are, and what it all means and why it happened the way it happened. So I love doing the job. It's like covering nine presidents who don't get along and, and, and it's so it's very interesting.
It's very hard sometimes, because it's - I had planned to do a story this week. It's very rare that I say I'm probably going to do this story - expect me to do this story, and it was just so dense that I couldn't conceive of a sentence that would make it interesting to people. I'll cover this story. It's about the National Environmental Policy Act. I'll cover it when there's a decision. But the oral arguments were beyond boring. They were impenetrable to the average person. And even if I'd done my best, you would have had to really want to read that story or hear that story. It was not - I made a judgment, and they really wanted a story. They were short on news. And I said, “This just doesn't make the bar.”
Most of the time. You know, we're flooded. It's like drinking out of a fire hydrant these days. And it's hard to look back on stories you did, but I did a series of stories about the campaign finance bill that had passed and was upheld by the Supreme Court and then ultimately reversed just a few years later, but it upheld various campaign finance regulations that had been adopted by Congress in a bill called the McCain-Feingold bill, and it, too, was very dense and boring, so I had to find a way to make it understandable, and I really worked hard at it, and I talked to a bunch of senators and former senators with a microphone about this, and they would tell stories about how the kinds of pressures that senators in their case faced, because they needed campaign money.
And lobbyists would come to them and say there was no quid pro quo per se, but if you didn't toe the line to a significant extent, you were not going to get a well-financed campaign. And it was very personal. It was very easy to understand, and the rules that Congress adopted, you could understand why they adopted it, and then I had very good people on the other side saying, “This is a violation of the First Amendment.” One of them was my former lawyer, Floyd Abrams, who argued against the campaign finance reform bill and in the Supreme Court. (laughs)
Bull: Small world, small world.
Totenberg:Yes.
Bull: Any final thoughts or comments either about your career or the state of the public radio industry today?
Totenberg: Well, I don't know what the state of public radio and all the other things that we do is. We live in a time where, I guess people call us legacy media, and they're saying that legacy media is going away because, well, there are podcasts and there are all these other things. But I tend to think that there is a - an audience and a fairly large audience, that lost to some degree, the habit of radio listening during the pandemic. But that will eventually come back, or it may be their children that come back. Because if you really want smart, factual, and --as much as we can do on deadline-- truthful accounts of what is going on, the best place to find that is at National Public Radio.
I still believe that, and I think that we have an audience that is actually expanding again post pandemic. And I think it's because people don't want everybody else's opinions. They want to be able to form their own, and they want interesting things on the radio to listen to, and not all terrible things. And I think we're making an effort actually, to not make people have to listen to the worst news in the world for a straight hour or a straight half hour. I'm a firm believer in putting within the shows funny things, interesting things, entertaining things, amusing things that are not just about people killing each other.
Bull: Kind of avoiding the whole audio “doom scrolling” sounds like.
Totenberg:Yes, yes. I think “doom scrolling” is a good way to put it. Even I, who love news and subscribe to two newspapers every day, come to my house, even I have days when I read the front page and I move on to the Metro section, the sports section and the Style section, and I may never get beyond the front page because it's just too awful to ponder. And it's not just about us, it's about the world, and we all live in the world. So there are days that I'm just like everybody else. “Okay, I've read the front page now I'm not going to turn the page at all” - section. Maybe I'll get back to it later, and I - if I do that, I probably won't get back to it, at least not till 10 o'clock at night, and by then, it may be old news and I don't have to read it. (laughs)
Bull: How do you unwind? I hear you talk a lot about going to the movies. Is there, like, a particular favorite type of movie you like to see, or any favorites that you watch over and over again?
Totenberg:Well, I don't go to the movies as much as I used to, actually, because of the pandemic and - but when I go, when we used to go, the six of us all the time, Cokie, Linda, me and our spouses, Cokie - I mean, Linda doesn't mind horribly scary and violent movies, but Cokie an I did -and do- so I don't go to those kind of movies. I'll go to a rom com, I'll go to a really good, meaty movie, but not if it's violent or scary and - and what I consider scary most people don't consider scary. I mean, I don't want to see one of those, you know, Marvel type movies that are with real people in them, where they're all again, the whole purpose is killing people and in an entertaining way. I don't really like those movies.
But I do love music. My father is a musician, and was a musician, a great musician, but we go to the symphony a lot. We go to the opera. We go to plays. I used to play tennis a fair amount with my husband, but I've had back surgery in the last year that doesn't allow me to - I'm not even walking terribly well at the moment - and I have to have another one, another surgery. But I love word games, but not Wordle. For some reason, I don't like Wordle, but I love, I love to play Boggle. Even with myself, I'll play Boggle, Boggle or Banana Grams.
And we have lots of really good, close friends, and we enjoy them all and spend time with them. On the weekends, sometimes and often, we have friends who don't live in Washington, and who we vacation with during - in August, they come [unintelligible] to stay with us for a week or so.
I have a very full and wonderful life, and I have a wonderful husband. My first husband died after we had been married nearly 20 years, and I have been fortunate enough to have two great husbands, but this husband takes exquisite care of me -actually, the old one did too - and they are wonderful human beings who I deeply admire. So I have a very full and good life, and I'm still working, which is a good thing.
Bull: And many, many people out there, millions of people, including myself, really enjoy your work and your contributions. So it's been wonderful hearing your updates, and thank you so much for taking on the interpretation of legalese, because my eyes glaze over whenever I read a docket, and I realize that there's substance there, but it's hard to decide –
Totenberg: Not -- just be sure that sometimes my eyes glaze over too! (laughs)
Bull: And this concludes my interview with Nina Totenberg, December 11, 2024 Nina, thank you so much for making the time to talk to me and about your history and your contributions to NPR. Again, your work is admired by millions of listeners and colleagues, and it's just been an honor to have this conversation.
Totenberg: You know, there's one other thing I want to say.
Bull Please.
Totenberg: Since I have worked at NPR since 1978 or something like that, I don't really remember what the date is – I have seen this place go from a small - almost like a professional version of a good college station to a major force in American journalism that is relied on by other journalists for information.
Often, I pick up the New York Times and there'll be a story there that was on NPR five days ago. Now I'm not telling you the reverse isn't true. Sometimes it is, but this is a really wonderful place that we all take for granted because it is now become such a staple of American journalism, and it's important to understand where that came from and how small we were to how big we have become, how we cover foreign news more than almost anybody else. We cover the Supreme Court, definitely more than any other broadcast institution. And people value us for very good reason.
And I think it's important to understand that institutions don't necessarily persist. We, at the moment, stand at a very difficult time, and I don't know what's going to happen to NPR if Congress decides to defund us, but this institution plays an important part in American life, mainly for the good, and I hope I will be here in five years and 10 years and long after I'm gone, that this institution will be here to be a stalwart of American journalism.
Bull: Well said, Nina, and thank you again for your time and your insights. I really enjoyed talking to you. By the way, you and I met a long, long time ago, when I was an overnight production editorial assistant for Morning Edition back in the Bob Edwards era.
Totenberg: You know I thought you looked dimly familiar! You look dimly familiar and I thought, “Where do I know this guy from?”
Bull: It was probably 1998 or ‘99 and I remember I was supposed to be trained by - it was someone like Burf for Chip Gabrow, someone was supposed to come by and train me in the NPR style of assembling reels. I think someone said, “Oh well, we'll send someone by in about five minutes to train you.” And they never did appear (Totenberg laughs.)
But then Audrey Wynn walked by and -- you were with her, I believe. And she said, “Oh great, Brian, you can, you can cut this tape now! Nina needs us, or ATC.” And she handed me the reel, and I didn't feel like saying no, so I just did my best rendition of what I thought an NPR splice job would be. And I think about 20 minutes later, he came by and handed the reel to you, which had a lot of generous paper spooling or something.
You gave me this very curious look as if to say, “Well, I don't know what he's doing here, and I don't know how much longer he'll be here, but he did cut the tape.” (both laugh) And I got better after that, so –
Totenberg:I'm sure you did. You can't imagine how - I used to - when I first did this - I used to not have breaths, and I didn't - I knew it didn't sound right, but I didn't know what I did. So finally somebody said, “No, you have to - people have to breathe.”
Bull: I still find new, upcoming reporters who edit all their breaths out. It is so unnatural, and it kind of puts me on edge when I hear a reporter do a story and they're not breathing.
Totenberg:Well, the truth is that I don't actually know how to cut tape electronically, which is a lot easier than what you and I used to do. But because we're flying a lot of the time, my interns actually learned to do it. And they do a rough cut, and somebody else from ATC will fix it up, because we have so little time to produce a piece, for example, about an opinion or oral argument, we might have two to three hours at the most, including lots of interviews, and we don't have a transcript until about two or three in the afternoon, so you're finding cuts based on your notes, and it's much better to have somebody who was there do that than somebody who wasn't there and wasn't listening.
So it's hard, you know, it’s much harder to with tape from the Supreme Court, but people like hearing it, and I actually like hearing it.
Bull: No, I enjoy your play-by-plays or your radio theater renditions. I also like to be able to hear the actual audio from the Supreme Court. So it's a good balance, it’s a very good balance.
Totenberg: Yes.
Bull: Yeah. And if we ever connect, I want to play you in Boggle, because I want to see how good you are. I play Super Boggle, the larger 25 cube --
Totenberg:Oh, I didn’t know there was a Super Boggle.
Bull: There is a Super Boggle game out there. So yes –
Totenberg: I've been known - I mainly play with myself because I'm too good for my husband, I give him and I have to have five letter words, he has to have four letter words.
Bull: My family stopped playing with me, too.
Totenberg: But what's really so interesting about it is that you can really have a hard time finding a lot of words. Or you do okay, but you come back the next morning, and you look at it, and you see all kinds of things you didn't see. I don't understand that, that part of the brain does work one day and works the next.
Bull: Yeah. It's curious. Yeah. It's - what you do is you get into a brusque confrontation with a stranger and the witty comeback comes in the middle of the night, hours after they've already passed or something like that.
Totenberg:Yes, exactly!
Bull: Anyway, hindsight being what it is.
Totenberg: Hindsight, right.
Bull: What do you have going for your day, Nina?
Totenberg: I think I have to listen to a briefing that somebody's giving, and then I haven't, then I have to deal with my crazy email, and then I have to start writing a piece that's actually for January, because it’s when the court comes back and I won't be here. So I need to do this ahead of time, and I may do something about pardons, also. I'm sort of interested whether Biden pardons everybody in the Justice Department, basically.
Bull: Preemptively. Yes, this’ll be an interesting time.
Totenberg: Yeah.
Bull: Well, keep up the great work. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, and I'll follow up with you in an email and when we get this formatted and presented for the Public Radio Oral History project, because I’m sure you’re curious what else comes later.
Totenberg:Right. Okay, thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it. Bye.
Bull: Thank you again. Bye.
Totenberg: You're welcome.
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