Nina Totenberg’s new book is on her friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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NPR's Nina Totenberg interviews Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the Justice's chambers in Washington, D.C.

Airdate: Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio’s award-winning legal affairs correspondent, who is considered one of NPR’s “Founding Mothers” was born in Manhattan, New York.

After starting her journalism career at the Boston Record American, Peabody Times, and Roll Call, she landed at the National Observer.

Four years after Totenberg started working at NPR and nearly twenty-two years before the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court, Totenberg called Ginsburg about a legal briefing, which started a nearly fifty-year relationship between the two of them.

Totenberg wrote a book called Dinners with Ruth: A Memoir on the Power of Friendships that displays their powerful relationship and stories.

“She was so much smarter than I am that you could not say that we had brain power in common,” Totenberg said. “But we had an enormous amount in common as women outside looking in when we started out. Now today, women have lots of opportunities, it’s not perfect but it’s light years different from when we started out.”

In Totenberg’s book it shows how Totenberg and Ginsburg tore down professional and legal barriers as a result of their relationship. However, she said she’s not sure their was the perfect combination for change but it was an accident of time.

Totenberg said after reading her book, she hopes people take away the value of friendship.

“Friendship is not the grand gesture. It’s showing up,” Totenberg said. “And that when you come to a crisis in life, there’s no doubt what you should do, your duty, your duty to your friends and family. And if you do that, they will be there for you in turn and you will be repaid a million times over.”