Subscribe to Lemonada Premium for Bonus Content

Today on Wiser Than Me, Julia sits down with legendary legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg. Nina is one of the founding mothers of NPR and has been covering the Supreme Court for over 50 years, longer than any justice has sat on the bench. Julia asks Nina about her friendship with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, balancing relationships across political lines, and the emotional toll of long-term caretaking. Plus, Judith, Julia’s 90-year-old mother, tells a story about how attitudes towards women’s ambition have changed in her lifetime.

Follow Wiser Than Me on Instagram and TikTok @wiserthanme and on Facebook at facebook.com/wiserthanmepodcast.

Keep up with Nina Totenberg @NinaTotenberg on X.

Find out more about other shows on our network at @lemonadamedia on all social platforms.

Joining Lemonada Premium is a great way to support our show and get bonus content. Subscribe today at bit.ly/lemonadapremium.

For exclusive discount codes and more information about our sponsors, visit https://lemonadamedia.com/sponsors/.

For additional resources, information, and a transcript of the episode, visit lemonadamedia.com.

Transcript

SPEAKERS

Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Mommy, Nina Totenberg

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  00:01

You know that movie, 12 Angry Men with Henry Fonda and Lee J. Cobb. I just I love that movie. It’s one of the truly great American films, and it all takes place in a jury room. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. I have only been on a jury once. It was a very long time ago. I can’t really remember exactly when, except that I had two little kids, and my husband, Brad, was running a show, and we were incredibly busy and self absorbed, and a jury summons hit my mailbox, and I thought, Oh, Christ, I don’t have time for this bullshit. And I figured I’d probably get out of serving because somebody was going to recognize me from Seinfeld, right? But, yeah, nobody recognized me, or they didn’t give a crap, because I went through Voir Dire with a couple of 100 people downtown. And of course, I got selected for the jury, and I am so glad that I did. The jury that I was on with 11 of my peers was made up of actual serious citizens. And what I mean by that is, I mean we all took our obligation very solemnly. It was sober. You know what I mean? I can’t remember the exact makeup of the jury now, but it seemed like it was an actual representation of people living and working in Los Angeles. You know? It was something like a real estate agent and a nurse and a couple of city workers and me an actor. You know, Los Angeles on TV, you often see the beautifully polished, grand locations where important things are being decided, but in reality, we’re in downtown LA deliberating in a room that looked and smelled, you know, kind of like the DMV. The whole thing was impressively drab, and still, there was something just so touching about it. I found the whole jury experience to be incredibly moving. The lawsuit was about a woman who was suing her insurance company because they refused to pay for hospital stay and the medical procedure. The case was pretty technical, and it took a whole week for the two sides to argue it out. When we started to deliberate, the hedger was this middle aged stockbroker, I think, who turned out to live about a block away from me, and he was so good, he was very soft spoken, and he got everyone around the table to state their personal views of the case. And the thing that amazed me, and actually amazes me still looking back on it, is that everyone stuck to the facts, and nobody talked about themselves, right? Nobody wanted to bloviate and, you know, make speeches and so on. They had listened and they had things to say about the case. So we took our first vote, and I think it was 10 to two against the insurance company, but the two who had voted the other way actually just wanted to talk a little more about it, and pretty quickly on the second vote, we had a verdict in favor of the patient. No drama, no David E Kelly, TV series, theatrics. This was just a humble, serious, restrained proceeding. So it wasn’t exactly like 12 Angry Men. In fact, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor once said when she was a lower court judge that she would specifically instruct jurors not to behave like the jurors in that film, but Justice Sotomayor also said that seeing 12 Angry Men when she was in college was a big reason that she decided to go to law school. How cool is that? She said that juror number 11 speech about American justice was particularly inspirational to her. He’s the only immigrant on the jury, played by George voskovec. I won’t do his accent, but here’s what he says in the film, We the jury, have a responsibility. This is a remarkable thing about democracy, that we are what is the word notified, that we are notified by mail to come down to this place and decide on the guilt or innocence of a man we have not known before. We have nothing to gain or lose by our verdict. This is one of the reasons we are strong. But I guess right now, unfortunately, a speech like that seems terribly naive. I don’t even know how to feel about justice, or justice is for that matter, the Constitution itself seems to be in danger, and Americans are losing faith in the judicial system so fast, it’s dizzying. I know our system has never been perfect. God knows we continue to be in desperate need of reform, and justice is unfairly applied, especially regarding wealth and race, but when I served on that jury, I couldn’t help but feel hopeful that the system is working. Now I’m not so sure. So it’s a good thing that today we’re talking to Nina Totenberg.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  05:06

Hi, I’m Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and this is Wiser Than Me, the podcast where I get schooled by women who are wiser than me.  Now that I’m in the podcast game, I am more aware than ever of the power of the spoken voice, and I’m talking about the voice itself, the sound that goes into your ear and delivers what the voice is saying to the brain. I’ve realized that for me, there are a few voices that I have come to absolutely rely on, and I absolutely need Nina totenberg’s voice, the timbre, the intelligence and reasonableness that she brings to her reporting of even the most outrageous injustice. Well, somehow what she says and maybe just as important how she sounds when she says, It calms me Well, I mean, it also weirdly lets me continue to rage, and I do love a little rage. She was one of the founding mothers of NPR, and has been on the air covering Legal Affairs, justice and the Supreme Court for almost 50 years, which is actually longer than any justice has ever sat on the court itself. Her coverage has earned her every major journalism award in broadcasting, and she was the first radio journalist to have won the national press Foundation’s broadcaster of the Year award. She’s in the Radio Hall of Fame, for God’s sakes even before NPR, she was breaking national stories and paving the way for future generations of female journalists and just plain journalists. She has written beautifully about her relationship with justice. Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her book, Dinners with Ruth, I am beyond excited to talk to a woman who is so much wiser than me the extraordinary Nina Totenberg. Welcome Nina Totenberg.

 

Nina Totenberg  07:20

thank you for having me.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  07:22

Okay, so I’m gonna start with the first question I always ask everyone on this show, are you comfortable if I ask your real age?

 

Nina Totenberg  07:30

No, I’m not comfortable at all about that, because the world is an ageist world.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  07:37

Boy, I’ll say.

 

Nina Totenberg  07:38

And I don’t, so I don’t go around advertising my age. Let’s just say I am many decades wiser than you are.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  07:49

So you don’t want to say what your real age is.

 

Nina Totenberg  07:51

I hate it, but, I mean, I will if you force me to. But I hate it because I don’t feel like I’m that age.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  07:58

Okay, well, how old do you feel?

 

Nina Totenberg  08:01

I think I feel that I’m about late 40s, early 50s.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  08:06

I feel the same. Actually, I feel the same. What’s the best part do you think about being your age that is unspoken?

 

Nina Totenberg  08:14

I don’t think there’s a wonderful part about being my age, because you suddenly realize that you’re not going to be around forever, and that the forever part is getting closer, and that you’re as much as I am who I always have been. I, you know, I had this year a real, genuine, horrible health scare, and I’m still walking around with a cane from it. So, you know, I had to learn to walk again. The most boring thing that I do a lot of is physical therapy, and so that’s what I do for the other part of my living is making sure that I will have another good 10 or 15 years, maybe.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  09:02

And what if? What have you learned from this process of recovery at this age? Are there big takeaways?

 

Nina Totenberg  09:10

No, I do think there’s a good deal of in life when you come to a serious health issue over which you have some control, not total control, but some control that you just have to try to as much as you can act as if you’re going to conquer this, because that way you will not scare the people you love so much. And it’s one of those things where if you act something, it becomes so. So if you act miserable, you can actually be miserable, and if you act with a sense of humor about your dilemma, you will feel much better about it.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  09:54

Well, that’s fascinating that you say that because, you know, I had breast cancer seven. Years ago, and that was exactly my experience. You make a decision to approach it with a certain point of view, and you adhere to that period.

 

Nina Totenberg  10:08

As much as you possibly can. And and you know, there’s nobody that doesn’t have their down moments, sure, but if you can act as if it’s going to be all right, yeah, and that you will do your best to make it all right. It gets you there faster and better.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  10:30

I think, yes, I agree with that. So I wanted to talk first about your early career, about which I know you’ve spoken before, but it sure is fascinating we all know and love you as one of the founding mothers of NPR. I mean, it may not even seem possible to people who are listening to us talking, but you had a you had a career. Even before you got to NPR. You dropped out of college, by the way, I did too, so yay for us, and you started your journalism career at the Boston record American doesn’t exist anymore. You didn’t stay there for very long, did you, Nina?

 

Nina Totenberg  11:05

No, I didn’t stay there for a long time. I think the straw that broke the camel’s back was that I I realized that I wanted to have a story that I could call my own. And I had this idea, which was, in hindsight, a very good idea, which was at the time, Massachusetts was a pretty conservative state, hard to believe, because the legislature was very conservative. It was democratic, but it was very conservative. And contraception was illegal in the state, so I figured it wasn’t illegal, probably at all the schools around town. So I pretending to be a student, called up Radcliffe and Simmons and Wellesley and made appointments with their health services as pretending to be a student to get contraception, which in those days was probably, I think it was a it was a diaphragm. And I wrote all this up as a memo, and I presented it to the editor of the newspaper, the executive editor, who was a man named Eddie Holland, and he it was lovely to me, but he called me into his office that afternoon, and he said, Nina, I can’t let you do this. And I said, why not? He said, gave you ever had an internal examination? And I said, No. And he said, I can’t let you do this. I’m not quite sure. When I was writing the book, my editor asked me why he was so upset, and I don’t know exactly why. I think he thought he was protecting me. He wouldn’t let me do it. I couldn’t persuade him.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  12:55

Didn’t he ask you if also you were a virgin?

 

Nina Totenberg  12:57

Yeah, he asked me if I was a virgin, and I said, Yes, I was a virgin. And it’s so sort of an amazing thought today that somebody in her 20s would be a virgin, but I was, and I was not hugely unusual, because it was difficult to get contraception.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  13:14

But when you said it’s amazing thing to I thought you were going to say an amazing thing to ask someone.

 

Nina Totenberg  13:21

Well, it was amazing. But I, you know, yeah, there were all I ever wanted was a job at the early in the early part of my career, and I was willing to do almost anything. I wouldn’t have slept with somebody or something like that. But I, you know, I wasn’t going to get offended by something that wasn’t going to stop me from getting a shot at a good job. And so I figured I needed to go someplace else. And you did. I did. That’s when I went to the Peabody times, where I got to do lots. There were days that I wrote every every story on the front page, every one of them, really, oh yeah, my byline was on every one of those stories a few times, like after an election or something like that. And I covered the courthouse and I covered they sent me in because I was pretty young. They sent me in undercover to find out what was going on in the local high school, which I don’t remember, that I found out a huge amount. And I think it was painfully obvious that I was not the age of the kids there. I don’t think I was.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  14:31

That you went undercover.

 

Nina Totenberg  14:32

Wait, I did not go as a reporter. I went as if I were a new student in school. I can’t remember, to save myself what they thought I was going to find out, whatever it was I didn’t find it out.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  14:45

And you sort of dressed like a student and tried to blend in.

 

Nina Totenberg  14:50

But I felt like an Amazon. I loved that year at the Peabody times, because I got to do everything. And when I got to NPR, I got to do everything. I covered politics. I covered presidential campaigns, I covered the Supreme Court. I covered almost every scandal that broke. I broke a few big stories, like the Anita Hill story.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  15:09

Right? But I do want to ask you, you did say at some point when we were when I was getting ready to talk to you and I saw you, said you weren’t, you weren’t trying to break a glass ceiling. You Yeah, you were just trying to get a foot in the door.

 

Nina Totenberg  15:24

Yes, exactly.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  15:25

Do you now still have a feeling like you have to prove yourself in some way or stay relevant? Has that changed over time? That driver for you?

 

Nina Totenberg  15:39

It changed, but it didn’t change until I was well into my 50s, I think.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  15:44

Uh huh, how did it change Nina?

 

Nina Totenberg  15:46

Well, I used to sometimes sit down when I had a big story to write and I was on deadline, I would sometimes sit down and think, oh my god, this time I’m going to be exposed for the complete fraud that I know I am. It was that kind of uncertainty that is so female, like in it is so freaking female. I know that I and fortunately, I was able to talk about it with other women as we got older, which helped, helped a lot. Yeah, but, but it wasn’t really until then that I was able to sit down and and I had that feeling, and I was say, come on, Nina, just suck it up. You just have to start writing. And you know, you will get through this. And you if you do that. I, when I was writing the book, I I asked for a list of the stories that I had done on NPR, yeah, and there were over 9000 of them. Oh, fuck. And so I didn’t even look at the list. I mean, I thought, okay, I don’t there are stories I look at that I wrote that I not only don’t remember writing, I don’t remember knowing, literally, don’t remember knowing.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  17:07

I know. And by the way, I want to say that I’ve had the same feeling in my own life of like, oh god, you’re you are a fraud. And I wouldn’t say fraud, but I they don’t know. They don’t know how, how much you suck and and have to and to, to push yourself to power through that and to because there is a feeling that to for me anyway, that it hasn’t completely gone away, that I feel that I have to be able to prove myself, you know, even to this day, to a certain extent, not like when I was in my 20s. But still, that’s a real thing. And I think it’s, it’s a female thing, as you say, isn’t that interesting?

 

Nina Totenberg  17:56

It is a female thing. But also it’s returning to this subject of age, people are very willing, including younger women, to dismiss older women, because they think we’re Fuddy duddies and we’re and we are in some ways. You know, we are we those of people my age and age that Cokie Roberts was, and that Linda Wertheimer is, and that Susan stanberg is. Susan is even older than I am and and we were almost always, until we came to NPR, the only women where we worked. We were the only women there, and we are. We just wanted a chance to prove ourselves, and therefore we put up with a lot of stuff that no woman puts up with today or should put up with.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  18:55

That’s why I’m doing this podcast, for exactly that reason.

 

Nina Totenberg  19:00

Yes, and hats off to you.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  19:02

No, but, I mean, I feel strongly about it, because they do listen to older men and and I’m exhausted by that. Now I’m exhausted, and we need to hear exactly what you’re saying right now. Exactly what you’re saying. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back with Nina Totenberg after this quick break.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  19:38

I want to talk about sexism, but before I even do, I do have to ask you this question. It was, I guess, when you were, when you were at the National observer, that you started covering Legal Affairs. And in those days you would invite this certain Supreme Court justices over for dinner to talk with them. Is that true?

 

Nina Totenberg  19:55

Yes. Okay, I invite them and their wives. I mean, if yes, of course, it. They would come, yeah.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  20:01

So let’s talk about, how did you get the courage to do that? Because to me, that’s like capital B balls. I can’t get over it.

 

Nina Totenberg  20:08

I can’t get over it either. The truth is, I can’t get over it either. I was so ambitious and determined not to fail at this job that I mean, I really don’t know how, the how I had the balls to ask Lewis Powell and his lovely wife, Joe to come have dinner at my little, 13 foot wide house, and I’m in my late 20s, early 30s, and how I had the nerve to do that, I would not have the nerve to do that today.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  20:47

Yeah, but except I think that you would. And for our listeners, Lewis Powell, he was a Supreme Court justice during the 70s and the 80s. Do you still have justices over for dinner parties and so on?

 

Nina Totenberg  21:00

If they’ll come, it’s all off the record, and it’s usually just social and if they’ll come, and it’s how I got to be a really good supreme court reporter. Was at least knowing some of these people and being able to, not so much, ask them the inappropriate question, but the appropriate question. I mean, one of my great things that I did when I was a bit younger was that I would invite justices who were retired to have lunch with me. And they were usually very happy to do that, because Washington is a place where, except for your beloved law clerks, once you you no longer have power. People are less, less visit you, less, care about you, less, etc. It’s not a very attractive thing, but it’s true. And so I would have lunch with somebody like Lewis Powell, and I would never have asked him a question about why he voted a certain way in a certain case, as long as he was a sitting justice. But afterwards, what have I got to lose? And he was much more forthcoming, I think, than he would have otherwise, because we’re talking about history at that point. We’re not talking about something at that moment that he was doing, and he was very helpful to me. Justice Brennan was very helpful to me. Justice Stewart was helpful to me. Lots of members of the court were willing to talk at least generically with me about the court, and then, after they retired, if they were remain in Washington. More specifically.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  22:41

Do you even today have justices over I’m guessing you can’t say who?

 

Nina Totenberg  22:46

But I can’t, but I do, yes, I do okay, including some conservative justices who I quite like. I never invite any other reporter, and I never invite people who are involved in court business, you know, I invite a really smart couple of doctors, like a duo, husband and wife team, you know, he a critical care doc and she and OB. They’re good friends. They, you know, after Justice, Scalia died, who I really adored. They had had dinner with him a couple of times at our house and so and when, when he died, they went over and bought one of his rifles from him for their daughter, who was working in a part of the world that was where you needed to have a rifle.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  23:49

Where Alaska, Alaska, Oh, I see.

 

Nina Totenberg  23:53

You know, in Alaska, if you’re out, you could see a moose, and you would, yeah, not want to have trouble with the moose.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  24:00

I had the I had this experience once where I ran into at a gathering at the White House, Justice Kagan, and she was incredibly lovely, and she said that how much she enjoyed this show I was making called Veep at the time, and that she and Justice Scalia would get together every week after an episode aired, they’d have lunch, and they would talk about things within that episode that they thought were funny or whatever. And I got such a kick out of that. And I was perfectly amazed that these two justices, who you know, their ideologies are obviously opposed from one another, could have the experience of enjoying that show together. I i That was just mind blowing. To me, absolutely mind blowing, but I know that Scalia was a good time. I’ve obviously read a lot about him and understand that to be the case. Nino, right?

 

Nina Totenberg  25:10

Nino, yes, we used to get a kick out of going to some you know, I would invite him to the White House Correspondents dinner or something like that. And would be the Nino and Nina show.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  25:20

Yeah, that’s good. That’s really good. Okay, so Nina, let’s talk about losing your temper. I read this amazing quote from you. You said losing your temper is not good for dealing with people, and it’s not good for you. The person who feels the worst afterwards is usually you did. Did you learn this lesson the hard way, Nina?

 

Nina Totenberg  25:46

Oh, god yes, I had a really short fuse, I think, and, and I think it was really because I always felt, as a younger person, as if I was, I I had to defend myself, because, after all, I was the only woman in the room, and so that I had to be and I had to prove that I was really tough. And believe me, I proved that many times, but I never felt that way. I always felt like mush. So I was even more probably tough than I needed to be, by far. So I and I would, you know, when I wasn’t completely Junior anymore, I I would lose my temper from time to time, and there was just no two ways about it. At some point, I realized that the best thing to do when I felt that hydraulic push of you think your head’s going to come off, was to turn around and walk out really Yes, because that way I couldn’t, because if I did lose my temper, inevitably, I said something that I was really sorry for embarrassed about shouldn’t have said so I don’t lose my temper that way anymore.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  27:11

Was there a specific moment or a period of time in which you made that transition to controlling your temper?

 

Nina Totenberg  27:19

I think it probably, I probably was in my 40s, my early 40s, because by then I had started to actually have a real reputation as a person, as a journalist. That means you can’t do that and not have people notice. And it’s one thing for somebody who’s nobody to blow her stack. It’s another thing. If you were to do that in the office with people you have to work with and or at the airport or whatever, it was not a wise thing to do. And I learned to not do it. And I also learned that the person who, if you really lose your temper, you’re physically ill afterwards, it just feels awful afterwards.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  28:09

Yeah, it’s a terrible feeling. I mean, you feel as if you’re it’s a release in the moment. But when, in fact, it the stink of it stays with you. It doesn’t mean you can’t get angry. FYI, where I would say you, of course you can get angry, but there’s a, there has to be a rationality to your expression of anger. And what, but what about like, shall I say, asshole management? Because here you are inside the beltway, and here I am in show business. There are plenty of assholes at work, I’m guessing, in the court. It’s how do you manage that? How do you manage people who you have to work with that are very misbehaved?

 

Nina Totenberg  28:59

Well, the people that drive you the most bonkers you should I just steer clear of if I you know, I just why bother, and I don’t actually get mad at anybody who I interact with regularly at the court because, well, first of All, the the public information office is entirely female. Really entirely female, and so that’s just for starters. And the people who work at the court take a lot of pride in what they do and deserve the respect that we generally give them. Yes, and we can’t, certainly, we certainly don’t have any influence, I would say is, I guess, the right way to put it, with the justices. So if they’re going to be a why bother? I mean, first of all, I don’t know how you’d even get to them to say to them, you were very disappointed in that.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  30:00

Um, yeah, exactly. But let’s go back a second. What were you saying about the public information office at the Supreme Court?

 

Nina Totenberg  30:08

Yeah, there’s the press secretary for the court, the Deputy Press Secretary. Then there are two other, two or three other people who work in that office, and they are very professional, and they are all women.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  30:22

So I am fascinated that you say that, because in my experience, when I have worked in situations with all women, for example, on this podcast, for the most part, everyone’s woman and and on films that I’ve made, directed by women. Nicole Hollis, Center shows that I’ve done with Carrie Leiser, female LED. It’s an entirely different workplace, and there is a what’s the word I’m going to say, there is an ease of generosity that’s just in place. And I would imagine you had that experience with Susan stamberg and Linda Wertheimer and Cokie Roberts when you first started at NPR, right? I mean.

 

Nina Totenberg  31:12

Absolutely yes. And Linda and cokie were and are my best friends. And when I when my late husband died and when he was terribly sick for almost five years, they and my sisters were the people who looked after me, took care of me, made sure I was okay, and they were my closest friends, and Ruth Ginsburg became one of my absolutely closest friends, even though I, you know, I in the book i i wrote about this, because I had to think about it, I didn’t realize that I was a close friend of hers until she turned um, uh, 50 or 60, I don’t remember which. And her husband asked me to write something about my friendship with her, a letter that would be he was putting together a book for her birthday. And I did that. And when I was writing my book, by then, Ruth had died, and I asked her daughter, Jane, if she had, by any chance, had a copy of the letter that I had written, because it was in a book. And she took a picture or whatever, and she sent it to me. And I was really quite astonished, because now I think of Ruth as my friend for almost 50 years, but back then, when she turned 50, I think I signed it Nina Totenberg, which is a little crazy when you think about it. So I had this moment of realization that I still thought I was that we were not best buddies or among the best buddies. And I thought, why did you think that? And what did you have in common that lasted almost 50 years? And the thing that we had in common that lasted almost 50 years is that for much of that time, we both were women of some accomplishment who constantly had our noses pressed up against the window looking inside at men who had all these jobs and they weren’t letting us have them and we wanted them. Let us in. Let us be part of this gang that you have yes and and I think she, that’s one of the reasons that she was so generous to so many women and so many girls and so many little girls, is that she understood that.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  34:02

You said that you learned how to be a better friend from your friends.

 

Nina Totenberg  34:06

Oh, I definitely learned how to be a better friend. I mean, I don’t think I could ever be as good a friend as Cokie Roberts. Why there was no end to her ability to be a friend and to know what was the right thing to do so that, I mean, at some point, I remember Lee, her son, was talking to his father, and he they said, you know, if cokie were here, she would have been at The house. Said, Steve, she would have gone over because so and so’s husband was in terrible shape, or was you just died and and Lee said, no, she wouldn’t have just gone over the house. She would have been sleeping on the couch that night. So that is the kind of friend she was for me and I learned. Learned from it how to be a much better friend and to understand that what you give, you get back to just by giving, yes, by giving, and that is no. I don’t know anybody who’d be as good a friend as cokie was, but just the other day, I wrote Steve, her husband, and I said, just want you to know I had one of my coke moments, which is always, you can’t figure out what what would be the right thing to do. What would cokie have done? Okay, then it’s obvious what would cokie have done. Then it’s obvious what you would do. You would give this much money. You would not hesitate to say, I to say, I can afford it. In this case, the the woman who had helped take care of my husband was in called me because she wanted she had been cheated out of some money. Could I help her get that money from the employer who had cheated her. And I thought, she’ll never get this money. She needs the money. I’ll send her a check. What would cokie have done? She would have given her the money. So look at that.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  36:16

Cokie is alive and well in you, that’s lovely. It is actually, in fact, it’s time to take another break. There’s more wisdom from Nina Totenberg when we come back.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  36:39

You know we had Fran Lebowitz on our show back in season one, and she was best friends with Toni Morrison, and she mentioned specific moments in her life when she wished she could ask her dear Toni Morrison for her thoughts on something. And I’m wondering right now, is there anything that you wish you could ask Ruth Bader Ginsburg right now, other than Could you please come back?

 

Nina Totenberg  37:16

That’s probably what I would add. You know, Ruth was, in her own way, just as I am, in my own way, a rather conservative person in her the way she conducted her life and what she thought about things, and and, and I would ask her, What knowing now what happened in the aftermath of of what’s happened at the court? What would she think we should do? Because I don’t think this is a question that’s easy to answer, and I interviewed her probably six, eight months before she died in that in course of that interview, I asked her whether she thought it was the court should be expanded, for example, and she said, Absolutely not. It’s if you expand it, you can contract it, or somebody, the next President, could just add more people and more people, and it gets and it’s just an unwieldy situation in which the court just seems constantly political. So there are those who would say that the court seems constantly political. Now, I’m sure. So what would she say? Now, knowing more about what happened, I know people will say, Oh, she should have quit earlier. Yes, she would have, if she had thought she was sick. She wasn’t sick. She was at the height of her powers on the court, right? She didn’t want to quit. And then by the time she did get sick, it was too late to do anything about it. So that’s a sort of foolish question. I don’t have to answer that one. I know what the answer to that one is, but I’m wondering, because she was very wise, not necessarily about politics, but she was a very wise person who what she would think of today’s court, and for people who think it’s that the outcome has been more than desultory, but even frightening for some people. What would she tell those people to do about it? And I don’t know what her answers would have been.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  39:36

Well, maybe we should have a seance or something.

 

Nina Totenberg  39:41

Maybe, yeah.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  39:43

So we’re speaking of the Supreme Court. We’re recording this in the summer, and I have no idea what’s going to happen with our country between now and the time that this episode airs. I mean, let’s talk about the culture change that you’ve experienced. Experience covering the court over this very long period of time. I mean, you were there for the original Roe v Wade decision, which is extraordinary, actually, and then, of course, most recently, the Dobbs decision. I’m sure you have a lot of feelings about this that are unique to you. I mean, I’m not exactly sure how to phrase this. I guess I want to talk about restraint in journalism.

 

Nina Totenberg  40:32

We have policies about that. Abe Rosenthal, who was for many years, the executive editor of the New York Times, used to have this saying, forgive me for my language, but please, if you cover the circus, you don’t fuck the elephants.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  40:50

Okay, first of all, that’s my new motto.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  40:59

That might be the best thing I’ve heard all week. I love it. I mean, of course, that was a different time, and there is plenty of biased media coverage now, plenty Fox News, etc. It’s partisan. I guess my question to you is the following, Is it challenging to keep your own personal views apart from your reporting. Is it particularly challenging now?

 

Nina Totenberg  41:28

It’s particularly challenging now because if you had said to me 10 years ago that I would ever be saying regularly that a president lied when he said, X, I would have said, no, we don’t do that. Because they didn’t lie like that. They may have overstated something, but they were afraid to lie. Now people do not seem to be afraid to just tell bald faced lies, and that is very challenging to journalists, even journalists who and maybe especially journalists who believe that we’re not supposed to impose our views on other people.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  42:25

We’re calling someone a liar, imposing a view?

 

Nina Totenberg  42:29

Well, if you say that somebody’s a liar, you’ve made a very definite value judgment about them. And I know lots of Republicans, most of them are no longer in the House and Senate, but there are some who will tell you absolutely that Trump has lied, and they will never say that publicly. So what do I do about that? What do you do about it? Well, if you really want to know what people genuinely think. You have to keep people’s confidences, if that’s the terms of them talking to you, otherwise, who’s going to trust you. You do have to do that. And I think the problem of bald faced lying is a relatively new one. Now, I didn’t live through the Civil War and I didn’t live through the late 1800s and I can’t know what politics was like. Then I only know what it’s been like for my life, which is a pretty now, a long life in Washington, and I came here as a quite young reporter, and I did not know of any president who lied willfully to the American public until well afterwards the biggest lie, for example, we know that now that Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin resolute to get the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution through, but we didn’t know that then, and maybe he didn’t think he was lying, but it’s a daily occurrence now in our political life. And I’m not just talking about Trump.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  44:27

Well, you’re talking about a new culture.

 

Nina Totenberg  44:29

I’m talking about a new culture.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  44:32

Have you lost faith? Do you have full faith into the judicial system? Or has it been shaken? Do you have hope?

 

Nina Totenberg  44:41

Hmm, I don’t actually know, but I try to tell myself always that, you know, the court for, I would say 80 or 90 years was on. A fairly steady it moved back and forth from a bit from liberal to less liberal, to more conservative to but there always was a center on the court, and there isn’t now. And I think that’s dangerous. I do think that’s dangerous. Maybe it’s a reflection of my own political views that I think there always ought to be a center. It may be more a right center or a left center, but there ought to be a center that is a bipartisan center, that is, you know, so you could look at Justice O’Connor and Justice Kennedy, for example, who were the center of the court when they were on the court. And that is, there’s nobody like that anymore, who’s at all, to a very small extent, Justice Barrett, perhaps in this last term, but this term, the court was on all of the biggest questions the court, and there were a lot of big questions this term, the court was just divided six to three.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  46:10

So Nina, I of course, have to ask you about Anita Hill. When you reported that story, you got a lot of blowback to say the least. How did you cope with that?

 

Nina Totenberg  46:23

So this is probably a longer answer than you want, but I’m going to give it to you anyway. So give it to me, babe. I had no idea when I broke that story how big a story it would be. I knew that after I broke the story, and I had gotten an exclusive interview with Anita Hill, if she went to ground and just disappeared, that this story would die, that it wouldn’t have legs on its own. What I didn’t account for enough was how many women had had the experience of being hit on by their bosses. I remember walking into the Russell Senate office building the day that the second set of hearings opened, and being shocked at this enormous media conglomerate that was there and networks were carrying it live. In fact, the Thomas Hill hearings outranked the World Series. I think maybe it was the playoffs, but I think it was the World Series in terms of ratings.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  47:36

What year was this? What year was this? By the way.

 

Nina Totenberg  47:38

1991 the fall of 91 so I had not anticipated this at all, but I did see what happened the minute I broke the story, and that was this rage from Republicans. So they got themselves a special counsel to investigate me and find out who the leak was. And of course, they did subpoena me, and I refused to. I went, I showed up, I complied with the subpoena, and I didn’t tell them anything. And it was very I guess the word is intimidating, but it really paid to be in my middle 40s at the time because I did have a lot of experience. Yeah, and the night I broke the story, I was on Nightline, and there were a bunch of senators on Alan Simpson and the late Paul Simon and I knew enough to keep my eye on the clock and to get the last word and say that, if I what I really wanted to say, which was, if you had looked into this, I wouldn’t have had a scoop. You buried it. You senators, you buried it, and I got a scoop, because you buried it, and I had enough sense to realize that something was going on and to start probing to find out what the hell it was. I didn’t know what it was when I started, so that made Senator Simpson very mad at me, but we eventually buried the hatchet and became good friends. It was in both our interests, I would have to say, and I like Alan Simpson.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  49:29

And did you? Did he have any regret about that incident? In retrospect?

 

Nina Totenberg  49:35

I don’t know, but he has a wife and a daughter who made very clear that he needed to make peace, and I was very clear that I wanted to make peace. So I invited him to the one of these correspondence dinners, and he came, and even brought me a corsage and a he was the Republican whip, and he came in the fancy car, you know, the. Limo from the we went. We were the stars of the evening because we were the unexpected duo there, and it made nice. Yes, we made nice, and it was a good thing. We have both, I think, enjoyed each other’s thoughts and friendships since then. But at the time, I remember coming home from that broadcast, two things happened. My husband, who was a former senator, greeted me, sort of he was up on the stairs when I walked in, and he said, what’s wrong? And I said, I lost my Deborah, Alice Simpson and I and I called him bad words and I cried. And he because we’d had a contra tone outside, and that was outside, that wasn’t on the air, that was not on the air, that was outside. And he said, Well, this is one of those nights where they’d had football, so it was delayed. So he said, Well, let’s watch it. And so we watched it. And he said, you won. Come on, let’s go to bed. And then I called my sister the next day, my sister, Jill, I have two sisters, one is a federal judge in Atlanta, and one is has her own PR business in New York. And I called her, and I was weeping, because, of course, people were trying to dig up dirt on me now, and it was very unpleasant. And she said, you just have to suck it up. There’s nothing you can do about it. Just do your job. It was great advice, but I would not have known all of those things when I was 27 for example, instead of, I think it was 46 or 47 at the time, I don’t remember, but I would not have known that when I was in my 20s.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  51:43

Yeah, I got it yes, of course, that makes sense. Okay, so wrapping up, I’m going to ask you a few sort of rapid fire questions. Okay, is there something you go back and tell yourself at 21 Nina Totenberg?

 

Nina Totenberg  52:02

I probably would tell myself, you will make it so just calm down. Yeah, you don’t have to be quite this pushy.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  52:13

Is there something you go back and say yes to?

 

Nina Totenberg  52:17

Something that I said no to and that I would say yes to? I can’t think of anything like that.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  52:25

Is there anything that you wish you’d spent less time on Nina?

 

Nina Totenberg  52:29

Well, I wish I’d spent less time perseverating about all manner of things and less time worrying about what people would think of me, or, you know, I Cokie once was doing a an obituary, which we do in our business, in advance, yes, of Gerald Ford’s dying, he wasn’t dying at time. We just do these right? I know people are shocked, shocked. It doesn’t shock you. But, and she was, you know, pieing her way through reams of tape, and one of the videotapes that she was looking at was the press conference that Ford had right after Nixon resigned his first press conference, and I was at that press conference, and I was, you know, and I got a question in, I asked him a pardon question, and I’m looking at this picture of myself, and I was really pretty, and I had no idea of that, then, and I wish I had had at least a little bit of idea that I was pretty and not because I always felt that I wasn’t.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  53:57

Well, it’s that adage, youth is wasted on the young.

 

Nina Totenberg  54:00

Yes, exactly right.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  54:03

Yeah, what are you looking forward to?

 

Nina Totenberg  54:08

I’m looking forward to getting rid of the cane. I’m really looking forward to my vacation this summer. I’ve earned it this year. It was a really tough year, and going back to work, when I went back to work was essential, or my brain would have turned to mush. But it was hard. It was very hard work. And the term has been very hard work not and it’s been hard for them, the justices, too, just, I don’t remember any term in which there were so many important cases, right? And there’s always a train wreck at the end of cases that are backed up. But this year was even worse than usual, and it was just an enormous amount of work.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  54:59

Yeah, want to keep working. I know you’re ready for a break right now, but is your plan? I don’t You don’t seem to me to be the retiring type.

 

Nina Totenberg  55:07

No, I’m not that’s I consider that the R word. I won’t let my husband retire either.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  55:12

Yeah, so you’re just going to keep going. Is that the plan I’m going

 

Nina Totenberg  55:15

to keep going as long as Justice Ginsburg used to say, as long as I think I can do the job. Now, my father died at 101 and was a virtuoso violinist, and he really didn’t want to die, but in the end, you know, even he couldn’t stay alive longer than he stayed alive, I can’t do what he did, which is in the last 10 years or so of his life, he did relatively little performing, certainly, and not any, I think, after he was about 95 but he taught and he played for fun. And I don’t think you I don’t think my brain will hold up long enough for me to be on the radio when I’m 95 or 90 maybe, but so I can’t it might be, yeah, maybe I’ll be a guest. I’ll be a guest person. I’ll make the occasional appearance in which I can write about the court or talk about the court in different ways. I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out. We don’t need to right now. No, I don’t have to. If there were an easy way to do a little less work, I probably would, but there’s no way to do a good job without working hard. I’m sorry. There’s not a way to do that most of the time.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  56:42

I think that’s the advice of this whole long conversation. Hard work equals good job, period. End of story, right?

 

Nina Totenberg  56:53

It is. And being lucky in your family and the people who love you.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  56:58

Thank you so much for talking with us today. I just adore you, and am grateful to you for your for your hard work. And I mean that from the bottom of my.

 

Nina Totenberg  57:07

That’s so lovely of you. And for those of you who are dying to know how old I am, just look it up, yeah.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  57:14

if you have Google, Google it.

 

Nina Totenberg  57:15

If you if you have Google, you can Google it. Yeah, if it says I’m 90, I’m not.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  57:19

Yeah, all right, thank you and thank you again, and thank you for having me, of course, such a pleasure. Well, that was a trip having a conversation with someone whose voice you know so well, but with whom you’ve never spoken that’s just wild. I gotta get my mom on a zoom to tell her all about it. Hi, mom.

 

Mommy  57:51

Oh, hi, love hello.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  57:53

How are you?

 

Mommy  57:54

I’m good. How are you?

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  57:56

I’m good. I just talked to Nina Totenberg,

 

Mommy  57:59

Well, I’m, I’m so excited about that.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  58:02

God Mom, we talked about so much, but she was talking about up until she was really, I think she said, into her 50s. Uh, Nina Totenberg, very often, when she got when she started to write a story, she felt sort of like a fraud, like she was was playing at the role of journalists, as opposed to being a journalist, I’m putting words in her mouth there, but I think that sort of there was a sort of a very and she, she characterized it as Being very female, her lack of security, confidence in herself as a journalist, and she’s had, she had to in her life, she’s had to push back against that, and she has successfully done so. Now she’s 80, she didn’t want to say her age. By the way, she’s the first guest we’ve ever had who didn’t want to say her age, which I thought was kind of strangely charming, because obviously you can Google it. And she said, You can Google it, but she still don’t want to say it. But anyway, have you had that experience mom, feeling that way, like as a writer?

 

Mommy  59:16

But first of all, I want to say, why did you use the word frog?

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  59:20

Well, first of all, I didn’t say frog, I said fraud, I said.

 

Mommy  59:30

Okay, well, that’s, that’s so that’s, that’s wonderful, all right we’ll just move on for that well.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  59:54

There is no way that that isn’t the funniest thing I’ve heard in like a week. Wait, Brad has come in here and ruining the podcast because he heard it too, and now he’s lying on the floor in the hallway in clutching his stomach. Yes, she was she had a story to write, and she felt like she couldn’t because she was a frog.

 

Mommy  1:00:22

Well, then she was right to not write it because.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  1:00:30

Oh, fuck, that is hilarious, Mom.

 

Mommy  1:00:34

Oh, that’s so funny. Well, can we get.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  1:00:38

Whatever felt a fraud or a frog.

 

Mommy  1:00:43

Let me tell you, that’s a common thing. You hear women say yes, what it took to make them feel legitimate and authentic. Yes, and I have a theory about it, at least as for myself, when we were young women who were born in the 30s and 40s, we didn’t know what to do with our ambition. It was your ambition was always like, you don’t go there. And what I mean is that, for instance, I was in college, and I read about Claire booth loose. There was a blue on article about her, and I read about her, and I thought that sounds so interesting. What was she doing? She was then, I guess she was the name ambassador to Italy, or she had gotten into politics, and she was taken very seriously. She was married to Henry Luce. It was a huge thing in publishing. So I said to my godmother, I went. I was in Florida with her, and I said to her, I’ve read this article about Clare Boothe Luce, and I’m fascinated. I think that would be such an interesting life. And so my Aunt Harriet, who is my godmother, said, yeah, it’s very interesting, but you’d have to marry Henry Luce. So the point being that they were saying that all that happened to her because she was married to that person, and that was such a way of it was like, don’t, don’t acknowledge your your own ambition and and so so constantly, I think that sometimes women that do, I think part of this is a little bit of that hangover, that when you feel like you don’t work, you’re not worthy of it, or you even after you proved yourself over and over again, I think that maybe it has to do with the fact that you don’t, you don’t quite permit your your ambition.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  1:02:33

That makes me angry hearing that story. I wish I could go back and change.

 

Mommy  1:02:37

By the way, it is not an uncommon story. I mean, I bet you that you know my my class and graduating class and from college was 55 from high school was 51 and I bet you there are scads of women of my era. That’s why I’m so interested in Nina Totenberg and the fact that she had that residue, a little bit of that residue working for her, yeah, against her, and actually.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  1:03:04

Yeah, well, and my final words today are, are, screw you Aunt Harriet for your, for your shitty remark. I don’t, I don’t like that at all. Well anyway.

 

Mommy  1:03:17

He was also a product, you know?

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  1:03:19

Yeah, I know, but I’m still mad about it.

 

Mommy  1:03:21

Yeah, okay, well me too.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  1:03:24

Good, Mommy.

 

Mommy  1:03:24

Yeah.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  1:03:25

okay. Well, listen, we’re gonna go okay.

 

Mommy  1:03:28

Well, much love, and I’m glad we got a good laugh today.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  1:03:31

Yeah, we got a good laugh. That was all the frogs are. Got a great inside joke, ribbit.

 

Mommy  1:03:38

Okay anyway I love you so much.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  1:03:41

Love you, mommy, bye.

 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus  1:03:42

Wiser Than Me is a production of Lemonada Media. Created and hosted by me Julia Louie Dreyfus. This show is produced by Kryssy Pease, Jamela Zarha Williams, Alex McOwen, and Hoja Lopez. Brad Hall is a consulting producer, Rachel Neil is VP of new content and our SVP of weekly content and production is Steve Nelson. Executive Producers are Paula Kaplan, Stephanie Wittels Wachs, Jessica Cordova Kramer, and me. The show is mixed by Johnny Vince Evans with engineering help from James Sparber. And our music was written by Henry Hall, who you can also find on Spotify or wherever you listen to your music. Special thanks to Will Schlegel, and of course, my mother Judith Bowles. Follow Wiser Than Me wherever you get your podcasts. And if there’s a wise old lady in your life, listen up.

 

CREDITS  1:03:52

There’s more Wiser Than Me with lemonade premium on Apple, you can listen to every episode of season three. Ad free. Subscribers also get access to exclusive bonus interview excerpts from each episode. Subscribe now by clicking on the wiser than me podcast logo in the Apple podcast app and then hitting the subscribe button. Make sure you’re following Wiser Than Me on social media. We’re on Instagram and Tiktok @wiserthanme and we’re on Facebook at Wiser Than Me Podcast.