Nina Totenberg (born January 14, 1944) is an American legal affairs correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) focusing primarily on the activities and politics of the Supreme Court of the United States. Her reports air regularly on NPR's news magazines All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition. From 1992 to 2013, she was also a panelist on the syndicated TV political commentary show Inside Washington.
She's considered one of NPR's "Founding Mothers" along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer and the late Cokie Roberts. Newsweek magazine called her "the creme de la creme" of NPR, and Vanity Fair refers to her as "Queen of the Leaks". She has won many broadcast journalism awards for both her explanatory pieces and her scoops.
Among her scoops was her groundbreaking report of sexual harassment allegations made against Clarence Thomas by University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, leading the Senate Judiciary Committee to re-open Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Previously, in 1986, she broke the story that Supreme Court nominee Douglas H. Ginsburg had smoked marijuana, leading Ginsburg to withdraw his name. In 1977, she reported on secret Supreme Court deliberations relating to the Watergate scandal.
Early life and education
Totenberg was born in Manhattan, New York City, the eldest daughter of Melanie Francis (Eisenberg), a real estate broker, and violinist Roman Totenberg. Her father was a Polish Jewish immigrant, who lost many of his family members in the Holocaust. Her mother was of German Jewish and Polish Jewish descent, from an upper-class family that had lived in San Francisco and New York City.
Totenberg enrolled in Boston University in 1962, majoring in journalism, but dropped out less than three years later because, in her words, she "wasn’t doing brilliantly".
Career
Soon after dropping out of college, Totenberg began her journalism career at the Boston Record American, where she worked on the Women's Page and learned breaking news journalism skills by volunteering in the news department. She moved on to the Peabody Times in Peabody, Massachusetts and Roll Call in Washington, D.C.
National Observer
At the National Observer, Totenberg began covering legal affairs. In 1971, she broke a story about a secret list of candidates President Richard Nixon was considering for the Supreme Court. All the candidates were later rejected as unqualified by the American Bar Association, and none were nominated.
After Totenberg wrote a National Observer profile of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Hoover wrote a long letter to the paper's editor demanding she be fired. Instead, the editor printed the letter in the Observer along with a rebuttal of Hoover's complaints regarding the article.
Fired for plagiarism
In 1972, Totenberg was fired from the National Observer for plagiarism in a profile she wrote on incoming Speaker Tip O'Neill, which included, without attribution, quotes from members of Congress that had previously appeared in The Washington Post. Totenberg has said that the dismissal also related to her rebuffing of sexual overtures from an editor. Many of Totenberg's colleagues have defended her, noting that the use of previously-reported quotes was a common journalistic practice in the 1970s.
In 1995, Totenberg told the Columbia Journalism Review, "I have a strong feeling that a young reporter is entitled to one mistake and to have the holy bejeezus scared out of her to never do it again."
New Times
She next worked for the New York City-based news magazine New Times. At that publication, she wrote a celebrated article called "The Ten Dumbest Members of Congress", prompting the senator at the top of the list, William L. Scott, to call a press conference to deny that he was the "dumbest member of Congress."
National Public Radio
In 1975, Nina Totenberg was hired by Bob Zelnick to work at National Public Radio and has been there since.
In 1977, Totenberg broke a story about the Supreme Court appeal of three men who had been convicted in the Watergate scandal: H.R. Haldeman, John N. Mitchell, and John D. Ehrlichman. Totenberg revealed the results of their secret 5–3 vote against reviewing the case and that the three dissenters were appointees of President Richard Nixon. Nixon had resigned three years earlier in the wake of Watergate. Totenberg also revealed that Nixon-appointed Chief Justice Warren Burger delayed announcing the vote results, hoping to sway his fellow justices. Her reporting of private Supreme Court deliberations was a novel development in Supreme Court reporting and led to speculation about who on the Court gave her the information.