Learning about the past

 

When I first saw the title, Dinners with Ruth, I was all excited because I thought it would be a book about fabulous menus at dinners with Ruth Reichl. Alas, the Ruth of the title is not Reichl but Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They say perseverance is the key, and I persevered—and was hooked.

This is mostly a memoir by award-winning NPR legal correspondent Nina Totenberg, and her life is interesting enough to keep me reading without RBG. I’m halfway through the book as of this evening, and RBG is there like a thread woven into the text. One of the things that has always stymied me about memoir is that I think it needs a peg to hang it on. You can’t just write, “This is my life” and expect to attract readers, no matter how thrilling, adventuresome, exotic your life has been. There needs to be that theme, that idea that holds it all together. For Totenberg, it was her friendship with RBG through many professional ups and downs, marriage, widowhood, the whole gambit of life. It might well have been Cokie Roberts, whose comforting, efficient presence hovers over this book like the housemother/big sister/aunt every woman wishes for.

But it is RBG who holds Totenberg’s attention. They connected by telephone in the sixties and became friends in the seventies. Those were still the days when women could not own property, open a bank account, apply for a credit card. The general opinion was that a woman needed a man to care for her, and her job was to keep the home fires, raise the children, cook the meals. None of that appealed to Totenberg, who was single, and RBG who was married and had a child. They fought their way, almost literally, into careers in journalism and the judiciary—places where women were not welcome.

I remember those days because, on a much smaller scale, I fought that battle. I was working on a Ph.D. in English in the late sixties and held an NDEA (National Defense Education Act) fellowship by which my tuition and fees were paid plus a stipend for living expenses. In return, I taught one class of freshman English each semester. There was a hue and cry in the department that another girl and I should not have fellowships because we had husbands to support us. Her husband was a fellow graduate student, also on a fellowship if I remember correctly, and they had two daughters. My then-husband was a surgical resident, and I brought home $30 a month more than he did. Our combined monthly income was something like $730, and I remember yet his indignation when he had to pay his first income taxes--$7.77.

So far, Totenberg’s story plays out against the background of politics in the last quarter of the twentieth century, particularly the politics of judicial appointments. I’m learning a lot about events that I remember but didn’t understand at the time. For instance, I remember the hearings about the appointment of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, a nomination which ultimately failed. I knew there were people aligned against him, but I didn’t understand what an arch conservative he was in a time of legislative cordiality nor how smugly confident he was.

Totenberg is a good writer who pulls her audience into the story and makes us feel that we are there with her—in the courtroom at Timothy McVeigh’s trial, in the hospital room with her dying husband, at the opera with RBG who is distracting her from tragedy. She makes me think of the power of good writing, and the ability of words to sway, persuade, inform. Totenberg is pretty straightforward.

The other thing she makes me realize is how complicated political life in D.C. is, what a complex understructure holds it together, how politicians, the judiciary, and associated personnel can call in a debt or pull a string or ferret out a bit of needed information. I can’t decide if I am reassured or frightened by that, but I think Totenberg has a good grasp of what goes on and is a honest journalist, striving for distance from her subjects and yet making them come alive.

Much to my surprise I am enjoying this book. I suspect the last half will have more about RBG.