Nina Totenberg

Nina Totenberg (born January 14, 1944) is an American legal affairs correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR) focusing primarily on 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 is considered one of NPR's "Founding Mothers," along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, and 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 reopen 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.

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 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."

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 then Roll Call in Washington, D.C.

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.