Dinners with ruth, p.20
Dinners with Ruth, page 20
When she and David came down, I busied myself with Ruth, pulling out the food, and I paused, almost just trying to make conversation, and asked her if she knew how to heat up the soufflé dish. She answered confidently, “Yes, I’ll just put it in the microwave.” The soufflé was wrapped in aluminum foil with cardboard across the top. I immediately said, “No, no, no. You can’t put that in the microwave because it will short out everything in the house,” to which she said “So, I put it in the oven?”
I walked her through taking the cardboard top off and as I was turning to leave David asked, “Do you know how to work the oven, Ruth?” And with total candor, she answered, “No.” So, standing in Marty’s treasured kitchen, in which he would never cook again, my sweetheart instructed Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on how to use her oven, and they practiced turning it on and off a couple of times. He wouldn’t leave until she could show him that she knew how to do it.
I felt nothing but love for these two people standing before me, and for Marty upstairs, who wanted his wife to succeed without impediment or reservation. And for the knowledge that sometimes we all, even Supreme Court justices, need someone to show us how to work our actual, or metaphorical, ovens.
* * *
Ruth took Marty to Johns Hopkins Hospital later that week, and she called us from there to say Marty was dying. What should she do? David said, “Bring him back so he can die at home.” And that’s what they did.
When she was sick Marty wanted to do everything possible that could be done. Every single thing possible. But he did not wish the same for himself, and he said so in his last note to Ruth, which she found beside his bed at Hopkins. I saw Ruth betray her emotions only a few times. One of them was when I interviewed her several years later and asked her to read Marty’s last letter. She had not looked at it in a while and had forgotten to bring it to the interview. One of her judicial assistants raced to her chambers and found the sheet of yellow-lined paper. When you know you’re going to perform, you can steel yourself, but she had not steeled herself, and as she spoke Marty’s written words, she started to cry.
6/17/10
My dearest Ruth—
You are the only person I have loved in my life, setting aside, a bit, parents and kids and their kids, and I have admired and loved you almost since the day we first met at Cornell some 56 years ago. What a treat it has been to watch you progress to the very top of the legal world!!
I will be in JH Medical Center until Friday, June 25, I believe, and between then and now I shall think hard on my remaining health and life, and whether on balance the time has come for me to tough it out or to take leave of life because the loss of quality now simply overwhelms. I hope you will support where I come out, but I understand you may not. I will not love you a jot less.
Marty
Thirteen FAME and FRIENDSHIP
Ruth had now entered the sisterhood that I had joined twelve years before, when Floyd died. Widowhood after a long, debilitating disease is often a bit different. Perhaps the only good thing about having someone you’ve loved very dearly die after an extended illness is that you are ready for the death. You’re never as ready as you think you are, but you can see it off in the distance, you know that it’s coming. The time you spent managing care and making accommodations is transferred over to funeral and memorial plans. There is a mountain of paperwork and busyness that engulfs you. What is new is the quiet, particularly at night. Every blast of air-conditioning or heat, every cycle of an appliance, every creak of a floor or squeak of a hinge is somehow amplified. TV, radio, stereo, nothing quite overcomes that underlying layer of silence.
And there is the stuff. People are very different about how they handle their loved one’s belongings after death. When Floyd died, I wanted everything out of the house except for a couple of things that smelled like him and felt like him, one denim shirt and one sports jacket. I think the jacket may be gone now. I haven’t looked in quite a while. But I still have the shirt.
As for everything else, I saw no reason to have sweaters and pants and suits hanging in a closet only reminding me over and over that there’s nobody here who still wears those clothes. I donated the rest of his things. I was also still a relatively young woman, and I wanted to move on with my life. I had taken really good care of him for almost five years. I had loved him and done my duty, and cried when he got hurt, and cried for him at his limitations and how hard he had to fight against them. But I recognized that I had many years stretching ahead of me, and I had to live them.
So, in her own way, did Ruth. But she kept the physical world she had shared with Marty—their apartment—largely intact. His kitchen stayed, including the pans carefully hung on the pegboard, and his books.
* * *
Two months after Marty died in 2010, Ruth traveled to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals Judicial Conference. Marty had been scheduled to deliver a speech on the historic joint case that he and Ruth had argued before the Tenth Circuit. He had written the speech before his death, and Ruth delivered it—with an aside to offer her own dissent that, unlike what Marty had written, her study in their New York apartment was not bigger than his. She sounded very much like Marty when she spoke, capturing his cadences and especially his trademark humor about tax law, and about most everything else. It was an amazing performance and so funny that it was almost possible to miss the poignant final line: “Ruth and I are truly delighted to be back with you in the Tenth Circuit again,” and the very slight catch in her voice as she said, “again,” which she quickly covered with a glowing smile. Because, of course, now it was Ruth alone.
I was there because I had been asked, as part of the event, to interview Ruth and the chief justice of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, on the differences between the U.S. and Canadian judicial systems. Ruth, however, was the main attraction. Her own familiar spunk and sense of humor were on full display during the conversation. She had a unique ability to recite the minute details of a case, much as if she were a second-year law student presenting in class, but to do it in a way that was witty and relatable.
She started off by a discussing a “silly” Oklahoma law that allowed girls who were age eighteen to buy low-alcohol beer, while boys had to wait until they turned twenty-one, “so, the thirsty boys at a fraternity in Stillwater, Oklahoma, brought this case.” When she discussed why the plaintiffs’ lawyers, including her, did not make it a class action suit, Ruth said it was because the fraternities had an “endless supply of eighteen-year-olds.” That case, however, became a landmark. It produced the ruling in which the Supreme Court, and Justice Brennan, declared for the first time that laws that discriminate on the basis of sex must be viewed with “heightened scrutiny.” This was a new and more difficult standard to meet. In describing the litigation, Ruth deadpanned that at the time, “we wished the Court had chosen a less frothy case.”
With the benefit of hindsight, I see that two truths converged at this moment in Ruth’s life. She had begun to step more fully into the spotlight back in 2007 with her blistering dissent in the Ledbetter pay discrimination case. Sandra Day O’Connor had retired. And Ruth was the only woman on the Court. The Ledbetter case particularly galled her. By a 5–4 vote, the justices ruled against Lilly Ledbetter, who had been repeatedly discriminated against in wages, as well as subjected to harassment, while working for nineteen years at the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in Alabama.
Summarizing her dissenting opinion from the bench that day, Ruth spoke slowly and deliberately, drawing out every word for maximum impact: “The court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination.” She ended her Ledbetter dissent noting that Congress had previously corrected the Supreme Court’s interpretation of this very statute, adding that “the ball again lies in Congress’ court.” She was very proud when the first piece of legislation enacted after President Obama’s election amended this statute to clarify that its protections applied from the time the workplace discrimination began, not from the time the legal complaint was filed.
By 2010, Ruth was no longer the only female justice. Because she was now the elder stateswoman of the three women on the Court and the senior member of the Court’s liberal wing, Ruth’s words carried even more weight. She was also writing far more dissents, and her dissents were getting noticed. Oral dissents are relatively rare at the Supreme Court. Prepandemic, the tradition was that the author of an opinion would summarize the decision on the day it was handed down. And, on rare occasions, a justice who disagreed strongly would summarize her or his dissent.
Ruth used that oral dissent tradition as a mechanism to call the public’s attention to any decision she thought was profoundly wrong. In 2013, she dissented from the bench when the Court gutted a major provision of the Voting Rights Act. Writing for the conservative majority, Chief Justice Roberts said essentially that times had changed since the law was enacted, in 1965, and there was no longer any need for its extraordinary provision requiring state and local governments with a history of discrimination to clear any changes in their voting laws with the Justice Department. Ruth, in her dissent, said that “throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” For some reason, Ruth did not include that “money quote” in her oral dissent. When I told her that years later, she was both surprised and horrified. But her predictions of racially motivated changes were rapidly proven true as legislatures in states with discriminatory histories immediately began to enact changes that made it more difficult to vote.
Ruth was also becoming more public and more visible. During their married life together, Marty had been the main attraction in social settings, while Ruth was far more content to sit back. But now, she seemed to intuitively understand that she needed to step up a bit more. She knew herself well enough to realize that it was important she not sit at home. And she certainly wasn’t interested in cooking for herself. She also genuinely liked the theater, the opera, all kinds of events, so she accepted numerous invitations to occupy her time. Rather like the energy one draws walking down the crowded streets of Manhattan, the bustle of a theater, the snippets of conversation, the visual stimuli of so many people in one space, gave Ruth bursts of energy. It’s not that she couldn’t be alone. Quite the contrary, sometimes when we knew she was working very hard, especially during the last month of the Court’s term, David and I would all but insist that she could take an hour off if we brought dinner. We would arrive with the meal already prepared, or ready to make, do the final cooking, set the table, and call her down, first for a glass of wine and then for dinner. After she took her last bite, we would scoot her upstairs to work while we cleaned up, and quietly let ourselves out.
Invariably, she would sigh as she headed upstairs, and say, “You were right, I did need a break and some social interaction. I didn’t realize how isolated I was.” We, of course, were thrilled to perform this mitzvah, and we joked with her that she should start calling us “the couple,” a reference to the term sometimes used by the rich and famous for their married household staff.
At the same time, Ruth’s professional star was rising. Within a few years, coinciding with her eightieth birthday, she had become an icon. That status truly began to take hold in 2013, twenty years after she had been appointed to the Court, largely thanks to a blog appearing on the now mostly forgotten Internet site Tumblr. Entitled Notorious R.B.G., a play on the name of the late rapper the Notorious B.I.G., the blog was started by a Columbia University law student, Shana Knizhnik, as a celebration of all things Ruth. In its first year, it had 250,000 visits. Notorious R.B.G. was sparked in part by Ruth’s dissent in the voting rights case. Suddenly, in the vernacular of popular culture, the woman who wore white lace collars (and a jet-black collar for dissent days) with her black robes was “cool.”
Ruth explained that one of her law clerks had originally told her about the blog. The clerk, she added, “also explained to me what Notorious R.B.G. was a parody of.” Giggling, she continued, “Well, my grandchildren love it, and I try to keep abreast of what’s on the Tumblr.” (This was a stark contrast to the time one of her grandchildren decided to unfriend Ruth on Facebook.)
This popularity—to some, it was merely notoriety—had a bit of a double edge to it, however. Because Ruth received so much more attention than the other members of the Court, even the chief justice, people thought that she was fair game for their own version of “strict scrutiny.” Some of her colleagues were no doubt put off by her new celebrity, and some academics thought it was unseemly, but ultimately, she understood that she had become an important role model for women—young and old. And none of the other justices could have done that in the same way.
Sandra Day O’Connor had accepted that role before Ruth. For as long as O’Connor had been on the Court, she was its most famous member. And because of her centrist position on the Court, she was dubbed “the most powerful woman in America.” There was even talk of her as a potential presidential or vice-presidential candidate.
During those years, Ruth remained largely in O’Connor’s shadow; she wasn’t that famous until her own time came—and then, as a sign of the social-media age, it was a very all-encompassing fame. Or as I wrote when the blog became a book in 2015, “Supreme Court justices are generally robed and mysterious figures. Their faces are not emblazoned on T-shirts, painted on fingernails, tattooed on arms and shoulders, and their characters are not parodied on TV programs ranging from Saturday Night Live to Scandal. At least not until Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg became a cultural icon at about the same time she turned eighty.” As Irin Carmon, who coauthored the Notorious RBG book, told me, “I think the Internet has given young women the opportunity to choose our own heroes.” And they chose RBG because “There’s this desire on the Internet to find something that feels authentic, and real and raw.”
* * *
I came to fully recognize this new chapter for Ruth at an event that I did not attend. In the summer of 2013, David and I were invited to the wedding of Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser to John Roberts—no not that one—an economist at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, who shared the name of the chief justice of the United States. The ceremony was scheduled to take place in the atrium, and the guest list included opera stars, Broadway marquee names, and philanthropists, including Jacqueline Mars, heir to the candy fortune, who to this day works incredibly hard on all things Kennedy Center. But it wasn’t just the guest list and the grooms that made this a significant night. Ruth was going to officiate at the wedding, the first time a sitting Supreme Court justice had ever married a same-sex couple. She had waited until the Court made same-sex weddings legal. I was really looking forward to the evening, but the day before, I broke my foot, badly. I couldn’t get out of bed. When I called to tell Ruth, her first words were “Oh, no! Can’t you come?” I promised her that David would be there.
David and I had already been designated as her “dates” for the evening; now David was seated in the front row, which he found somewhat intimidating. He says he will never forget when Ruth reached the end of the ceremony and spoke the words “I now declare you husband and husband.” He held his breath.
But it was at the dinner that followed that he (and later I) came to realize what a rock star Ruth had become, as actors, singers, and stars from every walk of life appeared at the table to speak to her. Ruth could barely finish a couple of bites of food because the crowd was so substantial. People looked at David sitting next to her and subtly, or unsubtly, conveyed the question, Who the hell is this guy? Ruth would graciously say, “Oh, do you know my friend Dr. David Reines?” They would perfunctorily shake David’s hand and then pivot back to Ruth. She was the biggest star in the room. She had broken through the glass ceiling to a whole new level.
Now when she arrived to watch an opera, often wearing a babushka to hide her hair, the audience was not fooled. Even if she sneaked in through a side entrance, a rolling wave of applause would start as soon as she reached her seat, until everyone was on their feet, giving her a standing ovation. The outpouring was immediate and visceral. She would smile and offer a slight wave. But that was all. She always kept her reaction to the accolades controlled. Ruth attended because she loved the opera. She often told me that if she were to be anything other than a Supreme Court justice, her “other” first choice would have been to be an opera diva. Alas, she couldn’t carry a tune.
But it wasn’t just events that she attended. It was events where she was the attraction. The interview chats that she and I had started doing in the early 2000s, beginning with the Ninety-second Street Y in New York, were suddenly multiplying and sold out immediately. A few of my Supreme Court reporter colleagues occasionally referred to these Ruth-chats with veiled criticism, whether I was the interviewer or not, seeing them as conversations geared to her fans.
People certainly didn’t go to the trouble of getting tickets to watch Ruth be skewered, but if I could get her to talk about an unusual or different topic, or about her early life, or a news topic, I would try. I learned that it was better if I shared the topic with her in advance. It gave her time to think about it, and almost always she would have things to say that were interesting. Sometimes her answer was a revelation to me, such as when I asked her if she’d ever had a MeToo harassment moment. But if I ambushed her without warning, it didn’t work; she was very good at deflecting. All the justices are, it’s part of their job.
