This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a famous Supreme Court

justice, and before Nina Tottenberg was a well-known award-winning NPR legal affairs correspondent

covering the Supreme Court, they became friends. They met in the early 70s when Tottenberg

interviewed Ginsburg for a story about a Supreme Court decision pertaining to women's rights.

Ginsburg was still teaching at Rutgers University, and the ACLU had asked her to write the brief.

The two women bonded over law, but Tottenberg says as friends, they tried to avoid subjects that

crossed over into their professional relationship. They helped each other through crises in their lives,

like the illnesses and deaths of Ginsburg's husband and Tottenberg's first husband.

One of the ways Tottenberg helped Ginsburg after Ginsburg became a widow and during the COVID

lockdown when Ginsburg was in poor health, was to invite Ginsburg over for dinners. Nina Tottenberg

has written a book about their friendship called Dinners with Ruth. It's also a memoir about

Tottenberg's life and about her friendship with NPR's Koki Roberts, who reported on Congress,

and Linda Werthheimer, who covered politics. Those three women, along with Susan Stamberg,

who co-anchored all things considered, became known as the founding mothers of NPR.

Nina Tottenberg, welcome back to Fresh Air. Congratulations on the book. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you so much. I want to start with Row. You write about how Justice Ginsburg didn't think that

Row was the best case to guarantee a constitutional right to abortion. She didn't think basing Row on

the right to privacy would make for the sturdiest precedent, and she also wished that the change was

more incremental. And she would have preferred a case that she had argued about a year before Row.

She wished that that had been the test case. What was that case? And explain why she thought it was

a better test case. She represented a woman named Susan Strach, who was a captain in the Air Force

and who got pregnant. And under the rules in the military, as they then existed,

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