RUTH BADER GINSBURG WAS MY IDOL, IS MY IDOL AND WILL FOREVER BE MY IDOL…AND I AM A MAN
The world as we know it took a big hit last Friday (September 18, 2020) when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died at 87 years young.
For a 5’1” 100 lb. wisp of a human being, she was a giant of a woman with an equally giant brain.
And tough — as in tirelessly tough — a woman with undying purpose and relentless drive.
Appointed by President Bill Clinton to the Supreme Court of the United States, Ginsburg took the oath of office on August 10, 1993 becoming the second female justice to be confirmed, following Sandra Day O’Connor.
(Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan have since joined her on the country’s highest court — “The Court”).
Upon O’Connor’s retirement in July 2005 until Sotomayor’s confirmation in August 2009, Ginsburg was the only female justice on the Supreme Court.
She described her years as the solitary female justice as “the worst times,” in a 2014 interview with Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic.
“The worst times were the years I was alone,” she recalled. “The image to the public entering the courtroom was eight men, of a certain size, and then this little woman sitting to the side. That was not a good image for the public to see [with only one woman]. But now, with the three of us on the bench, I am no longer lonely and my newest colleagues are not shrinking violets. Not this term but the term before, Justice Sotomayor beat out Justice Scalia as the justice who asks the most questions during argument.” (Sotomayor’s average questions per argument was 21.6 to Scalia’s 20.5).
Think she wasn’t tough?
From being one of just eight women in her Harvard Law School class of five hundred-plus to her Supreme Court appointment, she broke through barriers and defied expectations, becoming a feminist icon who not only changed the law, but also transformed the roles of men and women in society.
A champion: Gender discrimination. Equal protection. Due process.
And a mega-star in the fine art of disagreeing agreeably, she and Antonin Scalia offering a revealing case in point.
She was a pioneering advocate for women’s rights, who in her ninth decade became a much younger generation’s cultural idol.
The Notorious R.B.G.
A play on the name of the Notorious B.I.G., a famous rapper who was Brooklyn-born as was Ginsburg, anointed by a law student Shana Knizhnik, and her image — an expression serene yet severe, a frilly lace collar adorning her black judicial robe, her eyes framed by oversized glasses and a gold crown perched at a rakish angle on her head — became an internet sensation.
Young women had the image tattooed on their arms; girls sported R.B.G. costumes for Halloween; and “You Can’t Spell Truth Without Ruth” appeared on t-shirts and bumper stickers.
A biography, “Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg,” written by Irin Carmon and Ms. Knizhnik, reached the best-seller list one day after its publication in 2015.
The next year Simon & Schuster rolled out a Ginsburg biography for children entitled, “I Dissent.”
A documentary film of her life was a surprise box office hit in the summer of 2018, and a Hollywood biopic built around her first sex discrimination court case opened on Christmas Day that year.
Dahlia Lithwick, writing in The Atlantic in early 2019 offered this observation of the RBG phenomenon:
“Today, more than ever, women starved for models of female influence, authenticity, dignity, and voice hold up an octogenarian justice as the embodiment of hope for an empowered future.”
This late-life adulation, bordering on rock star status, gained steam after the election of Donald Trump whom Justice Ginsburg — in a rare flash of indiscretion — called “a faker” in an interview during the 2016 presidential campaign.
(She later remarked that her comment had been “ill advised”).
Doing something highly unusual for a member of the nation’s highest court — admitting that she may have made a mistake — she wrote in a brief statement issued by the court, “Judges should avoid commenting on a candidate for public office,” conceding that her remarks were “ill advised” and expressing regret.
“In the future I will be more circumspect.”
Prior to taking her vow of greater circumspection, the woman born Joan Ruth Bader on March 15, 1933 and nicknamed Kiki as a child, authored the following pearls of wisdom, and let the record reflect that she had plenty to say and said plenty:
— ON HER MOTHER:
“My mother told me two things constantly. One was to be a lady, and the other was to be independent. The study of law was unusual for women of my generation. For most girls growing up in the ’40s, the most important degree was not your B.A., but your M.R.S.”
— ON BEING REJECTED EARLY IN HER CAREER BY A FIRM THAT HAD ALREADY HIRED A WOMAN:
“You think about what would have happened…Suppose I had gotten a job as a permanent associate. Probably I would have climbed up the ladder and today I would be a retired partner. So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great good fortune.”
— ON FEMALE SUPREME COURT JUSTICES:
“[When] I’m sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]? And I say, ‘When there are nine.’ People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.”
— ON DISCRIMINATION:
“I- try to teach through my opinions, through my speeches, how wrong it is to judge people on the basis of what they look like, color of their skin, whether they’re men or women.”
— ON GENDER EQUALITY:
“Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.”
— ON FEMINISM:
“Feminism…I think the simplest explanation, and one that captures the idea, is a song that Marlo Thomas sang, ‘Free to be You and Me.’ Free to be, if you were a girl — doctor, lawyer, Indian chief. Anything you want to be. And if you’re a boy, and you like teaching, you like nursing, you would like to have a doll, that’s OK too. That notion that we should each be free to develop our own talents, whatever they may be, and not be held back by artificial barriers — man-made barriers, certainly not heaven sent.”
— WHEN SHE DEFENDED A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO AN ABORTION (JULY 1993):
“It is essential to a woman’s equality with man that she be the decision maker, that her choice be controlling. If you impose restraints, you are disadvantaging her because of her sex. The state controlling a woman would mean denying her full autonomy and full equality.”
— WHEN SHE CRITICIZED PARTISAN DIVISIONS IN CONGRESS (FEBRUARY 2017):
“I wish there was a way I could wave a magic wand and put back when people were respectful of each other and the Congress was working for the good of the country and not just along party lines. Some day there will be great people, great elected representatives who will say, ‘enough of this nonsense, let’s be the kind of legislature the United States should have.’ I hope that day will come when I’m still alive.”
— WHEN SHE LAUDED THE #METOO MOVEMENT:
“It’s about time. For so long women were silent, thinking there was nothing you could do about it, but now the law is on the side of women, or men, who encounter harassment and that’s a good thing. Every woman of my vintage knows what sexual harassment is, although we didn’t have a name for it.”
And then there was this which engendered an apology of sorts and prompted her to vow greater circumspection:
— ON TRUMP AHEAD OF HIS NOMINATION (JULY 2016):
“He is a faker. He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment. He really has an ego…How has he gotten away with not turning over his tax returns? The press seems to be very gentle with him on that.”
I’m afraid the truth hurts sometimes.
And Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke the truth.
She spoke the truth when she said of her late husband Martin — as young romantics — “Marty was the only young man I dated who cared that I had a brain.”
But it was much more than that.
Their 56-year union before Marty’s death at 78 in 2010 was a marriage made in heaven. Martin Ginsburg, espousing the doctrine of “proto-feminism,” was a man light years ahead of his time.
In fact during their early years together they agreed that to pursue dual — as in separate and distinct — careers in law together would be advantageous to both; they wouldn’t step on each other’s toes that way.
This mindset was novel and rare in the 1950s when traditional gender roles were slowly evolving, but the notion of the acceptance of a woman as an equal to a man was in its embryonic stages — if it had progressed even that far.
As is the case with any solid relationship, their bedrock was a mutual respect, equality and a willingness to share domestic tasks.
A sense of humor didn’t hurt either.
Soon after their wedding, young Army Lt. Ginsburg found himself assigned to an artillery unit in Fort Hill, Oklahoma. One night Mrs. Ginsburg proudly presented her husband with a dish which he later confided to The Washington Post in a far-reaching interview was inedible.
“What is it?” he asked.
“It’s tuna casserole,” she replied.
From then on Mr. Ginsburg assumed full responsibility for dinner, inspired by both what had been placed in front of him that evening as well as an English translation of an Escoffier cookbook that had been a wedding gift.
“As a general rule,” he told the New York Times in 1997, “my wife does not give me any advice about cooking, and I do not give her advice about the law. This seems to work quite well on both sides.”
Then there was her relationship with fellow Justice Scalia.
Complex, with a shared love of jurisprudence and opera.
The Ruth Bader Ginsburg — Antonin Scalia two-headed vaudeville act represented one of Washington’s storied odd couples morphing into famously good friends.
(Not quite like “the odd couple of the American Revolution,” John Adams and Thomas Jefferson but…???).
They went to the opera together, they spent New Year’s Eve together, they even once spent time together atop an elephant.
Scalia, a conservative from a liberal metropolis (Elmhurst, Queens) and Ginsburg, a liberal who worked, increasingly, in a conservative court found themselves sometimes at opposite ends of the legal spectrum, but elevated the ability to disagree agreeably to the highest art form.
It may be hard to remember that, not so long ago, political disagreements didn’t demand that the combatants retreat to their respective corners spewing vitriol, and that ideological differences needn’t be viewed as moral defects.
Two justices’ intellectual combat was never to be taken personally — and it wasn’t.
Eric L. Motley, the executive vice president of the Aspen Institute, peeled additional layers of the RBG persona when describing his unlikely friendship with the Justice.
It was 2002 at a Georgetown dinner party when Motley, a 30-year-old African American from the rural South met Ginsburg, a Jewish urbanite who had just turned 70 and had been appointed to the Supreme Court by a Democratic president.
Motley had arrived in Washington to serve as a special assistant to George W. Bush.
He had the “great good fortune” to be seated next to Marty, a gregarious sort.
Motley recalls their conversation.
“So what do you do when you’re not working at the White House?” Marty asked. Motley replied that listening to music and reading were his main interests. Marty turned and said, “my wife and I love music; what are you listening to now?”
When Marty learned that Motley was researching different renditions of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations and that his favorite was Glenn Gould 1955 he addressed his wife on the other side of the table saying, “Ruth, you have to meet Eric.”
A deep friendship over the next 17 years had begun and would be richly nourished.
The three discussed music and many other topics.
Ruth sent Eric CDs and articles and occasionally over dinner would explain complicated legal cases.
When Motley began writing a memoir of growing up in a poor community in Alabama founded by former slaves, including his great-grandfather, Ruth asked to read the manuscript and her keen insight resulted in several valuable suggestions.
Ginsburg shared her own recollections that helped Motley understand the genesis of her lifelong passion for equal opportunity for every person.
In a conversation about those who had made lasting impressions on them when they were young, Ruth recalled being mesmerized by the conductor of a children’s concert she attended in Brooklyn in 1944, when she was 11 years old.
She was saddened and somewhat incredulous when she learned that Motley had not heard of the African-American conductor, Dean Dixon, and his inability to land a conductor’s job at a major symphony orchestra simply because of his race.
“Sit down,” she said. “We cannot end the evening until you know his story. Can you imagine someone with so much skill and genius, conducting all over the world, and yet unable to find a job in his own country just because of the color of his skin?”
They discussed politics but never in a partisan fashion; rather, they exchanged ideas that underlie political theories and ways of thinking.
They always discussed issues — even potentially divisive ones — from a cultural and historical perspective in a far more nuanced way than the Democratic versus Republican dichotomy would allow.
As it happened, their views were not as far apart as their nominal party affiliations might have suggested.
Motley found Ginsburg to be a friend in all seasons and he sometimes would forget who she was, as she reminded him that it was friendship which mattered most.
When she first met his fiancee after knowing him as a single person for 15 years, she looked at him and proclaimed, “It’s about time!”
When the pandemic forced a postponement of their wedding where she was to be a reader, Ginsburg offered to marry them quietly in her apartment so that they could get on with their lives and celebrate later. She even shared a draft with the couple detailing how she planned to personalize the civil service of union.
They quarantined for a month and the ceremony was scheduled for Friday September 18.
Two days earlier they found out that she would have to reschedule.
“To have a Supreme Court justice marry you is one thing, but to lose a friend is everything,” the devastated Motley opined.
Later Friday evening Motley made reference in his diary to what Wordsworth refers to as “thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
Ruth Bader Ginsburg could do that to you.
The world lost a shining star whose brilliance was only exceeded by the depth and breadth of her character, her spirit, her ethos.
We were blessed to have had her.
May she rest in peace.
[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in September 2020.]
