Live to Lead

The following interview with the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg

took place at the US Supreme Court on August 2nd, 2019.

It had originally been scheduled a few weeks later.

It was brought forward at her request.

It was subsequently revealed

that a cancerous tumor had been discovered on her pancreas,

and three days after the interview, she began radiation therapy.

This is one of her last interviews.

I had two years out of university when I was married

because my husband was called into service.

And during those two years, I became pregnant.

And I worried, would I be able to manage

a young child and Harvard Law School?

So my husband's father said to me,

"Ruth, if you don't want to go to law school,

no one will think the less of you."

"You have a very good reason not to enroll."

"But if you really want to be a lawyer,

you will stop feeling sorry for yourself."

"You will pick yourself up, and you will find a way."

And that advice, at every turn in my life,

I thought, "Do I really want this?"

And if the answer's "Yes,"

you find a way.

This was inspired by Nelson Mandela.

Who once said, "What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived...

...it is what difference we have made to the lives of others

that will determine the significance of the life we lead."

His life left a lasting mark on the world.

A legacy that has helped inspire so many others to stand up.

To fight for change and to become leaders.

So this is in memory of Madiba.

It was made to remind us of the difference one person can make.

It's about people who have made brave choices.

Leaders who have walked alongside him and followed in his footsteps.

Caring for others. Working for a better and more equal world.

And giving inspiration to the rest of us

to live to lead.

- Are we all good to go? - Yep.

- Hey, are we rolling? - We're rolling.

- Okay. Justice Ginsburg... - Yes?

Take one.

I can't imagine anyone else on Earth

who I would be more proud to be in the room with than Ms. Ginsburg.

They call her the Notorious R.B.G.

She's a feminist icon, and a favorite among the young people.

She is the standard of courage

and intellect and kindness and heart.

Ruth used to ask,

"What is the difference between a bookkeeper in Brooklyn

and a Supreme Court justice?"

Her answer?

"One generation."

It has been said that Ruth wanted to be an opera virtuoso

but became a rock star instead.

Virtually every significant case brought before the Supreme Court

in the decade of the '70s on behalf of women,

bore her mark.

Later, she became a star on the bench,

where she sat for 27 years.

She's an amazing, brave woman.

And strong.

People ask me sometimes,

"When will there be enough women on the court?"

And my answer is,

"When there are nine."

So much has been written and said about you,

but I wonder if we could start with you telling me a little bit about your life.

My current life, and for the past 26 years,

I have been a member of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Before that, I was a lawyer and a law teacher.

My entering law school class had some 500 students.

Nine of them were women.

Parents of girls in those days

thought the most important degree for their daughter

was not the Bachelor of Arts or Sciences.

It was the MRS degree.

But my mother was not that way.

One of the things she urged strongly

was that it's fine if you meet Prince Charming,

but always be able to fend for yourself.

Be independent.

Two things were important to my mother.

One was that I be independent,

and the other, she called it

"being a lady."

And by that, she didn't mean wearing white gloves,

she meant that a lady doesn't give way

to emotions that sap energy and do no good.

So anger, jealousy, remorse.

Those were emotions that

don't move you forward.

They trap you.

Don't snap back in anger.

Take a few deep breaths,

and respond in a way that you may be persuasive.

It was a great sadness in my young life

that she died the day before I graduated from high school.

She battled cancer for four years,

and then finally succumbed.

I decided to become a lawyer when I was a college student.

It was a bad time for the United States.

There was a huge Red Scare.

This is no field day for Moscow or its sympathizers.

The only answer

to a strategy of victory for the communist world

is a strategy of victory for the free world.

And there was a senator from Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy,

who saw a communist in every corner.

Apparently, every time anybody says anything

against anybody working for Senator McCarthy...

- Just answer the quest... - ...he's accusing them of communism.

Just answer the question.

People were hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

And my professor of constitutional law

impressed upon me that lawyers were standing up for these people

and reminding our Congress that we have a First Amendment

that protects our right to think, speak, and write as we believe,

and not as some Big Brother government tells us.

That there is the right to freedom of thought and expression.

I said that I was exercising my rights

guaranteed to me under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

So that gave me the idea that being a lawyer was a pretty nifty thing to do.

I thought I could earn a living, and then I could do something

to make things a little better in my society.

I didn't appreciate fully

the barriers to going and getting a job in the law.

I did very well in law school,

but there wasn't a single firm in the city of New York

that would offer me a job.

I don't know how many times I heard from law firms,

"We had a lady lawyer, and she was dreadful."

I had three strikes against me.

One is I am Jewish, and there was considerable antisemitism.

The second, I was a woman,

and those barriers were just beginning to fall.

The third one was a strikeout.

I was a mother.

My daughter was four years old when I graduated from law school.

So the rare firms that would take a chance on a woman

would not risk hiring a mother.

When the women's movement came alive in the late 1960s,

I knew that's what I...

I wanted.

There were things that I had observed growing up.

Before I became a lawyer,

there was a time when women were not accepted as members of the bar.

There were no women judges.

Very few women engineers.

No women police officers.

No women firefighters.

This is Mary McDonald.

Age?

Well, old enough to be the mother of those three.

Profession?

That's part of it right there.

Together, with a good deal of housework and lots of mileage in the family car.

And I thought, "Well, that's just part of the territory."

"You have to put up with it."

But in the late '60s, women began to think,

"No, we don't have to put up with it. We should be able to do

whatever we have the talent to do,

and no one should stop us simply because we're women."

I was teaching law at Rutgers University,

and my students wanted to have a course on women and the law.

And in the space of a month,

I read every federal decision about women's rights or the lack thereof.

Women were making claims that they hadn't before.

So I was a volunteer lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union,

devoting the entire decade of the '70s to see what I could contribute.

So in that decade of the '70s,

I appeared before many courts.

This court included.

When I first got into the business of gender equality,

it was a world in which most men thought,

"There really is no such thing as discrimination against women."

All the barriers were regarded as protections.

They exclude women from an occupation

thought more appropriate to men.

The sex criterion stigmatizes

when it is used to limit hours of work for women only.

Hours regulations, today, "protect" women

from competing for extra remuneration, higher-paying jobs, promotions.

People knew that race discrimination was odious.

Discrimination based on religion was a bad thing.

But they didn't think that about the barriers that women face.

There's a line of contention that...

more protections are necessary for women.

From bans on pornography to child-rearing benefits for mothers

but not for fathers, not equally for fathers.

Uh, the greater protection that women need from

child sexual molestation,

where they are more frequently the victims,

and I'd be interested in your thinking as to the use of the legislative branch

as some of the other women's advocates have articulated the views in the 1980s.

I think it's grand to use the legislative branch.

What you discuss, Senator Specter, I think reflects a large generational difference.

In the days of the protective laws,

the legislative branch was used extensively.

And the legislative branch said that we'll restrict the hours