NPR Journalist Nina Totenberg And Her Husband H. David Reines Are Happily Married Since 2022

Nina Totenberg is a legal affairs correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR). She writes about the work and politics of the United States Supreme Court. Her stories are often heard on NPR’s All Things Considered, Morning Edition, and Weekend Edition news shows.

She was one of the first people to join NPR, along with Susan Stamberg, Linda Wertheimer, and Cokie Roberts, who has since passed away. Newsweek called her “the best of the best” at NPR, and Vanity Fair called her the “Queen of the Leaks.” She has won a lot of awards for both her pieces that explain something and her scoops.

Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, said that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her. In one of her groundbreaking reports, she wrote about this. This report led the Senate Judiciary Committee to reopen Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

The reporter had already said that Supreme Court nominee Douglas H. Ginsburg had smoked marijuana in 1986, which made Ginsburg take his name off the list. In 1977, she wrote about the secret Supreme Court talks about the Watergate scandal.

Who Is Nina Totenberg’s Husband H. David Reines? Wikipedia Bio

H. David Reines is the vice chairman of surgery at Inova Fairfax Hospital, where he works as a trauma surgeon. He does emergency surgeries on people who have serious injuries or illnesses that could kill them.

He has helped thousands of people who were hurt in the neck, chest, abdomen, or limbs. Even though he was a very skilled doctor, he became well-known after he married Totenberg.

On Nina and David’s honeymoon, he took care of her after she was hit by a boat propeller while swimming and got very hurt.

NPR Journalist Nina Totenberg And H. David Reines Age Difference

Nina and David might be a few years apart in age. The exact date of the surgeon’s birth is unknown, but Nina was born on January 14, 1944. In 2022, she will be 78 years old.

Based on how he looked, the journalist’s husband seemed to be in his 70s. Since they’ve been married for a long time and are still together today, it seems like they get along well.

Even though they are different ages, Totenberg and Reines look great together. They have helped each other’s careers and are both successful, so it seems like they are a good match.

What faith does Nina Totenberg follow? Jewish Family History and Race

Totenberg was born in New York City’s Manhattan. She is the first child of Roman Totenberg, a violinist, and Melanie Francis, a real estate agent.

Her father came to the U.S. from Poland. He was Jewish. During the Holocaust, he lost a lot of family members. Her mother was Jewish, but she came from a wealthy family with German and Polish roots that had lived in both San Francisco and New York.

She grew up in Scarsdale, New York, with her sisters Jill and Amy, and that is also where she went to high school. Amy Totenberg became a judge on the U.S. Jill works in marketing communications and the District Court in Georgia.

When a music student stole a Stradivarius violin from their father 35 years ago and then gave it back to the family in 2015, the sisters got a lot of attention from the media. Totenberg told the story about the famous instrument being found in the thief’s apartment after he died for NPR.

Did Nina Totenberg Have Any Children?

Nina doesn’t look like she has any children. She was married to U.S. Haskell in 1979, and then later remarried H. David Reines in 2000, but she doesn’t have any kids from either one.

She is close to Haskell’s kids from his first marriage, though, and she is a loving aunt to her sister Amy’s kids. She thinks of her sister’s kids as her own and does everything she can to help them.

Life at home and with family

In 2015, Jill, Nina, and Amy Totenberg, from left, celebrated the return of the Stradivarius violin that had belonged to their father.

Totenberg was born in Manhattan, New York. Her mother, Melanie Francis (Eisenberg), was a real estate agent, and her father, Roman Totenberg, played the violin. Her father was a Polish Jew who came to America. During the Holocaust, many of his family members died. Her mother was from a family of wealthy German Jews and Polish Jews who had lived in both San Francisco and New York. She was married to U.S. Senator Floyd K. Haskell (D-Colorado) in 1979, and they later divorced. In 2000, she remarried H. David Reines, a trauma surgeon and Vice Chairman of Surgery at Inova Fairfax Hospital. This wedding was led by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He took care of her after she was hit by a boat propeller while swimming while they were on their honeymoon. In March 2010, President Barack Obama put Amy Totenberg’s name forward for a job on the U.S. District Court in Atlanta. The next year, Amy Totenberg was chosen. Jill Totenberg is another sister. She is married to Brian Foreman and works in business. The Ames Stradivarius, which had been taken from their father 35 years before, was given back to the three sisters on August 6, 2015.

Start of a job

Totenberg went to Boston University in 1962 and majored in journalism. She dropped out less than three years later because, in her own words, she “wasn’t doing brilliantly.” Soon after she dropped out of college, Totenberg started working as a journalist at the Boston Record American. She worked on the Women’s Page and volunteered in the news department to learn how to cover breaking news. She then worked for the Peabody Times in Massachusetts and Roll Call in Washington, D.C.

Totenberg started writing about the law for the National Observer. In 1971, she broke a story about a secret list of candidates for the Supreme Court that President Richard Nixon was thinking about. Later, the American Bar Association said that none of the candidates were qualified, so none of them were chosen.

After Totenberg wrote a story about FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for the Observer, Hoover sent a long letter to the paper’s editor asking that she be fired. Instead, the editor put the letter and a response to Hoover’s complaints about the article in the Observer.

In 1972, she was fired from that paper for plagiarizing in a profile she wrote of Speaker-to-be Tip O’Neill. She used quotes from members of Congress that had already been published in The Washington Post without giving them credit. Totenberg has said that she was fired because she turned down an editor’s sexual advances. Many of Totenberg’s colleagues have defended her, pointing out that it was common for journalists in the 1970s to use quotes from other sources. Totenberg told the Columbia Journalism Review in 1995, “I have a strong feeling that a young reporter should be allowed to make one mistake and be scared so badly that she will never do it again.”

She then went to work for the news magazine New Times in New York. She wrote a well-known article for that publication called “The Ten Dumbest Members of Congress.” The top senator on the list, William L. Scott, called a press conference to deny that he was the “dumbest member of Congress.”

The public radio station NPR

Bob Zelnick hired Nina Totenberg to work at National Public Radio in 1975, and she has been there ever since.

Watergate makes a case

In 1977, Totenberg broke a story about the Supreme Court appeal of H.R. Haldeman, John N. Mitchell, and John D. Ehrlichman, who had been convicted in the Watergate scandal. Totenberg said that they had secretly voted 5–3 against reviewing the case and that the three people who didn’t agree were picked by President Richard Nixon. Nixon had left office three years before, after Watergate. Totenberg also said that Chief Justice Warren Burger, who was appointed by Nixon, waited to announce the results of the vote so he could try to change the minds of his fellow justices. She told the public about private Supreme Court discussions, which was a first for Supreme Court reporting. This made people wonder who on the Court gave her the information.

William Rehnquist’s nomination to be Chief Justice

In 1986, Totenberg broke the news that William H. Rehnquist, who had been nominated by Ronald Reagan to be Chief Justice of the United States, had written a memo in 1970 against the Equal Rights Amendment. In it, he said that the amendment would “speed up the breakup of the family” and “almost eliminate all legal differences between men and women.”

During the Nixon Administration, Rehnquist was in charge of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. This is when he wrote the memo.

Nomination of Douglas Ginsburg to the Supreme Court

Totenberg broke the news that Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg, had smoked marijuana “a few times” when he was a student in the 1960s and an assistant professor at Harvard Law School in the 1970s. This didn’t show up in Ginsburg’s FBI background check. Ginsburg pulled his name from consideration after the news came out. For the story, Totenberg won the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton award in 1988 for outstanding broadcast journalism.

Hearings about Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill

Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court

In 1991, a few days before a vote was to be held on Republican George H. W. Bush’s Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, Totenberg told the public that University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill had accused Thomas of sexual harassment. The Senate Judiciary Committee reopened Thomas’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings to look into Hill’s claims after Totenberg told them about them in his report.

Many of Thomas’s supporters, including Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee, said that Totenberg was wrong. Peter E. Fleming Jr. was hired as a special counsel by the Senate to look into the leak. Fleming asked Totenberg and Newsday’s Timothy Phelps to come to court, but they refused to talk about their confidential sources.