It was a great lesson in humility. I made the mistake of telling Stanley Tate that I knew Justice Ruth Ginsberg when she was young. He met her at a Washington, D.C. cocktail party and gave her my regards. She said “Who?”
I really did know her and can prove it. Everyone who knows anything about her knows that she was born in Brooklyn in 1933. Did you know that her father, Nat Bader, had a twin brother named Ben? They were known as “the Bader boys.” They owned an Army-Navy surplus store in downtown Brooklyn. Her mother, Celia Amster Bader, who was her inspiration and who Kikki adored, had been extremely active in Women’s Rights and particularly in the League of Women Voters, along with my mother, Anne. After Celia died of cancer at age forty-seven, my mother founded a new chapter of the League in honor of Celia Bader and became its first president.
Ruth Bader attended Public School 238 in Brooklyn at about east tenth street and Avenue P, as did I, three years earlier. Miss Warrager, the vice principal, a skinny, tough old lady, read aloud to the student assembly from the King James version of the Bible and we were compelled to sit there and listen. It made me feel quite uncomfortable. Miss Warrager knew that the school was almost empty when Jewish kids stayed home for the “High Holidays.” Our colors were orange and black and they “waved over us at field and track”. We were near King’s Highway and as I remember Ruth Bader went to nearby James Madison High whose colors were black and gold. Evidently neither she nor I was smart enough to be selected for junior high school and save a year.
Ruth was known as “Kikki” to her family and close friends, but she really did not appreciate being called by that name, although it stuck to her forever. It had to do with being a very active baby and her sister, who died as a child, coined it. It was with her when we were at Cornell where she was a member of a Jewish sorority, A.E.Phi. This was probably her first exposure to overt antisemitism. It was certainly mine. The fraternity and sorority world was totally “restricted.” At Cornell at that time there were “Jewish only” sororities and fraternities.
Being long-time friends with her family, my sister Barbara knew Kikki from Brooklyn, and from summer camp and then at Cornell too. My sister was a member of the other Cornell Jewish sorority, S. D. T. and married a Cornell Ph.D. Kikki was quite good looking and was very quiet and shy. She did not let on how smart she was. She was refined, petite, with brunette hair and grey eyes and a cute figure. Every man who went to Cornell when she was there claims to have taken her on a date, including her husband, Marty Ginsberg. I also was at Cornell at that time and spent an evening with her. The “ratio” was five men to every woman at Cornell in those days.
Kikki was a friend of my sister Barbara’s, going back to their many summers at camp Che Na Wah in the Adirondacks, at North Creek New York, where we all spent our summers. Her uncle, Chuck Amster, was the owner of the Balfour Lake Lodge, Balfour Lake Camp for Boys and the girls’ camp, Che Na Wah. My sister’s counselor, Ann D’italiano, was very unassuming and kind and became the famous actress, Ann Bancroft. Kikki conducted Friday night Jewish religious services at camp.
When Justice Ginsberg accurately described the terrible discrimination against women that she experienced in the nineteen fifties my experiences coincide. We had a total of three women at the Cornell Law School with an enrollment of about three hundred students from 1951 until 1954. The school only graduated about fifty students out of an entering class of about one hundred and twenty. (See the movie- “The Paper Chase.”) When I questioned the Dean, he imperiously stated that he had a duty to produce top lawyers who would be the judges and senior members in the government and partners in the most prestigious law firms. The Dean was concerned that women graduates would become housewives and mothers and not utilize their education. He believed that even the women who would actively practice would most likely become divorce lawyers. He attempted to explain why he culled out so many students when to be admitted to the law school each applicant had to be in the top ninety-sixth percentile of the national law aptitude exam. He claimed that this was needed to enable us to continue as a very elite small school. With so few lawyers graduating each year, he did not have room for women. It was disappointing. It was not impressive. It was prejudicial. Ruth Bader Ginsberg was right. Anti-feminine discrimination which has existed from the beginning of time has always been a cruel miscarriage of justice. It was extreme when she went to law school and started her career. As a result of the feminist movement women now comprise over fifty percent of the Cornell Law Students. Hooray!
You probably know that Ruth graduated at the top of her class at Cornell and went on to Harvard Law School. Just like my sister, she married a fellow Cornelian, Marty Ginsberg. She transferred to Columbia Law School to be with him. Marty was a highly successful tax lawyer, and a professor of law in his own right. They had a wonderful marriage, with two loving children. Marty died of cancer at age seventy-eight, in 2010. He was instrumental in supporting her entire career including her applications for her early clerkship with a federal district judge in New York, her professorship at Rutgers and later at Columbia and her appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington D.C. where she served for thirteen years before President Carter appointed her to the Supreme Court in 1993. In great part she was influenced by her mother when in her early career she had successfully argued before the very same court for gender equality and was active in the American Civil Liberty Union as cofounder and director of its Women’s Rights Project.
As a brief aside, not many years later, in the mid nineteen- fifties, after military service as a legal officer in the Army Ordnance Corps, my modest law firm was amongst the first in Florida to hire women, namely, Ms. Eleanor Schockett and Ms. Linda Rigot. They both left with my blessing, to become well respected judges. Women had struggled to be recognized in Florida. When and if they were hired, they earned twenty percent less than men and they were better attorneys.
Politics involving the Supreme Court always was nasty. However it worsened during the Obama Administration when in March of 2016, Senator Mitch McConnell of Tennessee, the Republican Majority Leader, created a new rule, to the effect that a sitting president could not appoint or nominate anyone to the Supreme Court during his or her last year of their presidential term of office, He refused to even allow a hearing on Democratic President Barak Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, although even under the McCullum rule President Obama had eight months before the next election. The McConnell rule was a big lie. The fact is that a United States President has the right to nominate a person to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court at any time during his or her presidency, and that includes twenty days into January at the end of the presidential term of office.
What does this have to do with Justice Ginsberg? Ruth Bader Ginsberg died of cancer on September 18, 2020. Then President Trump, at the very end of his term of office, with less than two months to the next election, at the instigation of the same Mitch McConnell, immediately nominated Amy Comey Barrett to take Ruth Ginsberg’s seat. Mitch McConnell, knowing that this nomination was in clear violation of his own “rule,” nevertheless, rammed the nomination through including a senate confirmation hearing, with amazing speed and on October 26, 2020. Justice Barrett was sworn in to occupy Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s seat, only thirty-eight days after her death.
Thus, through political chicanery an entirely different woman now sits on the Supreme Court who has the opposite goal and has the express desire to undo and reverse almost every feminist advance that Justice Ginsberg spend her life trying to secure, including the right of a woman to control her own body. That person is Notre Dame Catholic theorist, Amy Comey Barrett. Justice Barrett is a refined, intelligent, honest, and well-trained jurist. However, she follows her devout Catholic beliefs that abortion in any form, at any time, is against the rule of God. She is entitled to her own beliefs. That’s just fine, provided she doesn’t impose her religious and personal beliefs on other people, which she is doing.
Justice Ginsberg sought equal justice for women. She succeeded in preserving Roe v Wade which was decided in 1973. In September 1993, Justice Ginsberg became ill. It started with colon cancer. She finally died from pancreatic cancer in September 2020. During those twenty-seven years of illness, she attended the hearings and meetings at the Court and voted regularly. She was brave. She really can’t be blamed for the dirty politics shown when Mitch McConnell reversed his own rule to allow Donald Trump to appoint Justice Barrett in Trump’s last few weeks of his term in office. Mitch McConnell deserves to be investigated and censured even though he is leaving. His departure should not be a bar to his censure assuming we are able to create a new “Ginsberg” ethics rule.
I forgive Justice Ginsberg for not remembering me. I remember her.
We need more Ruth Bader Ginsbergs.