"For those seeking insights about any remorse Ginsburg might have felt about not retiring while a Democrat was safely serving as president, Totenberg offers little..."

"... possibly because Ginsburg was not always forthcoming with her; of a meeting the justice had with Barack Obama at which the president gently tried to raise the question of her retirement, Totenberg says, 'She never told me about it.' Nor does she report how Ginsburg responded to the news of Donald Trump’s election. But she does seem to speak with authority when she explains that Ginsburg had been eager to give 'the first female president the power to nominate her successor.' And at the time of the election, Totenberg points out, Ginsburg was not in a health crisis. 'It was a gamble, and she lost,' she writes. Rather than defending Ginsburg’s choice to remain in office, she emphasizes how valiantly Ginsburg fought to stay alive and keep working once Trump was elected....  In one indelible image, Totenberg knocks on the door of a hotel room to find Ginsburg, hair down, desperate for Totenberg to leave so she can continue her frantic search for a medicine to ease her stomach troubles...."

Writes Susan Dominus, in "Nina Totenberg Opens Up About Her Friend Ruth Bader Ginsburg/In her memoir, 'Dinners With Ruth,' the NPR journalist writes about their parallel ascents in fields that were not friendly to women" (NYT).

We could have lived without that "indelible image," but books must be written. 

IN THE COMMENTS: Some people are saying it's unethical for journalists to be friends with the subjects of their writing. But I said, "Read 'The Journalist and the Murderer,' about the journalist’s method of fake-befriending the subject. Isn’t that what we’re seeing here?"

Here's an excerpt from Janet Malcolm's "The Journalist and the Murderer," the best book I ever read about journalism:

Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. ...

The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views; what pains him, what rankles and sometimes drives him to extremes of vengefulness, is the deception that has been practiced on him. On reading the article or book in question, he has to face the fact that the journalist—who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things—never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own. The disparity between what seems to be the intention of an interview as it is taking place and what it actually turns out to have been in aid of always comes as a shock to the subject.

Well, it's not "always" a shock. If the subject has died, she is beyond shock, beyond outrage at the most atrocious betrayals. Just as Ruth Bader Ginsburg never knew that Trump would become President and Roe overruled, she did not know that the journalist who befriended her would hawk a book containing a first-person account of her with her hair down and frantically rooting around for drugs in a hotel room.