(Continued)

And what led you back to the Court?
After a couple of years of covering the Court, Stuart decided to leave the paper. So there was a vacancy, and they asked me to take it back, so I did.

Were you eager to go back after a couple of years away?
I hadn't been planning to go back, but Max Frankel announced he was going to conduct a nationwide search to find the best Supreme Court reporter in the country. And I got annoyed: I thought, what am I, chopped liver? I had done it for seven years, I thought I did it pretty well. So that's what got me interested.

Let's talk about the march you were in that got so much attention
It was in 1989. It was a march that was organized by NOW, and its aims were to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which believe it or not was still an issue then, and support abortion rights. And it was a march on Congress.

Before you participated, did you ask any of your bosses if this was a good idea?
Well I didn't ask them, I told them. Howell was the bureau chief. And I made it perfectly clear in the office that I was doing this. Nobody raised an eyebrow. It wasn't a big deal to anybody. And, in fact, during the march there was a party at Howell's house which was a going away party for Steve Roberts. So after the march I went over to the party and said, you all missed a great march, and I told them all about it. I swear to god, nobody turned a hair. It was just obvious to everybody that, as a private citizen, I had a perfect right to do what I was doing. I went with three friends from my college class. You know, it wasn't under a banner that said "New York Times Reporter For Choice." We were just four women in a group of half a million. And so, it was no secret; it was no testing of boundaries, it was not in your face. It was just completely routine as far as I was concerned. It seemed to me, as far as anybody was concerned.

And you know what happened was, Len Downie, over at the Washington Post—who of course believes that you shouldn't even vote —Len learned that some of his reporters had also been at the march and he started railing against this. Some of my friends at the Post said, 'well, what's the big deal? Over at the Times, Linda marched, and it was completely in the open and nobody said anything about it.' At that point Eleanor Randolph, who had the press beat at the Washington Post, called Max Frankel to say, 'Well, what about this?' Because here at the Post, our executive editor takes a dim view of this. Well, Max was not going to be "out-ethiced" by Len Downie. And so he said, 'Well, this is terrible, this violates all kinds of rules.' Which, actually, it didn't. So he came down on me. He made Howell call me in and read me some kind of riot act. [In the Washington Post, Randolph quoted Raines as saying, "As it turns out, it is Max Frankel's strong feeling that this should not be allowed.]

You know, I just realized I was being thrown overboard as a sacrificial lamb for the greater good of journalistic ethics. So I just took it with a grain of salt. [Asked by FCP about this account, Frankel replied: "I don't remember sacrificing any lamb—just trying to protect us from appearing partial about issues we cover. Linda served the Times brilliantly and I was then and have always been her No. 1 fan."]

You were pretty angry, weren't you?
Well, I was quite disappointed. I was disappointed in the fact that I knew some people from the Times, who I won't name—some of whom had editorial responsibilities, who had come down from New York and had also marched. The difference was, they had given themselves the cover of getting press credentials. I, of course, had a chance to get press credentials too, since abortion was something I wrote about it. But I declined press credentials because I said, 'I'm not covering the story, so I'm not going to take press credentials.' So I felt that there was a great deal of hypocrisy, and failure on the part of some to have the courage to speak up. But it is ever thus.

My next little encounter with journalistic ethics was in the fall of 2006. That was about a talk I gave at Radcliffe upon receiving their highest alumni honor that year, the Radcliffe Medal. It was a lunch talk to invited alums. I gave a kind of generational narrative. It wasn't a political rant at all. It wasn't intended by me to be a political speech, nor was it received by the audience that way. It was a generational tale, and the question I asked was, did we, the generation of the '60s, who thought we were going to change the world for the better—have we made a difference? Is it better? I said that there were a few troubling things, like the creation of a law-free zone in Guantanamo by the Bush administration—and P.S., this was two years after the Court had ruled there could not be a law-free zone. It was two years since the Court struck down the administration's notion that federal judges had no business in Guantanamo. It wasn't a new idea coming from me. I said that it's disturbing that the administration has been conducting a war against women's reproductive freedom—which is an obvious statement of fact. Obviously they have by signing the so-called partial birth abortion law—things that any reader of the New York Times would know.