Michael Geissinger NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg will speak Monday as part of the Drue Heinz Lecture Series. Click photo for larger image.

As a little girl, Nina Totenberg wanted to be Nancy Drew.

At 61, she's not driving a blue roadster or discovering hidden staircases, like the fictional amateur sleuth did; but the National Public Radio correspondent has done no shortage of detective work in her decades as a legal affairs reporter.

"Left to my own devices, I might have wanted to be a cop," said Totenberg, who will be in Pittsburgh Monday for the Drue Heinz lectures.

"I wanted to be a witness to history and a digger and a reporter of events. There was one way to do that, and that was as a reporter."

Totenberg is most well known for two "scoops" on U.S. Supreme Court nominees. She was the first to report University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against justice nominee Clarence Thomas as well as Douglas Ginsberg's use of marijuana as a Harvard law school professor.

When Totenberg started out in journalism, such high-profile work was hard to imagine for a woman. "The idea of wanting to be a journalist or anything that wasn't a secretary or a teacher was profoundly aberrational," she said.

When she started looking for reporting jobs after attending -- but not graduating from -- Boston University in the 1960s, she was told directly by several places that "we don't hire women."

She eventually was hired for $58 a week at the Boston Record-American to work on the women's page. At night, she would volunteer to ride around with photographers, sometimes dictating information to news reporters.

She later moved to Washington D.C., and covered politics for Roll Call, a weekly newspaper about Congress, for which she covered her first Supreme Court story: President Lyndon Johnson's 1968 pick of his personal attorney and Associate Justice Abe Fortas, to be chief justice replacing the retiring Earl Warren.

It was a crash course in the process -- and politics -- of a Supreme Court nomination. After a filibuster by Senate Republicans and Southern Democrats, Fortas withdrew.

Since then, Totenberg has also worked for the National Observer, New Times magazine and National Public Radio, which she joined in 1974. She won many high-profile journalism awards, and been honored seven times by the American Bar Association.

But her career hasn't been entirely rosy. Totenberg left the National Observer after plagiarism charges and was accused of lying about her own marijuana use. She first denied ever having used the drug and then admitted trying it once.

But those blemishes have hardly detracted from her career. Decades after Fortas, Totenberg is now analyzing the politics of Harriet Miers' Supreme Court nomination.

"The Miers nomination is extremely interesting in terms of the political dilemma it presents to everybody," she said.

For her part, Totenberg does not believe the chatter that Miers might withdraw, saying that "it would make the president look weak," she said.

The nomination of Miers has drawn the most controversy since Thomas's nomination in 1991.

It was Totenberg's role in that nomination that made her a household name. Her scoop on Hill's sexual harassment allegations after Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court set off a national firestorm. Her story led the Senate Judiciary Committee to reopen Thomas's nomination proceedings to review Hill's charges.

Totenberg also was subpoenaed by a special prosecutor in an investigation into the leaking of Hill's allegations.

For all the public scrutiny -- and rancor -- she received, Totenberg calls it the toughest story of her career. "I had a lot of people aiming a shotgun at my head," she said. "I was lucky I was not a kid because I don't know how I would have withstood it."

So how does Totenberg get those big scoops? Simply hard work at a young age, she says.

"I think that when you're younger, you really have to put in an extraordinary number of hours to make a success of your life as a reporter," she said. "And then you also have to be lucky."

And reading detective novels doesn't hurt either.

Nina Totenberg speaks at 7:30 p.m. Monday at the Carnegie Music Hall, Oakland. Tickets: 412-622-8866.