Excerpt, what Ruth Bader Ginsburg said about pro-football players like Kaepernick

While many A-listers come up for criticism in her telling, the biggest revelation in the book is one that arguably reflects poorly on the author herself: In a passage first leaked by the Daily Mail, Couric writes that she once selectively edited an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to “protect” the Supreme Court justice’s reputation.

Couric writes that Ginsburg, who died last year, told her during an interview for Yahoo in 2016 that professional football players such as Colin Kaepernick, who knelt during the national anthem to protest systemic racism, showed “contempt for a government that has made it possible for their parents and grandparents to live a decent life.” While Couric included some of Ginsburg’s criticism in the finished product, she decided to leave out that particular barb, concerned that it would besmirch the reputation of someone she was a “fan” of. In hindsight, she calls it a failure of her long effort to keep her personal feelings and politics “in check.”