What mentors do

Columns

July 29, 2009

By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts Picayune Item Wed Jul 29, 2009, 02:54 PM CDT

When Sonia Sotomayor was a law student, she told a professor that her career goal was to be a federal judge. But more than a decade later, when she was urged to apply for an opening on the district court in New York, her mentor and law partner at the time, David Botwinik, could not get her to complete the necessary paperwork.

“I told him it was a useless enterprise, they would never pick me,” she recalled in a speech at Hofstra University. “He took away my work, put an application on my desk, and said, ‘Fill it out.’”

That’s what mentors do. They’re counselors and cheerleaders, disciplinarians and therapists. They know that some proteges need a kick in the rear, some need a pat on the back, and many need both.

Sotomayor’s story embodies many virtues: from the devotion of her single mother to her own courage as a pioneering Hispanic woman. But one important theme deserves more attention -- the critical role that mentors have played in her rise to prominence. Without Botwinik’s persistent prodding, Sotomayor would not be where she is today, a nominee for the Supreme Court.

Justice Department statistics show that youngsters receiving guidance from a mentor are far less likely to start drugs, skip school or lie to their parents. But that’s the big picture. The real joy of mentoring is making a difference and leaving a mark, one young person at a time.

We’ve both been fortunate to have wonderful mentors in our lives, and like Sotomayor, the first ones were our parents. Steve’s dad, Will Roberts, was his best editor and earliest fan. A young professor at Harvard, John Rodman, repeatedly told him five important words: “This is not good enough.”

His first job out of college was doing research for James Reston, then the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times and probably the most influential journalist of his time. Yet every day, Scotty, as he was universally known, took time to answer a question, offer a suggestion, make a phone call.

During his long career, Scotty employed 26 clerks, and when he died, 18 of them were pallbearers and ushers at his funeral. As Steve carried his coffin from the church, his mentor was teaching him one last lesson: This is what’s important, this is what’s lasting, not the famous people I knew but the young lives I touched.

Cokie’s mother, Lindy Boggs, was a “multitasker” before the word existed. One of Cokie’s favorite memories is watching her mother holding a baby with one hand, stirring a pot of pickles with the other, while dictating a speech into a phone wedged under her chin.

The nuns who taught Cokie, from the Society of the Sacred Heart, took her seriously as a woman of intellect and competence. Friends at National Public Radio formed an “old girls’ network” that helped launch her broadcasting career.

Sotomayor was similarly fortunate. Her high-school debate coach, Ken Moy, first urged her to apply to Princeton. Once there, a young teacher, Peter Winn, took time to correct her English, which still reflected her Spanish heritage.

“Taking such constant criticism could not have been easy,” Winn wrote recently in The Washington Post, “but Sonia kept coming back.”

At Yale Law School, Sotomayor sought out Jose Cabranes, the university’s general counsel. As Amy Goldstein wrote in the Post: “Jose Cabranes had been told by one of Sotomayor’s undergraduate professors to keep an eye out for a talented young woman whose parents had, like him, come from Puerto Rico. He hired her as an intern, asked her to help research a book, and opened doors rarely cracked for Yale law students.”

The chain continued. Cabranes helped get her hired as an assistant to New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; Morgenthau introduced her to a law firm, Pavia & Harcourt; Botwinik, a partner at Pavia, pushed her for the federal bench; once there, she told Judge Miriam Cedarbaum that a mutual friend “suggested to me that I should seek you out as a mentor.”

Sotomayor has not forgotten the cardinal rule of the mentoring process: If you get help, you are obligated to help others. One of her favorite programs is the Development School for Youth, which teaches New York high-school students how to function in a work environment.

We try to follow the same rule. “Mentor” is one of our favorite titles, right up there with “grandparent.” So we know the pride and satisfaction that Sotomayor’s mentors are feeling this week.

(Cokie Roberts’ latest book is “Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation” (William Morrow, 2008). Steve and Cokie Roberts can be reached at stevecokie@gmail.com.)

Text Only

Columns

Hood loses hired counsel fight
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
The impact on John Q. Public from the passage of the so-called “sunshine law” regarding the implementation of restrictions and oversight of the hiring of outside counsel attorneys by the Mississippi Attorney General’s office has been vastly overstated by Attorney General Jim Hood and, to a degree, by Hood’s Republican political antagonists who passed the law over his objections.

May 26, 2012
Remembering war dead on Memorial Day
By Wyatt Emmerich/Northside Sun The photo of Billy Elmore has always haunted me. It pops up every now and then as my computer screen rotates through thousands of stored photos.

May 26, 2012
‘Calico Joe’ evokes memories
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
The new “small” novel “Calico Joe” — John Grisham’s much-anticipated paean to the game of baseball — was the perfect traveling companion on a long drive from Mississippi to Fayetteville, Ark., to witness my niece’s graduation from the University of Arkansas last week.

May 19, 2012
Is there a censored race war?
Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
When two white newspaper reporters for the Virginian-Pilot were driving through Norfolk, and were set upon and beaten by a mob of young blacks — beaten so badly that they had to take a week off from work — that might seem to have been news that should have been reported, at least by their own newspaper. But it wasn’t.

May 19, 2012
The virtues of grunt work
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
Occasionally a really bad idea gains currency and credibility. Here’s one: College students who work at unpaid internships are unfairly exploited by money-grubbing capitalists. In fact, goes this argument, the whole system is not only immoral but probably illegal and should be abolished.

May 19, 2012
Once, there were no words
By Rhetta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No matter how many times I stand in front of a group to speak, I get nervous. One of the reasons I went into print journalism was because I figured I’d never have to do any public speaking or wear grown-up clothes.

May 19, 2012
‘Finding Your Roots’ good show
By Cal Thomas/Syndicated Columnist
“Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.” is another of the Harvard professor’s wonderful television series for PBS. This is “must-see TV” and a more than worthy sequel to three previous projects Gates has hosted about how some of us came to be what and who we are.

May 17, 2012
Moral duties in a muddied world
By Kathryn Jean Lopez/Syndicated columnist
In an election season in which the White House has instituted a policy that puts unprecedented limits on the constitutional right to freedom of religion, questions of conscience, duty and spiritual and moral obligation are of critical importance.

May 17, 2012
Colleges, development intertwined
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
At his speech here to the movers and shakers in the Mississippi Delta’s business, agricultural, educational and political circles, Gov. Phil Bryant’s remarks were met with more than polite applause. Bryant, the mechanic’s son from Moorhead, understands the Delta region’s challenges as lessons from his boyhood.

May 16, 2012
Prolific circuit judge relieved of duty
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
Relieving the best criminal judge of all his criminal cases is not the way to exercise responsibility as senior circuit judge. What on earth is Hinds County Senior Circuit Judge Tomie Green doing?

May 16, 2012
More Columns Headlines

Columns

Search Results

What mentors do

Site Map

Contact Us