Pelosi warns in her new book that political threats and violence ‘must stop’
WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — Nancy Pelosi thought for a moment that she might have died January 6, 2021.
Less than two years later, the threat of political violence would materialize her husband at their home.
“Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”
That was the chilling question the intruder asked us. Paul Pelosi before hitting the then 82-year-old over the head with a hammer in their San Francisco home. echoed the menacing booing of the rioters who roamed the halls of the Capitol on January 6, chanting “Nancy, Nancy.”
The continuous line of escalating political rhetoric and violence in American public life form the opening and closing messages of Pelosi’s new book, “The Art of Power, My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House.”
Pelosi recounts her nearly four-decade legislative career in Congress, but also offers a rare public glimpse into the private devastation surrounding the attack on her husband, issuing a stern warning that the casual mockery and mimicry of political violence in America it is driving a generation away from public service.
“The current climate of threats and attacks must end,” Pelosi wrote.
“We cannot ask people to serve in public life if the price of doing so puts the safety of their families and loved ones at risk.”
Pelosi’s book covers familiar ground for those who have followed the 84-year-old’s rise from “homemaker to House Speaker.” The steely California Democrat, the speaker emeritus, is no longer leader but is running for reelection to the House this fall.
She has won the gavel twice, worked with seven presidents, and recently played a crucial role in quietly convincing President Joe Biden Unpleasant reconsider his decision to remain with the Republicans in the 2024 presidential election rematch Donald Trump. Biden curved.
But it is the first and last chapters that add a new element to the Pelosi era, chronicling in personal and meticulous detail the toll violence has taken on American civic life and public services.
“I don’t know if we will ever feel safe,” she writes.
Pelosi’s assessment of the nation’s dangerous discourse, written well before the attempted assassination of Trump in July, comes after back-to-back shootings in Congress of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and earlier of former Democrat Gabby Giffords, and it serves as a warning of a departure in what could be one of her last years in Congress.
Pelosi has recounted her disbelief as she was “dragged” from the speaker’s dais by security and escorted out of the House chamber on the afternoon of January 6, as rioters sent by Trump stormed through the halls, some searching for her.
“I can handle it,” she protested, telling U.S. Capitol Police she wanted to stay and finish the job while Congress certifies the 2020 election.
“Their response was curt,” she writes. “’No, that’s not possible.’”
After being taken to safety at Fort McNair, she writes about her meeting with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, all three of whom desperately called on the Pentagon to send in National Guard troops to restore order to the Capitol. She describes Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Trump loyalist, as almost completely invisible.
She was so concerned about the rioters’ threats against Vice President Mike Pence, who was hiding in the Capitol, that she called him and told him, “Don’t let anyone know where you are.”
“It still took three hours from the time I was dragged out of the House chamber before the Guard arrived at the Capitol complex,” she wrote. “It took approximately three and a half hours to get the rioters out of the building.”
Later, as she surveyed the mess of broken glass and splintered wood, she was told there was blood outside the chairman’s lobby. In some places, including her office, the mob had “literally defecated on the floors and carpets,” she wrote. “What was left behind was pure destruction.”
She remembered being in war zones and in Kiev at the beginning of the Russian invasion, thinking she might die in Ukraine. “I thought the same thing for a moment on January 6,” she wrote.
“When I became Speaker, I knew I was making myself a target,” she writes. “But accepting the risk is something fundamentally different for our families.”
Less than two years later, she was awakened in the middle of the night by the “Knock. Knock. Knock. Pound, Pound. Pound” of Capitol Police security at her door in Washington.
“The officers’ facial expressions were grim,” she writes.
“It’s Mr. Pelosi. He was attacked in your home.”
“Is he doing okay?”
“We do not know that.”
“Is he alive?”
“We do not know that.”
Pelosi recounts the dizzying hours, frantic family phone calls, the flight back to San Francisco, the hospital, the surgeries and the long recovery for her husband. Their youngest daughter said he looked like a bandaged Frankenstein.
Her son, Paul Jr., went to the family’s home to vacuum up the broken glass and clean up the blood. Her daughter Alexandra, who was in high school when Pelosi first ran for Congress, told her that if she had known what they were running for, “I never would have given you my blessing.”
The attacker was tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. But Pelosi writes that the story of Paul’s attack would not go away.
“Our home is still a heartbreaking crime scene,” she wrote.
Pelosi said her children told her that Paul slept alone in the bedroom for long periods of time when she was there. He still suffers from headaches and dizziness, and she said she has seen him faint and fall twice from dizziness. In February, she wrote, she was still changing bandages after surgery on his arm.
But the “real horror,” she writes, was the dehumanizing jokes made by Republicans from Trump on down, including the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who posted a Halloween costume of Paul Pelosi on social media, and the way the crowd “laughed, cheered and applauded” their cruel comments.
“It made me deeply sad for our country,” she wrote.
Pelosi places the two bloody episodes within the span of her career, from the way Republicans smeared her in countless campaign ads from the moment she first became Democratic leader to the way protesters spat on Democrats, including civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, the day the House voted to pass the Affordable Care Act to the severed pig’s head left outside her family’s home in the days leading up to Jan. 6.
Pelosi writes that when she speaks to young people about running for political office, “particularly young women, I too often hear their reluctance to put their families at risk.”
“This is not how our country should be. If you go into government service, you should not be a target, and your family should not be a target.”