WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — Nancy Pelosi thought for a moment she might die on Jan. 6, 2021.
Not quite two years later, the threat of political violence would arrive for her husband at home.
“Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”
These are the terrifying questions an intruder asked Paul Pelosi before bashing the 82-year-old over the head with a hammer in his San Francisco home. It echoed the menacing jeers of rioters roaming the halls of the Capitol calling out “Nancy, Nancy” on January 6.
The lines of political rhetoric and the increasing violence in American public life became the opening and closing messages of Pelosi’s new book, “The Art of Power, My Story as the First Lady Speaker of the House.”
Pelosi recounted her nearly four-decade legislative record in Congress, but also allowed public viewing of the personal damage of the attack on her husband. With that, he offers a serious warning that the mockery and mimicry of political violence in America is chasing a generation away from public service.
“The current climate of threats and attacks must stop,” Pelosi wrote.
“We cannot ask people to serve in public life if the costs are dangerous for their families and loved ones.”
Pelosi’s book pages through familiar terrain to those who have followed the 84-year-old’s career, rising from “housewife to House member to House speaker.” The steely California Democrat, speaker emerita, is no longer the leader but is up for re-election to the House this fall.
He twice won the speakership, worked with seven presidents and, more recently, played an important role in quietly convincing President Joe Biden to reevaluate his decision to stay in the 2024 presidential rematch with Republican Donald Trump. Biden bowed.
But the first and last chapters bring a new element to the Pelosi era, detailing in a personal and painful way the toll America’s violence has taken on civic life and public service.
“I don’t know if we will ever feel safe,” he wrote.
Written well before Trump’s July assassination attempt, Pelosi’s assessment of the nation’s dangerous discourse comes after the congressional firing of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and before former Rep. Democrat Gabby Giffords, and became a walk-on. a reminder of what could be his last year in Congress.
Pelosi recounted her disbelief at being “pulled off the Speaker’s platform” and out of the House chamber by security on the evening of Jan. 6 as rioters sent by Trump stormed the hall, some of them looking for her.
“I can handle it,” he protested, telling US Capitol Police that he wanted to stay and finish the job as Congress certified the 2020 election.
“The response was brief,” he wrote. “‘No, you can’t.'”
After being safely evacuated to Fort McNair, he wrote about meeting with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, the trio desperately calling on the Pentagon to send National Guard troops to restore order in the Capitol. He described House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Trump loyalist, as barely visible.
So worried about the threat of rioters to Vice President Mike Pence hiding in the Capitol, he called and said, “Don’t let anyone know where you are.”
“It still took three hours from the time I was dragged out of the House chamber for the Guard to arrive at the Capitol complex,” he wrote. “It took about three and a half hours to clear the rioters from the building.”
Then, surveying the wreckage of broken glass and splintered wood, he was informed of blood outside the Speaker’s Lobby. In some places, including his office, the crowd had “literally thrown up on the floor and the carpet,” he wrote. “What’s left behind is pure destruction.”
He remembers being in a war zone, and in Kyiv at the beginning of the Russian invasion thinking he might die in Ukraine. “I briefly thought the same thing on January 6th,” he wrote.
“When I became Speaker, I knew I was a target,” he wrote. “However, we accept the risk as something different for the family.”
Not quite two years later, he was awakened in the middle of the night by “Knock. Knock. Knock. Pound, Pound. Pound,” the Capitol Police security detail at his door in Washington.
“The officer’s expression was grim,” he wrote.
“This is Mr. Pelosi. He has been attacked in your house.”
“Is she alright?”
“We don’t know.”
“Is he alive?”
“We don’t know.”
Pelosi recounted the dizzying hours, frantic family calls and flights back to San Francisco, the hospital, surgery and long recovery for her husband. The youngest daughter said he looked like a dismembered Frankenstein.
His son, Paul Jr., went to the family 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 me that if she knew what she signed up for, she would “not give you my blessing.”
The assailant was tried, convicted and sentenced to prison. But Pelosi wrote, the story of Paul’s attack will never go away.
“Our home remains a thrilling crime scene,” she wrote.
Pelosi said her children told her that for a long time Paul only slept in the bedroom when she was there. He still suffers from headaches and dizziness, and he says he fainted and fell twice because of vertigo. In February, he wrote, he was still changing the bandage from the surgery on his arm.
But the “real horror” he wrote was the dehumanizing jokes by Republicans from Trump on down, including the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who posted Paul Pelosi’s Halloween costume on social media, and the way the crowd would “laugh, cheer, and applaud -applause” he said cruelly.
“This makes me very sad for our country,” he wrote.
Pelosi occupied two bloody episodes in the arc of her career, from the way Republicans disparaged her in countless campaign ads from her early days as Democratic leader to the way protesters spat on Democrats, including civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, the day the House voted for the Affordable Care Act, for the severed pig’s head left outside the family home the day before January 6.
Pelosi wrote that when she spoke to young people about running for office, “especially young women, I often hear that they are not willing to destroy their families.”
“That’s not the way our country works – if you’re involved in public service, you shouldn’t be a target, and your family shouldn’t be a target.”
