WASHINGTON – Nancy Pelosi thought briefly she might have died on Jan. 6, 2021.
Not quite two years later, the threat of political violence would come for her husband at their home.
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“Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”
That was the chilling question the intruder posed to Paul Pelosi before bludgeoning the then-82-year-old over the head with a hammer in their San Francisco house. It echoed the menacing jeers of the rioters roaming the halls of the Capitol calling out “Nancy, Nancy” on Jan. 6.
The through line of escalating political rhetoric and violence in American public life serves as the opening and closing message 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 record in Congress but also allows a rare public glimpse into the private devastation around the assault on her husband. With it, she delivers a grave warning that the casual mockery and mimicry of political violence in America is chasing a generation from public service.
“The current climate of threats and attacks must stop,” Pelosi writes.
“We cannot ask people to serve in public life if the cost is risking the safety of their families and those they love.”
Pelosi’s book pages through familiar terrain for those who have followed the 84-year-old’s career, rising from “housewife to House member to House speaker.” The steely California Democrat, the speaker emerita, is no longer in leadership but running for reelection to the House this fall.
She twice won the speakers gavel, worked alongside seven presidents and, more recently, played a pivotal role in quietly convincing President Joe Biden to reassess his decision to remain in the 2024 presidential election rematch with Republican Donald Trump. Biden bowed out.
But it’s the first and final chapters that bring a new element to the Pelosi era, detailing in personal and painstaking ways the toll that America’s violent strain is taking on civic life and public service.
“I don’t know that we will ever feel safe,” she writes.
Written well before the July assassination attempt on Trump, Pelosi’s assessment of the nation’s dangerous discourse arrives after back-to-back congressional shootings of Republican Rep. Steve Scalise and earlier of Democratic former Rep. Gabby Giffords, and it serves as a walk-off warning in what could be among her final years in Congress.
Pelosi recounts her disbelief at being “pulled off the Speaker’s platform” and out of the House chamber by security the afternoon of Jan. 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 work as Congress was certifying the 2020 election.
“Their response was curt,” she writes. “'No, you can’t.'”
After being whisked away to safety at Fort McNair, she writes about huddling with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, the three of them desperately calling the Pentagon to send National Guard troops to restore order at the Capitol. She describes House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, a Trump loyalist, as almost entirely unseen.
So worried about the rioters' threats against Vice President Mike Pence in hiding at the Capitol, she called and told him, “Don’t let anybody 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,” she writes. “It took about three and a half hours to clear the rioters from the building.”
Later, surveying the wreckage of broken glass and splintered wood, she was told of blood outside the Speaker’s Lobby. In some places, including her office, the mob had “literally defecated on the floors and rugs,” she wrote. “What was left behind was pure destruction.”
She recalled being in war zones, and in Kyiv at the start of the Russian invasion thinking she may well die in Ukraine. “I briefly thought the same on January 6," she wrote.
“When I became Speaker, I knew that I was making myself into a target,” she writes. “However, our accepting the risk is something that is fundamentally different for our families.”
Not quite two years later, she was awakened in the middle of the night by the “Knock. Knock. Knock. Pound, Pound. Pound,” of the Capitol Police security detail at her door in Washington.
“The officers’ expressions were grim,” she writes.
“It’s Mr. Pelosi. He’s been attacked in your home.”
“Is he okay?”
“We don’t know.”
“Is he alive?”
“We don’t know.”
Pelosi recounts the dizzying hours, frantic family phone calls and 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-up 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 had been a high schooler when Pelosi first ran for Congress, told her, had she known what they were signing up for she would "never have given you my blessing.”
The attacker was tried, convicted and sentenced to prison. But Pelosi writes, the story of Paul’s attack would not go away.
“Our home remains a heartbreaking crime scene,” she wrote.
Pelosi said her children told her that for a long time Paul would only sleep in the bedroom when she was there. He still suffers from headaches and dizzy spells, and she said she has seen him faint and fall twice from vertigo. As of February, she wrote, she was still changing bandages from surgery on his arm.
But the “true horror” she writes was the dehumanizing jokes by Republicans from Trump on down, including the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., who posted a Paul Pelosi Halloween costume to social media, and the way the crowds would “laugh, cheer, and applaud” their cruel remarks.
“It made me profoundly sad for our country,” she writes.
Pelosi situates the two bloody episodes in the arc of her career, from the way Republicans vilified her in countless campaign ads from the time she first rose as Democratic leader to the way protesters spit on Democrats, including civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, the day the House voted for the Affordable Care Act, to the severed pig’s head left outside her family’s home in the days before Jan. 6.
Pelosi writes that when she speaks to young people about running for office, “especially young women, too often I hear their reluctance to put their families in harm’s way."
“This is not the way our country should be — if you engage in public service, you should not be a target, and your family should not be a target.”