WASHINGTON – Nancy Pelosi was awakened by the banging on her door.
"I was sure they had the wrong apartment," she told USA TODAY. But when she heard the voices of her Capitol Police security detail in the hallway outside her Washington condo, she opened the door. Her husband had been attacked by an intruder in their San Francisco home, they told her. They didn't know if he had survived.
Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi has built a lifetime in politics being in command, in control. As speaker of the House, she was the most powerful woman in the history of the United States. Her new book, being published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster, is titled "The Art of Power."
But she was powerless to protect her husband from an assailant who in the middle of the night smashed glass panes in their back door to break in, looking for her, carrying zip ties and a hammer.
"It happened echoing Jan. 6," the day of the assault on the Capitol in 2021, she said. "'Where's Nancy? Where's Nancy?' That's what they were saying in the halls of Congress ... (and) going into our bedroom in San Francisco, that's what he was saying."
Paul Pelosi, then 82 and her husband of six decades, was grievously wounded. His skull was fractured by three blows of the hammer. His left hand was so damaged that plastic surgeons would have to perform multiple surgeries to reconstruct it in hopes he could use it again. He would suffer dizzy spells and have to avoid bright light and noise.
But he survived.
"I'm hoping that by two years it'll be, we'll cross a threshold," Nancy Pelosi said. That marker arrives on Oct. 28. "He's still on the mend. He's good − maybe 80%. But getting hit on the head is an ongoing affliction, and I'm hoping that with the progress that he's making that pretty soon he'll be where he was before."
The two of them have never talked about what happened that night.
"I have never had the conversation with my husband," she said. "He has not had it with us, with our family, with me." It is still too painful for him to revisit, although he did testify in court. His assailant, a right-wing conspiracy theorist, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.
"If and when he's ready, he will," she said.
Persuading presidents, whether they like it or not
Pelosi's 337-page book details a quartet of major legislative battles, "four things that I was in the room where it happened," she said, a play on a line from the musical "Hamilton." She played critical roles in the passage of the financial bailout in 2008 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and she was a leader in opposing the Iraq War and shaping U.S. policy toward China.
The chapters relate the meticulous detail and exhausting persistence involved in getting big things done in Washington, and she includes the occasional nugget for legislative aficionados.
Here's one: Republican efforts to repeal the landmark Affordable Care Act were vanquished in 2017 when GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona, at a suspenseful final moment, gave a thumbs-down vote against his party. Pelosi reveals that he had told her beforehand what he would do, a heads-up he hadn't given President Donald Trump or Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell or, perhaps, anyone else.
In a thread that runs through all the battles, Pelosi was willing to confront presidents and deliver tough messages to them, to Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as well as Republicans George W. Bush and Trump.
In recent weeks, to President Joe Biden as well.
According to others who were involved, Pelosi was a crucial voice behind the scenes in the Democrats' fraught debate last month over whether Biden, 81, should step back from his reelection bid after his disastrous televised debate with Trump. That included a pivotal phone call when she told Biden that polls showed he would not only lose to Trump and but also risk bringing down the party's congressional prospects with him.
She was, essentially, in the room when that happened, too, but it's not one of the cases she's willing to discuss.
"The decision that he made was the right decision for him," she said. "It was his decision, so it has to be the right decision. I mean, it's his decision."
Asked about her role in Biden's decision, she replied, "I probably won't be talking about that" in the don't-try-again warning tone familiar to countless members of Congress and others during her years in politics.
Has the episode affected her relationship with Biden?
"You'd have to ask him," she said. Then she added that she loved and respected her colleague of nearly 40 years, and thought he belonged on Mount Rushmore "for the size of the contribution he made to our country."
Will she ever feel safe again?
Pelosi is running in 2024 for her 20th term representing a San Francisco district that she almost certainly can hold as long as she chooses. She arrived a bit late for the interview because of the crush of congressional interns seeking selfies after she had addressed a bipartisan group of 400 of them.
She was crisp and confident, as always. But she was also willing to address a moment of vulnerability, the attack on her husband − one that was meant for her − and its repercussions.
"He paid the price that night when the man was after me, and I ... carry a lot of guilt about that," she said. "I feel guilty that he would be going for me and taking violent action against my husband, a centimeter away from death."
For a long time Paul Pelosi couldn't bring himself to go back to the garden room, which had been his favorite spot to watch sports on TV and smoke an occasional cigar, because that was where the intruder had broken in. He would no longer go near the elevator where he had tried to escape his attacker. He wouldn't sleep in their bedroom unless she was there, too.
"The scars from that night will never truly heal," Nancy Pelosi wrote in her book. And this: "This assault has truly had a devastating effect on three generations of our family." And this: "I do not know that we will ever feel safe."
Does she feel safe yet?
"I don't know that I ever have, even before that, because of the kind of violence and comments that were made" against her for years as a frequent target of partisan attack. "Painting me as a demon, cloven feet, hood, horns in my head, blazing devil, all of that," she said. People would threaten "that 'We're going to burn your house down, 'We know where your grandchildren are.'"
Asked what could make American politics less toxic, less angry, she cited the defeat of Trump in November. She expressed optimism that presidential nominee Kamala Harris, a fellow San Francisco Democrat, would succeed in doing that even after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed in the 2016 presidential election.
"I respect (Clinton) so enormously, but I think this is a better shot for us now," Pelosi said. Democrats need to "own the ground game" to turn out their vote and "have a message that is bold and progressive, but not menacing so that you can have a comfort level for people to come over."
"And you have to have the money to get it done," she added.
At age 84, after the major legislative battles she details, what remains for her to do in office?
"The defeat of Donald Trump," she said. "Save our country from that assault on our democracy. That's it."
OK, then: If Trump is defeated, will retirement beckon?
"I'm never one to make myself a lame duck," she replied. "But I'm here to make him a lame duck, or some kind of a duck."
Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA TODAY, is the author of "Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power," published by Twelve in 2021.
