Susan Page

Let me just ask you a sort of omnibus question: What do people not know about Nancy Pelosi that you know about Nancy Pelosi?

People think she's a San Francisco liberal, and she is, but she is also at heart a Baltimore pol.

And what do you mean by Baltimore pol? What does that mean?

Here's what I mean by a Baltimore pol: She wants to get the most liberal legislation possible through Congress, but she will cut whatever deal is necessary. She will accept whatever is the most feasible thing to get through, call it a victory, and go back to work for more. She's not somebody who demands, "Give me the whole loaf or nothing at all." She is a half-a-loaf politician, and she's had to convince fellow liberals, fellow progressives that it's worth doing that.

We'll cover this in just a minute, but from what I can tell—you'll know the answer to this question— … from almost the very beginning of her time in Washington, very partisan player, not one of those people that buys the idea that you've got to sit down with the other side and cut deals. She's interested in her caucus and holding that together, which is enough of a job. But I gather she's not crazy about the Republicans, and maybe that's what you mean about a Baltimore pol, where they're all Democrats, at least in her time. …

You know, she learned about her politics in Baltimore. You do not need to worry about the Republican Party in Baltimore. In the Baltimore of her era when her father was the mayor, Republicans were irrelevant. You had to worry about the different factions of Democrats. Then she moves to San Francisco. You don't need to worry about Republicans very much if you're going to be a politician in San Francisco. It is a Democratic game. She comes to Washington. She never develops the muscle that you develop as a politician when you're in a swing district, when you're in a swing state where you've really got to build alliances across party lines. That is not her strength. Her strength is holding the Democratic Party together to get the most liberal legislation passed.

Now we're going to be in chronology for a while. … Let's start on Jan. 6. The morning of Jan. 6, you have her on a Zoom call. "Good morning, everybody." What is in Nancy—from what you can tell, what is in Nancy Pelosi's aspect and mind on the morning of Jan. 6?

Well, remember, on the evening of Jan. 5, Democrats had won both seats in Georgia, both Senate seats in Georgia. The races I don't think had been called yet, but it was pretty clear they were going to carry both those races. Those were seats that were long shots. They were stretches for the Democratic candidates to win back two Republican-held Senate seats in Georgia, and it made all the difference. It meant that there would be a 50/50 Senate. It meant that with the vice president's vote, Joe Biden could have Democratic control of the Senate. That would make all the difference in the world going forward for the next year and two years and four years during the Biden administration.

Actually, not four years, because you'll have another Senate race, but having even 50/50 control of the Senate would make all of the difference in the next year or two with Biden in power and Democrats controlling both the House and the Senate. So she was in a very good mood about what had happened in those Georgia Senate races. And of course, on Sunday, the previous couple days before, on Sunday, she had been elected to another term as speaker. She was in a good mood. She thought that her overriding goal for the previous four years, which was to get rid of Donald Trump, had been achieved.

She's standing on the podium, and in walks somebody and whispers in her ear and basically tells her she's got to get out of there. … How did she feel about being pulled out of there? …

It was inside the House Chamber at that point. They weren't aware of what was going on outside. They knew there was going to be this big demonstration. They were aware of that, but they weren't aware that the Capitol had been breached. And her floor manager comes up to her and says, "You have to go." And she said, "I don't want to go." She thought there was some minor kerfuffle that they would need to deal with and then she could come back. She told me she was so convinced that she wasn't going to be gone long that she left her cell phone up on the dais. Can you imagine leaving your cell phone there because you were going to be right back?

So they hurry her away. And at that point, all hell breaks loose. Then it becomes clear within minutes that there was a major security problem and that she was going to be one of the prime targets of that mob.

What are the stakes for Nancy Pelosi at that moment? As soon as she realizes what's happening, from her perspective, given her years in Washington, what are the stakes that are now before her?

Well, let me talk about two kinds of stakes. There's the personal stakes. She told me that if they had caught her, they would have killed her, that that was what some members of that mob were determined to do. And I think she's right. I think subsequent investigations have shown that there was—she was in physical peril for her life if the mob had caught her. And I ask her if that made her afraid. Now, this was three months later. She said that it didn't; that they would've had a fight on their hands. They would've had a battle on their hands because she's a street fighter. And then she lifts up her foot, and you know she always wears those four-inch stiletto heels, and she points at her shoe and says, "Besides, I could've used these as weapons."

So she denied, with the benefit of hindsight, at being afraid in the moment. I can tell you that what I think she found the bigger stakes, the broader stakes were the stakes of democracy itself; that this was an attempted coup. This was an attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election. And it meant that that good mood she had that morning, thinking Donald Trump was finally out of the picture, it meant that was wrong. It was at least premature. He was still around, and he was still a threat, in her view, to our democracy.

They take her to Fort McNair along with a lot of other people. She's on the phone, as I hear it, continuously. What's she saying about Trump?

Well, I think her initial agenda was to get some security, some additional security to the Capitol to control the mob, because, you know, the Capitol Police force is not exactly the U.S. Army, and they clearly needed help. They needed reinforcements. So one of the things she and Chuck Schumer and Steny Hoyer and others were trying to do was just to find somebody with some law enforcement forces to devote to securing the Capitol. I think that was number one. I think to the degree she talked about Trump on that day—and I don't know in those phone conversations—but I don't know to the degree of which Trump was the topic. But in subsequent days, she talked about Trump as a threat to democracy, as unfit for office, as dangerous and as unhinged.

Why does she insist on going back to the Capitol building?

Why does she insist on going back? Both Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell wanted to make it a point that the mob had failed, that the democracy was intact, that the election—the formal counting of the electoral ballots, the ceremonial occasion that was supposed to take place on Jan. 6 would be completed. I think they both wanted to make an important point.

We've all seen the pictures and the video of her office being ransacked and people walking down the hall and saying, "Nancy, Nancy," and we've seen the note. We've seen the guy with his feet on her desk. Did she know that was happening while she was at Fort McNair? Do you know? And how did she feel about it?

They were watching—the leaders of Congress were watching the same TV pictures that we were all watching that showed a lot of what was unfolding, that showed that eerie—it was like a monster movie or like a horror film, the "Nancy? Where's Nancy?" That was pretty ominous. But I think one thing she was very concerned about was a half dozen or so of her staffers had not escaped from the suite of speaker's offices, and they were huddled in a conference room under a table behind two doors hoping that the mob would not know that they were in there. And the marauders got through the first door, didn't get through the second one. … She knew that she had staffers who were in real danger for hours.

… When you total up what she was doing for the next few days, she, in effect it feels like, took charge of the American government. She was acting almost like a president, calling [Gen. Mark] Milley, calling many others, calling the vice president to see about the 25th Amendment and more or less insisting on it. Walk me through that. What was she doing?

She wanted to get Trump out of office. I mean, Trump didn't have that much time left, right? He had another two weeks. But she thought he was dangerous and unfit for office. She wanted to figure out if there was a way to get him out of office then. She called Pence. I don't think she got through to Pence. I don't think Pence took the call. She, of course, was immediately thinking about impeachment. She knew that impeachment wouldn't happen in time to get him out of office beforehand. I think she thought maybe he'd resign. That was, I think, not going to be in the cards either.

One thing I think that Speaker Pelosi was very concerned about at this point was that the military not be abused by the outgoing president, the powers of the military. And, you know, that had been something that she had been concerned about for some time, about the possibility of President Trump ordering some military action either for his own purposes or for political purposes or to create a stir or for some reason that would not be in the national interest. And so we know that she conferred with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others about the control, for instance, they were going to maintain on nuclear weapons, on the nuclear arsenal. So she had the biggest possible set of concerns in her mind as that was all unfolding.

It's amazing when you read the transcript in at least [Bob] Woodward and [Robert] Costa's book about what she's saying with Milley and how she won't let it go. It's literally the third degree with this guy, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to make sure that America is secure. Let's total up her actions over those few days, starting at the very beginning. How representative is this of Nancy Pelosi, the way that she acted all the way throughout this?

You know, John Bresnahan, who's a reporter now for Punchbowl but a longtime congressional correspondent, he did a profile of Pelosi like 10 or 11 years ago and described her as an "iron fist in a Gucci glove." "An iron fist in a Gucci glove." There is no more perfect description of Pelosi's use of power because she can have a Gucci glove. She can be persuasive. She can offer favors. This is something she learned from her mother and her father back in Baltimore, the "favor file" that they kept. But when she needs to, she can have an iron fist, and she can deliver what I call the "Pelosi treatment," which is something pretty fierce. And members of Congress whose votes she needs on some crucial matter have felt the iron fist. And I think that on that day, Gen. Milley felt the iron fist as well.

How does it work with her? Does she start nice and then go hard, or is it blast furnace from the beginning?

Well, one thing: I've never heard Nancy Pelosi raise her voice. I've never heard her yell. I've never heard her make kind of a big threat. She just gets more and more and more intense. She gets more relentless. She forces you to explain and defend your position. She wants to make very clear that you understand what she thinks the stakes are here and what the consequences might be for her and for you and for the country if you don't do what she thinks you ought to do. And I think that it's enough to make sweat pop on the foreheads of members of Congress and Army generals.

[Let's go back to 2003 and] that Gang of Eight meeting in the Oval Office … where she realizes, "I'm the only woman who's ever been in this room with all these men where all these decisions for a couple hundred years have been being made." Sound like a familiar story?

… So Nancy Pelosi has challenged the Democratic establishment in the House by running for whip. She started running for Democratic whip before there was actually an opening for Democratic whip. The election campaign took three years. Finally she's elected Democratic whip over the man, Steny Hoyer, who had been on track to get that job. So she's been disruptive. She was not invited to run for this leadership job. So she's elected into this leadership. And it's the highest-ranking leadership position any woman has ever held in American history, in congressional history.

And so she's invited to meet with the president, with President George W. Bush at the White House. It's kind of a standard opening meeting of the year of the congressional session with the president. And she realizes that no woman had ever been in that meeting before. And, you know, Pelosi is a pretty devout Catholic, but she's not really a mystical person. But she says, she insists—and she insists this isn't some kind of metaphor—she insists that she felt crowding in her chair, leading suffragists and other women leaders who had come before her, long dead, crowded around with her saying, "Now we have a seat at the table." You know, it sounds like a kind of a convenient metaphor, right, like a story a politician might tell. But she insisted to me that she physically felt their presence.

And the meaning of that for her, the meaning of that for future policy, the meaning of that for the way that she would do her job?

Well, she's always had a political agenda that includes things that we think of as women's issues, like health care and education and taking care of kids who are growing up in poverty. Maybe we no longer think of those as women's issues, but we did at a time. And she has always put those kind of issues forward on her own political agenda, although in a way, I think that's a little misleading, because she's also been a leader on national security affairs, serving for the longest time on the House Democratic Intelligence Committee of any member, something she's very proud of. So it's not that she has only that one facet. But in some ways, she does reflect the interests of women and mothers and their children in a way that a lot of the male politicians had not.

She's handed the whip by David Bonior. … In what way is she the right person for that job? And is that whip symbolic of something about her, at least at that time?

I've covered 11 presidential campaigns and seven presidents, and Nancy Pelosi is more comfortable with power than any other person I've ever covered. And I think it's because she grew up in a household where power was like electricity and running water. From the day she was born, she was in a family that was accustomed to seeking power, holding power and using power. And it's in her bones.

Talk a little bit about what 7-year-old Nancy sees when the congressman is elected mayor, and there she is in this family of men with "Big Nancy" and her, and how it all forms, at least on the male side of it, a perspective on the world that Nancy saw.

So there's this wonderful photo of her father being sworn in as mayor of Baltimore for the first time, the first of his three terms. And he's up there, and who is holding the Bible? It's not his wife, and it's not any of his first five sons. It's his daughter, 7-year-old Nancy, his youngest child, his only girl. … She makes what she calls her first public speech, which went something like, "Dear Daddy, I hope this holy Bible will help you to be a good man." You know, there's something else about when her father won that first election for mayor of Baltimore, which was a huge achievement and his lifelong dream. They had a family portrait painted called Victory Night, which is an oil painting that shows the whole family on the night, purportedly on the night that he won that first mayoral election, and at the center of the portrait is not her father, the mayor, or her mother or any of her brothers. It's her. They're all in dark clothes. She's in this iridescent white dress. She's in the middle. Things are focused on her. It's really quite remarkable. It's as though Nancy D'Alesandro, "Little Nancy," had just been elected mayor, not "Tommy the Elder" D'Alesandro.

What is up with that?

I think she was the beloved. One of Nancy D'Alesandro's high school classmates told me that she thinks that Big Nancy was so tired of having boys that she prayed to God, if he would only give her a girl, she would make that girl a nun. Now, Nancy D'Alesandro was not really interested in becoming a nun. She once told her mother that she would be more interested in becoming a priest. Maybe that seemed like a more powerful position. But it tells you something about the position she held in that family, which was the shining little girl, always getting good grades, always at the—many times at the center of family life, and especially close to her mother, who was a remarkable person in her own right.

… There are several moments of sexism from her father to her mother. He doesn't let her start her business about the—doesn't let her go to law school, which she says she wants to do. It's very much a '20s courtship and a '30s marriage kind of environment, I suppose. And for Little Nancy, it's got to be all kinds of lessons. …

Well, she sees her mother being thwarted, her mother who her whole life wanted to go to law school and never could, and who wanted to buy some property in Ocean City, Maryland, and her husband wouldn't let her. So her mother was this restless and in some ways unsatisfied person. I think she wanted to do bigger things than she could do. On the other hand, Nancy Pelosi saw her mother wield enormous influence over her father and exert a lot of political power. She saw her mother organizing the troops for her father in political campaigns. And it was her mother who kept what they called the favor file, which was crucial to the D'Alesandro political machine. So her mother may have been thwarted, but that does not mean her mother was not influential and important.

Nancy leaves to go to Trinity College an hour south of Baltimore. It's like she went around the world. Her father says, "Over my dead body," or something like that, and the mother says, "That could be arranged," or some version of the story like that. It's almost like a sitcom in a way, or a Tennessee Williams play.

I have an almost firsthand source for that story, which is—there's a reporter at The Baltimore Sun who had a source who as a young person had been kind of a junior aide to Tommy D'Alesandro. And so he happened to be the body man in the kitchen while the two of them argued, while Tommy the Elder D'Alesandro and Big Nancy D'Alesandro argued about whether Nancy would be allowed to go out of town to go to college, and that's when Tommy said, "Over my dead body," and Big Nancy said, "That can be arranged."

Nancy … has potential to be sure. She faced the LSAT. She wants to go to law school. But she meets this guy named Paul, and I guess she didn't want to be a nun, but did she want to be a mom? Apparently so, you know?

Well, she was interested in being a lawyer, although maybe that reflected, to some degree, her mother, since her mother had wanted to be a lawyer and it never worked out for her. But I think Nancy D'Alesandro was very happy. And of course, the other thing she did, she worked for a senator. She got a job as the front-desk receptionist for a new senator from Maryland. But she was, I think, happy to fall in love with Paul Pelosi and to follow him first to New York and then to San Francisco, and to have five children in six years and a day, which as she says is a pretty remarkable feat. She called it "the Catholic way."

… The impact of being a mom of five kids under 6 years old—any influence on her as Nancy Pelosi the speaker of the House?

Well, she says it's the perfect training. She says having five kids in six years is the perfect training to be speaker of the House, because you think about it, if you've got a lot of kids, even fewer kids than she had, you're constantly dealing with chaos. You have shifting coalitions, right? Sometimes you're in agreement with one child and not the other, and sometimes it's the parents against the kids—all kinds of shifting coalitions. You're also trying to persuade people who may be pretty stubborn to do what it is that you think they should do and to convince them that it was their idea. Now, if you wanted to describe what a speaker of the House does, that's not too far off.

She decides to run, and she's in her mid-40s. … Why, and how does she win?

You know, her reluctance to run for office is something that I think people are skeptical of in that, how could she not have wanted to run for office before, given her skill at doing it and also kind of her upbringing? But this is another point on which she is very firm that she's not speaking—she's not telling you a story. This is how it really was, that she did not want to run for office. She had no desire to run for office until another woman encouraged her to run for office. And the fact is, for that whole generation of female politicians, this is a really familiar story. There are a lot of women now in office who did not get in office until another woman said, "Yes, you should do this. Yes, you can do this."

You know, every man you went to college with think they should be a U.S. senator. Probably half of them think they should be president. But that's probably not true, at least for that generation, of the women that you would run across. So—she had a friend of hers, Sala Burton, a member of Congress who had succeeded her husband in the San Francisco congressional seat, who was dying of cancer, and it was when Sala Burton said to her, "I think you should run for my seat, and if you do, I'll endorse you," Pelosi insists that was the first time she seriously considered running for office.

… Sala Burton encourages her to run, offers her this huge gift, which is an endorsement. You know, San Francisco politics is a contact sport. There are a lot of politicians in San Francisco. It's a very political town. Like Baltimore in that way. And so there was going to be nobody handing her the congressional seat that was going to be opened, but the endorsement of Sala Burton and the Burton machine, that would take her a certain distance. I think that was probably encouraging when she thought about whether to run or not.

She'd had other qualifications that are essential for a politician. I think in some ways, she knew how to pull money out of people's pockets, a great fundraiser. Knew how to organize foot soldiers and people out there in the neighborhoods or the wards or whatever they are in San Francisco who go door to door for people. And her role in the—what was it, 1984 Democratic Convention was fundamental. She was sort of known, I gather, as this rich, politically active … person before she put her hat in the ring.

You know, even when she got married and started having all those kids, she never stopped being active in politics. She was an active political volunteer. She became active in party politics. She was the voice that urged Jerry Brown, then the governor of California the first time around, to seek the—who had wanted to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976—to run in the Maryland primary. And then she lined up her brother and her brother's best friend to run the Maryland campaign, which they delivered for Jerry Brown, much to the consternation of Jimmy Carter, who was then on track to get the nomination. So she had skills.

After that, she served as chair of the Northern California Democratic Party, then of the entire California Democratic Party. So she was no newcomer to politics, but she had always played the kind of role her mother had played, which is behind the scenes. And when she decided in 1987 to run for this congressional seat, she was taking the role her father had played as the candidate herself.

We have the debate KQED [hosted] on television where there's 14 candidates. It's raucous, a completely chaotic moment. And she's not exactly prim. I don't know how you'd describe it. You're a writer; you can describe her. But there she is in the midst of all this chaos—the AIDS candidate and this candidate and the socialist communist candidate, and they're all yelling at each other. And here's the rich dilettante standing in the room, right? Take me there. Who's that Nancy Pelosi, and how does she—I have a feeling she made her mark in that moment. She somehow drew a line in the sand or something about who she was. Help me understand what was going on there.

… There's like the one crucial exchange. There's that crazy opening, right, when it was all about the Iran-Contra stuff. That was hilarious. I saw that. And the crucial exchange, the most important exchange of her political career—

What do you mean, the most crucial thing of her whole career? …

So she's running for this congressional seat, and she's backed by the Burton machine. But there are more qualified—more traditionally qualified candidates running, including a couple members of the City Council. And she's being portrayed by them in attack ads and attacks as this rich dilettante, not as somebody who understands the lives that most people live and who would represent their interests. So this is a crucial point for her to counter. So she goes to this debate, and she's waiting for the question which is then posed about, how can you understand the lives of real people because you're so rich?

And she starts to try to answer, and then there's this big kerfuffle about something else on stage about Iran-Contra. She gets interrupted, I think, twice, and then finally has a chance to deliver the remarks that she had clearly prepared and rehearsed, which said essentially, "I may be rich, but that doesn't mean I don't understand the problems of other people. I've spent my whole life working for people—working people, people in need. I am a voice that will be heard. I can deliver for the people I would represent in San Francisco." And Nancy Pelosi is not really an orator, and she's not great at the big speech or the big remark.

And it's not that she was so incredibly eloquent at that moment, but she was good enough at countering the main attack that was being waged against her. And I think you could argue that was the most crucial political exchange of her career because she then won the election, but she didn't win it by much.

When she gets to Washington, what does she do in those first years that somehow distinguished her and get her to the whip, in short order, more or less? And you think about how long a lot of people labor there in anonymity. What is it that Nancy Pelosi has that allows her to get on the rocket ride to the whip and become, by that time, the most—the highest-ranking woman in the history of American politics?

Nancy Pelosi had a couple of assets, and one of them was money. She already had a history of raising money for Democratic presidential candidates and gubernatorial candidates and Senate candidates. She had been finance director of the Democratic [Senatorial] Campaign Committee. So this is an ability that would serve her well throughout her entire career in Congress, her ability to raise money. She has raised more money than any other congressional leader ever. She had also political skills that came from, I think, growing up understanding how politicians work, what they want and what they need.

You know, remember the day she was born, her father was then a member of the House. He was on the House floor lobbying for an FDR bill. He waited until the vote had taken place before he left to go back to Baltimore to see his wife and his newborn daughter. So this is a family that understands something about politics. She is often in situations where her relationship with her father or memories of her father by older members of Congress serve her well. And she also showed the kind of focus and drive that she would need to get ahead to reach the leadership offices she did. And early on, she devoted that attention, that focus and drive to the issue of HIV/AIDS. You know, I think it's easy for us to forget now how controversial that was; how big the stigma was attached to the issue of AIDS; how many politicians, including President Reagan, refused to even say the word or to acknowledge it as a public health crisis.

But it was impossible to ignore in San Francisco, the center of gay life at that time, and the city that was being hardest hit by the AIDS epidemic. And she tackled that in a really straightforward way. She attacked it both by seeking money for programs, by dealing with regulations that were hurting people who had been—who had gotten AIDS and were trying to deal with the federal bureaucracy. She did large things and small things that earned her the respect and the appreciation of the community that was working on behalf of AIDS. She was crucial even in getting permission from the Reagan administration to allow the AIDS Quilt for the first time to be put out and spread on the National Mall.

She makes it to the whip in a classic gambit of counting votes and beating Steny Hoyer, her old officemate in that senator's office. She's become known as somebody who can count the votes and make it happen. And when she's the whip, the president is young George W. Bush. What does she think of Bush?

Pelosi had good relationships with the elder Bush, George H. W. Bush, and she liked Barbara Bush a lot. And in fact, on the mantle of her fireplace in the speaker's office are just a couple pictures, and one of them is a picture of her with the Bush clan. But she disagreed from the start with George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq. She was the highest-ranking Democrat in the country to oppose the Iraq invasion from the start. And she saw it as a terrible mistake, a terrible and costly mistake, and one that he bore responsibility for, and that makes her judgment of George W. Bush pretty harsh.

She said things like he's in over his head and he's immature. And this causes, from Rush Limbaugh to everybody on that sort of GOP rising right-wing side of the politics in our country, she becomes a target almost from the very beginning about these statements about the war. And of course, stoking the anger about the war, I guess, helps her in her caucus, but not always. It becomes her issue, and you'll help us understand, how does this issue in the end, by the 2006 midterms, turn in her favor, and how hard was it for her to withstand the onslaught both from the right, but also within the caucus?

Well, we should remember that the safe vote at first was to be for the Iraq invasion, and the Democrats who wanted to run for president, almost to a person, supported the Iraq invasion. So it was not the easy stance to take to oppose it. It put her at odds with the other Democratic congressional leaders. She had not been in the leadership herself very long. It was a pretty gutsy thing to do. But by 2006, the whole country was concerned about the course of the war. There were questions about whether we'd gone to war under false pretenses with the argument that turned out to be debunked that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And by then it was the war in Iraq that made Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House by delivering a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.

… The president supported, of course, counterattacks, and it was pretty personal. You've already sort of alluded to this, but I gather she does not exactly have the thin skin. How did she respond?

You know, Nancy Pelosi raised more money for Democrats running for Congress than any other leader in history. Nancy Pelosi also raised more money for Republicans running for Congress than any other leader in history, because as popular as she is with many Democrats, that's how much she is hated by Republicans. She's portrayed as a San Francisco liberal. I think there were overtones that she was the politician who stood up for people with AIDS early on. I think that was one of the factors. She's female. There are not many female leaders. They come in, we know, for special criticism and caricature.

So she was a huge fundraiser for both parties. And I think one result of having grown up in a political family in a rough-and-tumble town like Baltimore is that she had a tough skin by the time she was in college about political attacks and an approach to it, which was take them on.

… An issue emerges early in her speakership: the crash of the financial institutions in the fall of '08. … And this is where she is told not only that America is going down, and therefore the world might be going down, but that in order to save it, you've got to do deals, compromise deals with John Boehner and George W. Bush and the Republicans. So walk me through that story, will you? …

So Pelosi was enraged for two reasons. One is that this was a big surprise to her. She hadn't realized how serious the financial meltdown was becoming. She thought Hank Paulson, the Treasury secretary, had an obligation to have kept her better informed. She was also enraged because she thought it was Bush's fault. She thought it was a failure to effectively regulate the big banks and other financial institutions that had led us to the mortgage crisis, the mortgage meltdown, that the financial crisis was going to engulf all of them.

So she was quite angry about that. And the third thing that really angered her was she was going to be put in a position to bail them out, and that was because congressional Republicans were unwilling to rescue their own president by passing that unpopular bank bailout that's called TARP, Toxic [sic] Assets Relief Program. This was a really tough political vote. But all the financial experts, including the Fed chairman and the Treasury secretary, insisted that the country's economy was going to collapse unless they bailed out the banks, that bailing out the banks would, in effect, bail out average Americans, even though it was hard for a lot of average Americans to believe that.

So she and Boehner, the Republican Leader John Boehner, reach a deal where they'll each produce 50% of their caucus and they'll pass this thing that neither of them want passed. That way, neither of them takes full responsibility for it. And they have the first vote, and she delivers over 50% of House Democrats. Boehner is unable to deliver half of House Republicans. And the bill goes down, and the markets crash. It was a very perilous time. And so Pelosi at that point agrees to bring the bill up again. She gets more Democratic votes. Boehner gets some more Republican votes, but still not half. The bill goes through, and the economy is saved.

But Pelosi told me that the political costs for doing that were considerable. She said that, you know, the next midterm election in 2010, Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives and she was no longer speaker, and a lot of analysts think that's because of the repercussions of passage of the Affordable Care Act. She says she thinks it's the repercussions, first and foremost, of the passage of that bank bailout, that that's what convinced people that Democrats had bailed out the banks and not them.

It feels to us while we look at it as a sort of transformative moment for her. If she was partisan when she came in, then she holds hands, and they, as they said, jump off the cliff together, and the Republicans—and it's very hard for a Democratic speaker to do the things she did, bail out banks, to bail out the very unpopular president, George W. Bush. Democrats aren't supposed to do things like that. Democrats don't take care of the banks; they take care of Main Street. They jump off the cliff together; Boehner didn't deliver. The Republicans largely vote no on it and take it down. And she feels—I mean, as we look at it, it's almost transformative. …

I think it was a case where she was thinking—and this sounds a little grandiose, but not as a Democrat, but as an American—that the consequences for the—even if there was some political benefit to letting Bush go down and the markets collapse, that it wasn't good for America and Americans, and therefore reluctantly perhaps, she stepped up and passed this controversial bill. You know, I think you see her making some of the same arguments now in the aftermath of Jan. 6. And the argument is, we can disagree on expanding Medicare benefits, or we can disagree on the role of the government in regulating Facebook, but we shouldn't disagree on the things that strengthen or weaken our democracy, things that strengthen or weaken kind of the fundamentals of our country. And I think that both Jan. 6 and the 2008 financial meltdown were things that tested that theory of the case.

As it turns out, fate is going to deal her a president, her next president, Barack Obama, who's a big bipartisan guy. Comes to town with lots of hopes and lots of promises of change, and she thinks she knows better. And as much as she's happy to have a Democratic president, I think very early on, I think she gets it demonstrated to her through the stimulus bill and other things that he doesn't care very much about her and what her opinions are about this. …

Pelosi and Obama are pretty different kinds of pols. You know, Obama is inspirational. And I think President Obama often took the view that he was smarter than you, so he would figure out the right thing to do and he would inform members of Congress of that, and then they should do what he informed them was the right thing to do. Maybe that's not entirely fair, but that was the impression that some members of Congress had of him. Pelosi is much more a nitty-gritty, figure-it-out, let's use the Gucci glove, now we'll use the iron fist. She is much more a pol that understands the power that members of Congress have to either get things done or not. She is meticulous in cultivating the support of and monitoring the plans and dreams and needs of other members of Congress in a way that Obama was not.

And I think she thought Obama, number one—she would've liked to have him do a little more of the traditional glad-handing [of] members of Congress to bring them along. But also she thought he should do more about explaining the benefits of what they had already done. So when the Affordable Care Act is passed, I think she faults the White House for not explaining to people how it's going to work, how it's going to benefit them, kind of selling what it was they had worked so hard to pass.

And it ended up taking years, I think, for Americans to come around and have a more positive view of the Affordable Care Act because of that failure in messaging. They're just politicians with different strengths and different weaknesses. She has huge admiration for Barack Obama, and passage of the Affordable Care Act is definitely one of the things she is most proud of in her entire career, but they operate in different ways. And you know, in a way, both turned out to be crucial in passing the big agenda items that Barack Obama had. The Affordable Care Act wouldn't have passed without Obama both making the campaign promise and then deciding to go ahead and deliver on it once he won office, but it also wouldn't have passed without Nancy Pelosi's meticulous work in muscling it through a reluctant Congress.

… I mean, there does seem to be moments and what she said and things we see that indicate that she thought they really—they throw her under the bus, or they aren't taking her seriously, and the president isn't backing her up down when you get down to the nitty-gritty of all of that. How important were things like that to Nancy Pelosi during that fight?

You know, they're working on the Affordable Care Act, and they're feeling pretty good because they have 60 votes in the Senate, which means the filibuster can't be used to block consideration. And then Scott Brown happens. Then Ted Kennedy's Senate seat goes to a Republican. And for, I think, a lot of people in Washington, that meant that the Affordable Care Act was in some really serious difficulty. For one thing, Scott Brown had run against the Affordable Care Act. That had been—he could argue that was the reason he was elected. That could make other politicians, including Democratic ones, a little nervous about being out there as a big advocate of the Affordable Care Act.

But Pelosi was convinced that they could get a big bill through, a big, sweeping, comprehensive Affordable Care Act, even with the change in the Senate, and she needed to persuade Obama to go ahead with this. And they had this meeting in the White House, which I think is the most extraordinary example of a member, a leader in Congress threatening a president of his or her own party, because basically she said to Obama, "We can go"—so they're at this meeting, and Rahm Emanuel, who was then Obama's chief of staff, is arguing to go for a small bill, for maybe a bill that would just cover kids because that was just the political reality.

And many in the White House, including Emanuel, had been nervous about going for a big bill. They thought it would be too controversial. They remembered what happened when Bill Clinton went for a big health care bill. That didn't end so well. They had been arguing for more limited ambitions, but Pelosi was not ready to give up on the big ambitions yet, and she basically said to Obama, "You can go big and I'll be out there fighting it, and I tell you I can deliver this, or you can go small, and you can do it yourself." He went big, and they got it through.

… So when he's in the East Room after he's signed the bill and saying, "Nancy, Nancy," and all of that, what is that?

Hillary Clinton told me that when the Affordable Care Act passed, she called President Obama to congratulate him. And of course Hillary Clinton had her own complicated history with health care because she had led the Clinton health care debacle. And she said that even at that moment of celebration, Obama said to her, "You should thank Nancy." Obama recognized his own role, his own important role, but he recognized how crucial Pelosi had been in getting that through as well.

… Let's talk about Trump. So Trump comes along, and she's gotten money from Trump in the past, I guess when he was a Democrat. She extracted some—she doesn't really know him much. She's watched the campaign and everything else. And she's in the minority, so it doesn't kind of matter. She doesn't really have to deal with him, I suppose. But there is this famous story of a meeting at the White House where she goes, and Bannon is there, and others are there, and he tells a few whoppers, and she calls him on it. Do you know this story?

I do. But let me just disagree with the idea that she was in the minority so she didn't really have to deal with him. When Trump took over in that unexpected victory in 2016, Republicans were then holding the House and the Senate. And while Nancy Pelosi was no longer the speaker—she was the minority leader in the House—she was the leading Democratic opposition to Trump. She was the face of the Democratic opposition to Trump. And she had a weak hand, but she played it pretty well for two years until Democrats could win control of the House and all the powers that that meant.

So the meeting that you ask about: They have a meeting at the White House. It's in the State Dining Room. … And this is the kind of meeting that new presidents routinely have with congressional leaders where they usually start out by saying how grateful they are to the republic and we all work together to save the nation and, you know, kind of boilerplate, "Let's all feel good about America" rhetoric. And that's not what he did, even though he had a script before him that his staff had prepared that had the kind of standard boilerplate political happy talk.

Instead, he starts complaining about illegal votes being cast, and, you know, "I won by even more." He was annoyed that he didn't win the popular vote, even though he won the Electoral College, and he was arguing to these stunned members of Congress that he really should've won the popular vote as well; there were millions of illegal ballots cast, which is not accurate. That's not true. And they're sitting there, and no one is speaking up. Now, Pelosi has been in a lot of these meetings before, and she understands the protocol of who gets to speak first, and she comes way down the line because she's the minority leader in the House. No one's speaking up.

So she figures, nobody but Mitch has been here before, so I'll just speak up myself. And so she speaks up and says, "Mr. President, that's not true, and it's important that we deal with facts here." So from that very first meeting, she was willing to confront Trump in a way that basically no one else in Washington was willing to do.

Back up one second there. Rejoin the meeting. But what is Trump's view of her? What is—their past communications have been? Just—what does he think of her? He's a brand-new, absolute novice political figure and president, and here's Nancy Pelosi. What does he think of her?

Pelosi had come to him once when he was a Democrat and gotten a contribution from him for the Democrats running for Congress, and the first time she was elected speaker, he sent a congratulatory note to her congratulating her on becoming speaker, and that was pretty much the extent of their relationship before he won the White House. His election had a huge effect on her. You know, she had been thinking about retiring from Congress as soon as Hillary Clinton took office and took over things, thinking they would be in safe Democratic hands. Well, she shelved that idea on election night in 2016 when it became clear that Donald Trump was going to be the next president.

But his view of her was pretty respectful. You know, he made demeaning nicknames for people. He didn't really do that for Pelosi for a couple years. And I had an interview with Trump right before the 2018 midterms for USA Today in which I said, you know, "People say Democrats may win control of the House in the midterms that are coming up in a couple of weeks. Are you worried about that?" And he said no. He said he thought he could do business with them. He said he thought he could do business with Pelosi. He thought they could go through maybe an infrastructure bill. Does that sound familiar? He said, "You know, on some of these issues, I may be closer to the Democrats than to the Republicans." He did not have the kind of concern that his aides, including Steve Bannon, thought he should have about the prospects of Democrats winning the House of Representatives.

And of course they did win the House, and it started a nightmare for Donald Trump because for the first time, he was subjected to congressional scrutiny and oversight of his actions, and it led ultimately to him being impeached, not once but twice.

Let's go back to that meeting, because I'm just—what I'm fishing for now is the Bannon conclusion that he comes to when he watches Pelosi pipe up kind of out of turn in front of the president of the United States.

And what was the word? She's a—

Assassin.

"She's an assassin." So when I talked to Steve Bannon about that meeting, interviewed him about what was happening, he said he had intentionally seated himself so he could watch Nancy Pelosi because he was interested in her, and he knew that she was going to be a figure of real power affecting the Trump presidency. And when Pelosi spoke up, and in a very matter of fact way challenged the president and said what he was saying was not true, he turned to Reince Priebus, then the White House chief of staff, and said, "She's an assassin."

… She has problems with her own caucus in the aftermath of the election. It's like her family maybe, brothers and parents, progressives, moderates, and others—not a lot unlike it is now for her. And then her speakership was in some jeopardy. Let's talk about the white men first, the "five white men" and the moderates. And what was their objection? What did they do? How did they handle her? How did they want to handle her? …

I think in retrospect, this is surprising, but the fact is she faced a really serious challenge to being reelected Democratic leader after 2018, even though she had helped engineer Democrats' winning back control of the House. I think a lot of it was a sense that it was time for a new generation of leadership, that she had been in the leadership for a long time, that the three top Democratic House leaders were all really getting up in age. Where were the new voices, the rising forces, that there ought to be space for them. And she held her speakership, but she did it by making some concessions when it came to how long she would stay in the leadership, and she made some concessions in terms of devising some new roles for younger leaders to hold and to get some attention.

But I think it's surprising given all that she had done to bring about this happy situation that they had won control that she had to do a reasonably serious job to hold onto it. After she succeeded, I think her actions over the next two years made Democrats wonder what they had been thinking about getting rid of her, because over and over again, her skill as a legislative leader, her history in handling some of these issues turned out to be very important, her skill at handling their concern about President Trump and the impeachment trials that followed. But at the time, I think she was in some danger.

I think there is—you know, she has been in the leadership a long time, through good times and bad times, through majority and minority status. And that doesn't last forever. And I think there were some Democrats who just felt enough's enough, and also felt that some of the policies she was doing weren't sensitive enough to members who are in these moderate swing districts, these members of Congress who somehow managed to win, Democrats who managed to win House seats, even in a district that President Trump carried.

We will now talk about the red-coat-and-sunglasses moment, where she—somehow it feels like that turns the tide for her with her caucus. What happened?

That was an important moment in this campaign, I think, her own campaign, because she and Chuck Schumer, the Senate leader, go in to meet with Trump and Vice President [Pence] in the Oval Office. It is after Democrats have gained control of the House, but before—it's in December; it's before the new Congress has started. Trump makes a kind of comment that indicates she may be in a somewhat weakened position because she's facing this challenge within her own caucus.

And she turns and pins him with, "Don't you question my position of power," in a way that became the clip of the moment. And the meeting then deteriorated after that over funding the border wall and he was going to shut down the government. And Pelosi, several times in this meeting, throws Trump what could've been a lifeline by saying, "Maybe we should talk without all these cameras present," suggesting maybe the press pool ought to be taken out of the room, which would've been customary. That would've been no surprise; the press had been allowed to stay there longer than expected. Trump finally realizes that he is not winning this public debate, and the press pool is taken out. And when Pelosi comes out of the West Wing onto the driveway where reporters are waiting, she's got this swingy red coat on; she's got sunglasses on. She looks like James Bond. She looks like she is in control of the world, not a care in the world, having succeeded in this early meeting with President Trump.

She told me that the reason that she wore that red coat, which became so iconic, was because it had just come back from the cleaners, so it was clean. It was in the front of her closet. It was kind of a chilly day; maybe she'd need a coat. She put it on. She said that now she can't wear the coat because if she wears that coat, it seems like she's trying to send some kind of message.

She doesn't really care about all the image stuff, does she? I mean, my impression over all the years is that—I mean, yeah, she wears the Manolos, and yes, she has color-blocked outfits or whatever and has her hair done for 20 minutes every day. But I don't know. You know her; you've been inside with her. How important is the image stuff to her?

Well, she's always perfectly dressed, classically dressed. But I don't think it's what she cares about. And you won't find Nancy Pelosi discussing what designer she's wearing. I think she wants to look appropriate and she wants to look like a person of authority. But beyond that, I don't think it's what fuels her.

Speaking of image, she has another problem after the red-coat incident, which is the Squad and AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and [Ilhan] Omar and others. It's both a cultural—it's an influence-versus-power argument. It's all those things wrapped up. Tell me your version of what was happening there at that time in her caucus and with her and the Squad.

You know, Nancy Pelosi is a really tough interview because she is so disciplined and because she is not embarrassed to repeat the talking points that you have heard before, because she has a couple go-to quotes from Abraham Lincoln and from Ronald Reagan that she'll use over and over again until you can all repeat them with her. She is guarded and disciplined, and that is the opposite of what a reporter wants to have in someone you're interviewing. But in one of the interviews, one of the 10 interviews I did with her, that was not the case, and she had come in from a big fight in the Democratic Caucus that involved the Squad, and the Squad had defected on an immigration vote where she had really worked to—she really wanted Democrats to support it. She thought it was not perfect; it was the best thing they could get. It was important to support it, and the Squad defected.

And after that, there were public exchanges between the Squad and between AOC's then-chief of staff deriding Democratic members of the House for positions they had taken and characterizing them in very critical ways, and Pelosi did not think that was appropriate. They had tough caucus meetings, one in particular about the obligation that Democratic House members had to one another. And my interview happened to be soon after that meeting had broken up, which was my good fortune because she was really mad. And I tried to ask her about what had happened in the meeting, and she said nothing had happened, Democrats being Democrats. And I finally said, you know, "Do you think that members of the Squad don't understand or don't appreciate how messy it can be to make legislation? It's not—" Pelosi had said, "We're not making usually a beautiful pâté. We're making sausage," meaning it's a messy process and we need to hang together. And at that point, Pelosi talked about the difference between people who came here to really do things and the people who came here to Washington just to make a point or to get attention or to be praised. She said—she was actually quoting Dave Bonior, a former member of Congress and chairman of the Budget Committee, who used to have a saying that, "Some people come into the room to pose for holy pictures, and they can stand over there. We're coming to the room and stand over here, and we'll actually get things done." And so Pelosi was saying that members of the Squad in this case were posing for holy pictures, and that was not meant as a compliment. That was as mad as I've ever seen her. I mean, she doesn't lose her—she was pretty mad then.

I only saw her really lose her temper once, and that was in the 2020 State of the Union address. She's pretty controlled, and to catch her being as spontaneous as she was in that interview was interesting. It gave you some insight into how she viewed both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Squad.

… There is, in the caucus, real—as you say, from the very beginning, there's an impeachment impulse. But around that time, the idea of impeaching Trump is just for a number of people in the Congress. Where is Speaker Pelosi on the idea of impeaching Trump? What's her position on it, and how does she handle it?

I think that Pelosi thought Trump shouldn't be president, but that impeachment wasn't going to remove him from office because the Senate was under Republican control and that it was a political loser for Democrats. So why would they do those things? They weren't going to get him out of office, and it was going to cost them something. And she was thinking, I think, about her experience from the impeachment that Republicans pursued against President Clinton that had rebounded against the Republicans who had pursued it, because Americans are mostly concerned about their own lives. They want their elected officials to be working on the things that are bothering them, on jobs and the economy and health care and education and things like that, and not on impeachment. So she was a voice against impeachment.

And at one point, I'm told—one of her aides told me—she once said when there was a little bit of a movement, some momentum toward impeachment by House Democratic members, one of her aides told me that she told him, "If I'm the only voice against impeachment, we still aren't going to impeach him." She held off on impeachment until release of that phone call that President Trump had with the new president of Ukraine.

… The 2020 State of the Union address—let's stop there for a minute. Rush Limbaugh … who's been just destroying her over the years … gets the Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump, right? It's just got to drive her crazy.

So Trump arrives there to deliver the State of the Union, and he hands to both the vice president and to the speaker of the House the text of his speech, which is traditionally done. And so she's leafing through it to see what he's going to say, and she sees something that she thinks is inaccurate, and she wants to make a little notation so she can get back to this inaccurate thing and challenge it. And so she looks for a pen. And apparently you do not take your purse with you when you're at the dais for the State of the Union address. There's a drawer in front of her, the desk in front of her where she's seated. She opens the drawer. There's nothing in it—no pen. So she makes a tiny tear in the margin of the paper so she can come back to find this inaccurate thing she's going to discuss later.

And she keeps reading, and she finds something else she thinks is not quite accurate and makes another little tear. And she keeps reading. And by the end of the speech, there are little tears up and down the margins of the president's text of the State of the Union address, and she told me that she didn't decide immediately what she was going to do about that. But as you said, I think Rush Limbaugh was the tipping point for her and for other Democrats who were in the hall because he had been such a contentious figure, and for him to get an award like that at the State of the Union address, their night in their chamber I think just crossed some kind of line. So when the speech ended, we all saw this—my jaw dropped—she stands up and starts tearing the State of the Union text up. I've never seen anything like it.

She has to do it in four—four times because it's too thick to tear all at once. And she said to me that she decided if he was going to shred the truth, she was going to shred his speech. But it was, I think, the one time I've ever seen her lose her temper, the one time that Donald Trump really got under her skin.

Did she regret it, do you think?

She told me she didn't regret it, but there are some Pelosi fans and defenders who think it was the wrong thing to do.

Do you think she's the last of a breed? Some people—I read and we talk to—it's hard to say this is it for such a traditional pol, somebody who's just cut from that Tommy D'Alesandro, Nancy D'Alesandro cloth. This is it. We don't have people like that anymore. We have others, but not that, not somebody who doesn't have an active Twitter feed or whatever it is our current crop have, or the rising crop have. Is she the end of that particular line?

Well, I think there are two things you can say—there are two things that some people criticize her for, and one is her reliance on big money. It's the source of her strength. She's never been afraid to raise lots of money. The other is her general inclination to fight along partisan lines, not to reach across the aisle. So those are two things that I think—people look at her leadership and say, "These distinguish her in ways that perhaps others shouldn't want to follow." And we've seen big changes in the way political money is raised and political support amassed. The culture is changing. Our ways of communication are changing; so are our politics.

Whoever succeeds Nancy Pelosi is not going to be like Nancy Pelosi. They're going to be at least a generation younger, maybe two. They're going to have grown up in a different political world with different strengths and weaknesses and priorities.

So in that way, maybe she is. I mean, I think she's survived a long time. Trump extended, I think, her tenure a little longer than it would have otherwise. But when she leaves, things are going to be different. There's going to be—I can't tell you exactly how, but a Hakeem Jeffries is not going to be the same Democratic leader that Nancy Pelosi has been, or whoever ends up succeeding her.

So when you think about her in a valedictory sort of way, what's been the result of Nancy Pelosi and her rise through American politics?

Well, she's been the most powerful woman in the history of the United States. But in a way, I think that masks something else about her, which is that she is one of the most effective legislative leaders in the history of the United States of either gender. She has been the most consequential speaker since at least Sam Rayburn (D-Texas). She has persuasive skills as a legislative leader that we've seen in LBJ and only a few others. So you don't need to put "woman" in the sentence to get Nancy Pelosi in the history books.

… When you think about the most consequential events in the first part of the 21st century, Nancy Pelosi is a big player in nearly all of them. She is the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee on 9/11. She is the most senior Democrat in the country to oppose the Iraq War from the start. She is the legislative leader who bails out George W. Bush by pushing through an unpopular bank bailout during the 2008 financial meltdown. She becomes the muscle that gets President Obama's signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, through Congress. And then she is the face of the Democratic opposition to the most disruptive president in American history. That is a considerable legacy.