Top Quotes: “Pelosi” — Molly Ball

Introduction

“When she first set foot in the Capitol’s marble hallways, she was six-year-old Nancy D’Alesandro, a little girl from Baltimore, watching her father get sworn in for his fifth term as a member of Congress. She was never supposed to follow in Daddy’s footsteps, no more than her mother had been allowed to fulfill her dream of going to law school in the 1930s. Nancy’s father became the mayor, boss of the city, while her mother had to settle for being her husband’s unseen, uncredited political brain. Nancy, too, was expected to one day fulfill her role as a behind-the-scenes helper to the men who did the world’s important work. Her five brothers were groomed to follow their father into the family vocation; she was groomed to be a nun. Women didn’t have power. Women had responsibilities.

She didn’t become a nun, but nor did she join the bra burners and dropouts and establishment smashers of her generation. Her rebellion was a quieter one. When she attended the March on Washington, she left before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech in order to prepare for her upcoming wedding. While some were burning their draft cards during Vietnam, she was pushing a stroller around her upscale New York City neighborhood, slipping Democratic leaflets under apartment doors, while her husband, a banker, put in long hours at the office. When violent riots broke out at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Pelosi was not with the protesters but inside the convention hall, watching her father and brother cast their delegate votes. Married straight out of college, she became a full-time housewife and mother, moving across the country to San Francisco to support her husband’s career in finance and giving birth to five children in six years.”

“She soon established herself as a master of the game, using techniques she’d learned as a young Catholic mother. Nothing teaches you to deal with unreasonable egomaniacs like having five young children in the house. In Pelosis home, the children formed an assembly line to make their own school lunches, and they set the table for breakfast as soon as dinner was cleared.”

“She never lost a major vote on the floor of the House, because she wouldn’t bring anything to the floor unless she could get the votes to pass it. She was so good at the job that she sometimes made it look easy. Boehner and Ryan, however, quickly discovered how hard it really was. Despite their large majorities, they repeatedly brought bills to the floor only to see them fail.”

“He entrusted her with much of his political operation. They lived in a three-story brick row house on Albemarle Street, on the same block where both of them had grown up. She organized campaign rallies, managed fundraising and ran the Baltimore Democratic Women’s Club out of the familys basement. At election time the women were crucial to turning out the vote, house by house, street by street, precinct by precinct. This was politics at the most fundamental, ground level — “human nature in the raw,” as her oldest child, Thomas III, used to call it. Annunciata, or “Big Nancy,” as she was later called, was the mayor’s chief strategist and political enforcer. She knew where all the bodies were buried, and she never forgot anyone who crossed her.

She was also a sort of one-woman social service agency. In the family’s downstairs parlor, decorated with large portraits of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, people were constantly coming and going, seeking the D’Alesandros’ help. It was Big Nancy who sat at the parlor desk and maintained Tommy’s “favor file,” writing on a piece of yellow paper the services people sought and keeping it in a folder. Her husband’s name was the one on the campaign signs, but she knew whom to call at the Housing Authority, the public hospital, or the city courthouse. During the Depression, she kept a giant pot of stew always simmering on the stove, and if someone looked hungry she’d invite them to stay for dinner.

Big Nancy had a fiery temper. Once, when a precinct worker tried to push her around, she punched him. She wasn’t intimidated by high office, either. When then-President Lyndon Johnson referred to her husband by the nickname he customarily gave Italian men, “Tony,” she fixed LBJ with her coldest glare and informed him, “My husband’s name is Thomas John D’Alesandro.” Years later, when then-President Ronald Reagan planned to visit Baltimore, his staff telephoned the D’Alesandro house to see if the former mayor would join him for a ceremonial event. But it was Big Nancy who answered the phone, and she made clear her feelings about the Republican president: “After what he has done to poor people,” she said, “he should not come near our house.” She proceeded to put up campaign signs for Reagan’s Democratic opponent, Walter Mondale, in every window of the house.”

“In 1957, when Kennedy came to Baltimore to speak at a dinner, Big Nancy pretended to be ill so her daughter could take her place at the head table. Kennedy’s appeal was lofty and ideological, rooted in patriotism and faith. It would become the model for Nancy’s evolving political orientation — Catholic social justice with a hint of noblesse oblige.

When Nancy finished high school, she decided she would finally break free. She set her sights on Trinity College, a Catholic women’s school in Washington, DC, just forty miles down the road. Her father, who was at the time in the middle of the Senate campaign he would eventually lose, opposed it: he wanted her to stay in Baltimore, where she’d be safe. But her mother took her side. “Nancy’s going to Trinity,” she said.

“Over my dead body,” her father said.

““That could be arranged,” her mother replied. So she went.”

Early SF Life

“At the Pelosis’ apartment in Midtown Manhattan, Paul was homesick for the West Coast. His father had just died, and he’d been offered an exciting job as an investment manager in his hometown of San Francisco.”

“After school, it was a snack and homework and outside to play. Pelosi would ring a big brass cowbell from the steps to call them in for dinner. A friend once remarked that she knew Pelosi was destined for political success when she saw the five young children all folding their own laundry.

Tattling and gossip were prohibited. Pelosi often dressed all five children in the same outfit — even Paul Jr.— to make them easier to spot in public. In classic Catholic mother fashion, if a child misbehaved, Pelosi didn’t get mad, just disappointed. She rarely yelled, but she’d look at some mess or other evidence of misbehavior and say, “You children wouldn’t have done that,” and their hearts would sink. “Let’s have some cooperation,” she’d say. “I’m not taking any complaints,” she’d say.”

“Because they had the biggest house of all their friends, the Pelosis began hosting Democratic fundraisers. It was, Pelosi reasoned, the one thing she could still contribute to her beloved party while raising five children. (Guests would sometimes look around at their spartan furnishings and remark that it was smart of her to have taken all the furniture out to make room for the party, and she would smile and nod, while thinking, But this is the furniture.) The children were pressed into service as coat takers, servers and nametag distributors. Driving around the city in her red Jeep Wagoneer, Pelosi kept campaign mailings on the passenger seat and stuffed envelopes whenever she stopped at a red light.

She had a natural talent for fundraising, and the house became a well-known stop on the local campaign circuit. Precisely because it involves so much hostessing, political fundraising had traditionally been women’s work, only later professionalized after decades of being run by volunteers — that is, unpaid wives.”

“Alioto, it turned out, wanted to appoint her to the San Francisco Public Library Commission, the policymaking body that oversaw the city’s system of public libraries. Pelosi had spent a lot of time at the library with her kids; she’d also seen the institution through a political lens, as a vital resource for families that, unlike hers, couldn’t afford books of their own. The library, to her, was nothing less than a pillar of democracy.

But her first response to the mayor’s offer was to demur. She enjoyed volunteering for the library, she told Alioto, but she didn’t need any kind of official position to do that.

“You shouldn’t say that,” he said sternly, surprising her. “You’re doing the work. You should get official recognition for it.” It was, she realized later, a feminist gesture, albeit from an unlikely source. Since time immemorial, in many institutions, women had been working for free while men made all the decisions and held all the power. Alioto was telling her that if she was going to provide the labor, she should get to make the decisions, too. Pelosi would come to see this exchange as a seminal one in putting her on the path to political power.

There was a political angle to it for Alioto, too. He’d recently appointed a new city librarian whose attempts to modernize and democratize the system were rubbing some longtime commissioners the wrong way. Putting Pelosi on the board would give the mayor and his librarian a crucial ally. Even at the library, everything came down to counting votes.

The commission, Alioto told Pelosi, would look good on her résumé if she ever decided to run for office. This struck her as ridiculous. “Mr. Mayor,” she huffed, “I have absolutely no intention of running for office.” But she thought about his argument that her labor entitled her to a voice. I think it’s time for you to get official recognition for your work. She thought about how much she loved books. And with her youngest child, Alexandra, starting kindergarten, she reasoned, she’d have a bit of free time.

On June 6, 1975, the name “Nancy Pelosi” appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle for the first time. The brief item noting her appointment to the library commission described her as “Nancy Pelosi, neighborhood leader and sister-in-law of supervisor Ronald Pelosi.”

As a political office, it was the smallest of small-time gigs. But to the thirty-five-year-old housewife it was a revelation. Having authority changed everything for Pelosi. Volunteers did what they were told, but commission members made policy. People treated her differently.

They couldn’t dismiss or ignore her just because she was a woman. They called and asked her opinion; they listened when she had ideas. For the first time, she felt that people actually cared what she thought. And it was all because she had a vote.”

“The memo proposed that Brown contest the Maryland primary, to be held in mid-May. Pelosi argued that the state’s Democratic voters would be receptive to Brown’s message and that the D’Alesandro family would work their connections on his behalf. Members of Pelosi’s own family, including her brother Tommy, were skeptical. But Brown liked the idea.

Jerry Brown flew to Maryland and stayed with the D’Alesandros for the two weeks leading up to the primary. Tommy and his friend Ted Venetoulis (Pelosi’s high school boyfriend, who was by now the Baltimore county executive, with a formidable political machine of his own) showed the young governor around, despite their misgivings. “My professional judgment is that it is impossible for a thirty-eight-year-old bachelor from California to come into this state and run for president,” Venetoulis warned Brown. “It’s ridiculous.” To their surprise, Brown’s candidacy caught fire. Thousands of young people flocked to his rallies, where Ronstadt accompanied him as he gave soaring speeches.

To the political world’s amazement, Brown came out of nowhere and won Maryland. In his victory speech, he paid tribute to Pelosi, calling her the “architect” of his Maryland campaign. She found herself both abashed and energized by the attention.”

“Brown and Pelosi became friends. When he wasn’t in Sacramento, the governor sometimes hung around the Pelosi house, lying on the couch talking about affairs of state while she got dinner ready. He urged her to run for state Democratic Party chair, but having never run for anything, and having never even been to a party central committee meeting, she told him, “Please find someone else.” At his urging, she agreed to run for a lower-tier party post, Northern California chair, which she won easily. The first campaign flyer of her career read, “Nancy Pelosi-Volunteer.”

Four years later, having learned the ropes of state party politics, she felt ready to run for chair of the California Democratic Party, the largest state Democratic Party in the country. With the backing of Brown, who’d been easily elected to a second term as governor, she won overwhelmingly. The party had to change its bylaws to refer to its first woman leader as “chair” rather than “chairman,” a construction some of the old men found clumsy. No other large state had a woman chair, and some didn’t have a single woman on their central committees. On a regular basis, people would walk into the party office, see the attractive young woman at the desk and say something like “Oh, do you work for the committee?” Pelosi took immense pleasure in responding, “I am the chair.””

“A Polish-born Jew whose family had fled the Nazi occupation of Poland, Sala still spoke English with an accent, and she never learned to drive. When Sala was in DC, the oldest Pelosi daughter, Nancy Corinne, who was attending the now-defunct local women’s college Mount Vernon, often drove her around in one of the family’s old Jeeps. Pelosi saw how others sometimes underestimated Sala, but she knew that Sala’s apparent shyness masked an inner strength.

Sala had been in DC only a few years when tragedy struck again. In early 1986, she was diagnosed with colon cancer, a lethal and fast-moving disease. For months, she managed to conceal her illness. In order to be reelected that November, she convinced her constituents that she was on the mend. But it wasn’t true: doctors had given her no more than a year to live, and she was declining rapidly. By Christmas, Sala was so weak she could barely walk. Still, because another member of Congress who lived in a neighboring DC apartment might see her, she refused to call an ambulance. To get her to the hospital, her chief of staff, Judy Lemons, had to drape Sala’s body over her shoulders and creep down the back stairs.

Sala was too weak to attend her own inauguration in January 1987, so the House passed a resolution allowing her to be sworn in at home. Shortly after, she called Pelosi and told her she wasn’t going to run for reelection and wanted Pelosi to take her seat instead.

Pelosi’s first instinct, once again, was to demur. “Come on,” she told her friend, “you’ll get better.”

“You must promise me you will run,” Sala insisted. “It’s the only thing that will make me feel better.”

“Fine, I’ll run,” Pelosi said, “but you’re going to get better.””

To Congress

“Mailers touting Pelosi’s support for gay rights were sent to any home where two unrelated men of similar age lived together.”

“She became the first daughter in history to succeed her father in Congress. In the ensuing decades, observers would reflexively attribute Pelosis electoral success to her father’s influence.

But she knew she had done it herself.”

“She hurried to the dais, nervous and unprepared. She paid tribute to San Francisco and the Burtons, to her family and constituents, to “making government work for people.” Her district, she said, prided itself on “its leadership for peace, for environmental protection, for equal rights, for rights of individual freedom.” And she added: “Now we must take the leadership, of course, in the crisis of AIDS.”

In later mythmaking, this maiden speech would be condensed into a brazen declaration: “My name is Nancy Pelosi, and I’m here to fight AIDS!” But in its real, extended form, the speech was bold enough. Pleased with herself, she went to take her seat, only to be greeted by fellow members’ horrified stares. Had she really just said that out loud? Didn’t she know how it would look? Did she really want to associate the Democratic Party, and her own political brand, with those people?

But Pelosi had spent her campaign insisting she could advocate for San Francisco’s gay community, and she was determined to prove it. It was a matter of politics, of course — both the crass matter of getting reelected and the democratic duty to speak for one’s district. (One of her favorite aphorisms, repeated to newer colleagues to this day: “Representative is not just your title. It’s your job description.”) But her commitment to the issue was also a function of the firm and unvarying moral clarity that had always been part of her makeup. The Catholic Church’s leadership might not share her view of gay rights, but she believed she knew better. “I was brought up to believe that all people are God’s children, and the last time I checked, that included gay people,” she told an interviewer.”

“Liberated from the family responsibilities that had consumed her for so long, she seemed to do nothing but work, with a maniacal level of energy. Behind her back, they called her “the Energizer Bunny.” Her curiosity about every policy issue was intense and earnest. She was determined to know everything about everything, to always be the most prepared, so that no one would ever be able to say she was in over her head. Pelosi would get up at 5:30 a.m., check the stoop for newspapers and then get frustrated when they weren’t there yet.

Still, some worldly matters weren’t her strong suit. She was always losing things — a purse, a wallet, a piece of expensive jewelry. Determined to respond personally to all her mail from constituents, she would stuff it in her carry-on bag to work on during one of her cross-country flights, but she never seemed to get through it all; some letters traveled with her for thousands and thousands of miles. In Washington, many of her colleagues didn’t have a car, so she would give them rides, but they quickly learned they were taking their lives in their hands. Pelosi would be talking in the car, engaged in conversation, looking back at her passengers, as they yelled, “Keep your eyes on the road!” “But we always managed to get there,” recalled then-Congressman Leon Panetta, “sometimes at great risk.””

“At the time Pelosi entered, Democrats had held it for thirty-two consecutive years, and fifty of the last fifty-four years; Republicans had held it for just two terms since 1933. It was a majority so large and durable that Washington insiders regarded it as unchangeable, like the law of gravity. Presidents came and went, but in the House the Democrats reigned.”

“Progressive accomplishments such as civil rights drew support from a cross-partisan group of Republican and Democratic racial liberals, even as many in LB’s own party opposed his signature legislation. The “bipartisanship” so many Americans now pine for wasn’t a function of politicians of different ideologies working together so much as it was politicians of similar ideologies belonging to different political parties. Indeed, in the 1960s, some reformers complained that there wasn’t enough partisanship in Congress, depriving voters of clear policy choices.”

“It didn’t happen overnight. An oft-repeated quote has LBJ, upon signing the Civil Rights Act, muttering prophetically to an aide that the Democrats had just signed away the South for a generation or more. But the evidence he actually said that is slim, and in fact the process was much more gradual. It would be many decades after LB] left office before the GOP succeeded in wiping out Democrats’ dominance in the South. Nixon in the 1970s and Reagan in the ‘80s succeeded in using racial provocation to swing some Deep South states, but the majority of white southerners were still Democrats.

The Democratic Party, then, was an odd, disjointed mix of conservative southern Democrats and liberal northerners, along with, thanks to the Voting Rights Act, an increasing number of African American representatives from majority-minority districts. In Pelosi’s father’s day, liberal urban Catholics like Thomas D’Alesandro served alongside conservative southerners like Edward Hébert of New Orleans, who opposed desegregation and signed the Southern Manifesto.”

“She might not have had any previous political experience, but thanks to her fundraising, activism and party work, she had some unusual resources at her disposal. She estimated that by the time she arrived in Washington, she knew two hundred representatives and senators personally, a bigger network than many members who’d been there for years. And, in many cases, they owed her a favor. Right away, this network of contacts came in handy: some AIDS-related legislation was stalled because, even though it had broad support, it was up to the powerful committee chairmen to decide whether to bring it to the floor to a vote. In a move that would be unthinkable for any other freshman, Pelosi called the eighty-eight-year-old chairman of the Rules Committee, Claude Pepper, who’d served alongside her father in the 1930s. He did as she asked and put two AIDS bills on the floor.

Despite her father’s exhortation, Pelosi had not immediately gotten a seat on the Appropriations Committee — freshmen almost never did — and the first time she sought one, in a caucus election in 1990, she was defeated. The second time, a few months later, she won, and immediately set to work finding little pieces of the federal budget she could carve out for the purpose of helping AIDS victims. In her first major legislative victory, she created a program to provide housing assistance to victims of AIDS. She helped fund research into an AIDS vaccine and worked to extend Medicaid to AIDS victims; she introduced provisions to make existing federal programs available, such as an amendment to the 1985 Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (COBRA) that would let AIDS patients maintain insurance coverage and an adjustment to Social Security disability and survivor benefits.”

“In 1986, the U.S. Surgeon General had issued a thirty-six-page report setting out the facts, including what did and did not constitute safe sex, and that people could not contract the virus by sitting on toilets, hugging or being sneezed on. Pelosi had the report, in its entirety, sent to every resident of her district. The following year, the Reagan administration took a page from her playbook and ordered the report be mailed to more than one hundred million households.

Pelosi and her congressional allies’ biggest legislative effort on AIDS was a bill named for Ryan White, a teenager in Indiana who had been expelled from his public high school after being diagnosed with the disease. A hemophiliac, Ryan was just thirteen when he fell ill after a blood transfusion. He was diagnosed with AIDS and given six months to live. Pelosi coauthored the Ryan White Act to create a federal fund specifically dedicated to the medical care of AIDS patients, which was bankrupting families and governments. The administration of George H. W. Bush resisted on fiscal grounds. Pelosi proposed that instead of granting an entitlement directly to victims, the bill could make grants to states and cities dealing with the epidemic. Remarkably, after years of dogged effort, the legislation passed and was signed into law by the Republican president. Ryan surprised his doctors and lived for five years, dying just a few months before the law with his name on it was signed. To date, the law has distributed more than twenty billion dollars and provided services to more than half a million people.”

“Pat Schroeder, the pioneering Coloradan, authored the Family and Medical Leave Act that forced employers to grant unpaid leave to new parents and family caregivers — but when Bill Clinton signed her bill into law in 1993, it was with an all-male group of congressmen. (Quippy and indomitable, Schroeder once told the Pentagon officials testifying before her in a committee hearing that if they were women, they’d always be pregnant, because they never said no. Annoyed at Tip O’Neill’s persistent habit of introducing her by recounting her husband’s accomplishments, she once introduced the Speaker at a DC event as “Millie O’Neill’s husband” — he got the picture.)

The humiliations were constant. Once, when Pelosi’s friend Barbara Boxer, who represented a neighboring district — they were constantly being mistaken for each other — was speaking at a committee hearing, a colleague spoke next: “I want to associate myself with the remarks of the gentlelady from California,” he said, following the protocol for amplifying statements. Then he added, “As a matter of fact, I’d like to associate with the gentlelady.” Another member echoed the suggestive remark, and the two men chortled as Boxer, sitting right there, silently fumed. The men were always winking, cracking crass jokes, laughing at them. Many cheated on their wives back home with an everybody-does-it, what’s-the-problem-sweetheart brazenness. A prominent woman lobbyist recalls being asked, in the mid-1980s, to deliver a message to a couple of senators who were lunching at a restaurant, and being directed to a private room — where the two men were screwing their mistresses right out in the open. Behavior that would today be considered sexual harassment was rampant and unremarkable — the concept itself was a new one. It was the women’s job to know which of the men surrounding them were the grabbers, the gropers, the ones you didn’t get into an elevator with. In newspaper comics, the image of the boss chasing his secretary around the desk was still reliably good for a laugh.”

“The Presidio, a beautiful old Spanish fort was situated on acres of rolling green waterfront property. The oldest continually operating military installation in the United States, it had been an active army post since its acquisition from Mexico in 1846, serving as a military hospital and staging ground for the invasion of the Philippines and America’s Pacific operations in World War II.

San Franciscans regarded the fort as a local treasure and assumed it would always belong to the army. But in 1988, a commission looking to cut Pentagon spending recommended it for closure. It was costing the Defense Department seventy-four million dollars a year to maintain, and with the Cold War coming to a close, there were few threats to justify the expense. The federal government proposed selling the land for development, which would surely fetch a pretty penny — if the people of San Francisco ever allowed it. By one estimate, the real estate was worth four billion dollars, the equivalent of more than eight billion in today’s dollars. Local environmentalists said they’d never stand for seeing their beloved jewel auctioned off, and wanted to turn it into a national park. But Democrats in Congress worried that it would be so expensive to operate that there wouldn’t be enough room in the budget for the rest of the National Park Service. And as pretty as it might be, was it really national park material? As one Republican congressman noted drily, “It’s not Yosemite.”

Pelosi and her colleague Barbara Boxer assigned their staffs to research the issue, and they made a stunning discovery. After he lost his bid for majority leader, Phil Burton had taken as a kind of consolation prize the chairmanship of the Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, and threw himself into its work creating and overseeing national parks. One of them was the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. And true to Burton’s modus operandi of passing baroquely complex bills studded with sneaky hidden provisions to benefit progressive causes, he had tucked a clause into the bill mandating that if the Pentagon ever relinquished control of the Presidio, it would become part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

The two women considered their discovery a legislative coup. Now, they thought, there would be no choice but to turn the installation into a park.”

“When Murtha would come to her office, she’d put on her desk a little doll made of coal that her father had saved from his work with the coal miners’ union. When Pelosi and Boxer told Murtha about the Presidio, he taught them a lesson in practical politics. Sure, he knew about the Burton provision. But using it to convert the site into a park immediately was “completely amateurish,” he said, and would only put it at risk. The Park Service would then be on the hook for cleaning up the former military site and making it suitable for civilian use, which Murtha knew from experience could be exceedingly pricey. Make the Pentagon keep it, he told the women, and the cash-rich Defense Department would have to pay for the cleanup instead of the National Park Service. So, instead of fighting to turn the base over, Pelosi and Boxer began campaigning against closing it.

They mounted a full-court press, and for several years they succeeded. By the time Congress voted to go ahead with the closure, the Pentagon had already committed more than $65 million to cleaning up the Presidio.

Once the base was ordered closed, Pelosi had another fight on her hands. Selling off the Presidio was intolerable, but it would be a tall order to ask the Park Service to shoulder its full maintenance cost, estimated at $45 million per year — an order of magnitude more than any other park, and more than the combined operating costs of Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. Pelosi embraced an idea to split the difference. The Presidio, she proposed, could be turned into a public-private partnership. Some parts, such as buildings and a golf course, could be leased to private operators, generating revenue that would help the Park Service run the rest as a public facility.

It was a complicated plan that pleased no one: not the environmentalists, outraged that their own congresswoman seemed to be selling out their precious local treasure; not conservatives, who saw an unworkable scheme that would leave taxpayers on the hook if, as they thought likely, things didn’t go as planned. Pelosi worked on the bill for five years before it finally passed the House in 1994 with mostly Democratic votes. But the Senate put off considering it, and then, in the 1994 midterm elections, Republicans won control of Congress. To keep the Presidio alive, Pelosi would have to get the bill through the House again in the new session. It had been hard enough to get it through a Democratic House; it was hard to imagine that Newt Gingrich’s conservative revolutionaries were ever going to go along. Many of Pelosis colleagues assumed she would give up.

Instead, she set about finding Republican allies. She enlisted California’s GOP governor Pete Wilson and Republicans in the California delegation to lobby other Republican lawmakers. Wealthy San Francisco Republicans who wanted to protect the site were assigned to call their well-placed friends in Washington. Pelosi made a spreadsheet and scoured her network for potential avenues. Noticing that Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska had been a banker before entering politics, she got a banker friend to call a banker he knew in Alaska to call Murkowski. She invited every Republican on the House committee overseeing parks to come to San Francisco and personally led them on tours of the site, appealing to their skepticism of big government by arguing that San Francisco’s cumbersome regulatory process would make it impossible to sell off the site, and that what she was proposing was really the free-market alternative to liberals desire for government to manage the whole thing.

This did not go unnoticed by the liberals in her district: community activists, as well as the mayor and board of supervisors, pushed her to designate the Presidio for public housing rather than private profit and accused her of working to “privatize” a civic landmark. The Bay Guardian, the city’s liberal alt-weekly, denounced her for it and refused to endorse her ever again. To this day, the paper endorses Pelosi’s opponent in every election. (And indeed, the housing crisis now plaguing San Francisco might not be so intense if the Presidio was affordable housing, instead of a pretty place that is mostly enjoyed by rich people.)

Pelosi, however, believed her solution was the most workable compromise. She offered concessions to the GOP, such as giving business more of a voice on the Presidio board. In another clever move that would become a signature tactic, she offered what seemed like a major concession to get the bill over the line: if the Presidio didn’t pay for itself within fifteen years, it would be designated as “surplus” and revert to the possession of the General Services Administration. Pelosi and her staff acted as if this were a truly painful provision for them.

But in fact the “concession” was a phony one. Pelosis chief of staff had traced the Presidio’s provenance all the way back to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which had deeded the land to the United States from Mexico. According to the treaty, the land belonged to the Department of the Interior, not the GSA — leaving it to the government to administer at taxpayer expense, the very outcome the Republicans wanted to avoid. But they didn’t tell the Republicans that, and they got a counter-concession in return.

All the wheeling and dealing finally bore fruit. The bill passed the Republican House in late 1995 and the Senate a year later. President Clinton signed it into law. As one writer marveled, Pelosi “had managed to get a Republican Congress to create the nation’s most expensive national park in, of all places, Democratic San Francisco.” As for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the discovery was never put to the test: the Presidio Trust was self-sufficient ahead of the deadline.”

“With foreign policy generally the domain of the White House, it wasn’t clear what Congress could do about the outrage unfolding overseas. Pelosi’s chief of staff, Judy Lemons, an old congressional hand, was flummoxed, but she locked the staff in a room and told them they wouldn’t be getting out until they came up with something — anything.

Tens of thousands of Chinese students, they discovered, were living and studying in the United States on visas that were set to expire when they finished their studies, forcing them to return to China, where they could be persecuted. Many of the students had attended pro-democracy demonstrations in the United States, where Chinese spies had photographed them in order to send threatening letters to their families back home.

There were thousands of such students in San Francisco alone; Pelosi’s district had one of the largest concentrations of Asian Americans in the country. Pelosi, her staff suggested, could propose legislation to waive the visa requirements, which would allow the students to stay.

It wasn’t much, but it was something. Pelosi started working on her colleagues. Many were skeptical. Then she heard that a colleague had an intern who had a friend who had been in Tiananmen with a camera hidden in the basket of his bicycle and had smuggled the film out in an empty tear gas canister. The photos were wrenching and bloody. Pelosi marched down the hall with them to the office of the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. “This is why I want to do something,” she said. He agreed to help, and by the end of June, her bill to waive student visa requirements had more than one hundred cosponsors.

The fight for human rights in China would establish the new congresswoman as a force to be reckoned with, rather than just another voice in the crowd. In the course of her crusade, she would put herself in physical danger and take on two presidents, including one from her own party, as well as Big Business interests, including some of her own donors and constituents.”

“Jerry Brown had dropped out of politics for a few years to study Buddhism in Japan and work with Mother Teresa in India.”

“Shortly before the deadline for most-favored-nation-status renewal, Clinton called Pelosi. They talked for nearly an hour as he broke the bad news: not only was he going to renew the status this time, but he was going to stop making it conditional on human rights altogether. He hoped she could find a way to swallow her objections and support her party’s president.

If Clinton thought Pelosi would take this defeat quietly, he was mistaken. More than betrayed, she felt humiliated for having trusted him. Not long after hanging up the phone, she publicly accused Clinton of “coddling dictators,” just as Clinton had once accused Bush of doing. The president, she told a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, was selling out human rights for lucre. “I cannot say one thing about George Bush’s policy and another about Bill Clinton’s when they are the same policy,” she said.

Though she continued to support Clinton, Pelosi never trusted him after that. The incident created a longtime rift between Pelosi and both Bill and Hillary Clinton.”

“Clinton granted China permanent trade status in 2000, paving the way for its ascension to the World Trade Organization in 2001. “I predict,” Pelosi said at the time, “that the trade deficit will soar, the human rights violations will intensify, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction will continue uncurbed. The only lever we had was free trade.”

China’s entry into the WTO triggered a period that economists dubbed “China shock.” Millions of American manufacturing jobs disappeared as American companies outsourced their operations abroad to take advantage of cheap Chinese labor. Economists mostly believe that the American economy benefited overall in the long run. But decades later, the massive Chinese trade deficit, China’s unfair trade practices and a Rust Belt landscape dotted with hollowed-out towns and empty former factory buildings would be a major engine of Donald Trump’s political rise. And the Chinese people continued to suffer under the thumb of their repressive government.

Pelosi never gave up the fight. In 2019, she repeatedly spoke out against Beijing’s brutal repression of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, even as the National Basketball Association and other multinational corporations were cowed into silence.”

“Most Republicans in Congress seemed to accept their status as a permanent minority. They were content to temper the Democrats’ liberal impulses in minor ways. If Democrats proposed a hundred billion dollars in new spending, Republicans would meekly object to a frivolous program here and there (or, worse, put their hand out for some of the spoils for their own districts), get the Democrats to agree to “only” ninety billion dollars and call it victory. The idea that the Democrats were dangerous and needed to be stopped, that the fundamental direction of American policy was wrong — this did not seem to have occurred to the lily-livered dopes.

Gingrich the visionary — sarcastic, grandiose and inveterately competitive — dared to dream.”

“The vote to impeach Clinton in December 1998 was the last one Newt Gingrich would ever cast as a congressman. His colleagues blamed him for the dismal election result and worried that his own extramarital affair with a young congressional staffer might make them come across as hypocrites, given the party’s moralistic crusade against Clinton. Gingrich stepped down as Speaker and resigned from Congress.”

“Every Wednesday, Pelosi met with her campaign team for a catered lunch in her office. To make sure people came, she ordered the best sandwiches in Washington.”

The 21st Century

“DeLay said he knew that, but was it really such a big deal? The new chairman wanted a slightly smaller committee, and both parties would be giving up a seat. With two fewer total seats on the panel, Democrats would actually have a slightly larger proportion. Couldn’t she find a way not to be difficult about this one little thing?

Pelosi chose her words carefully and spoke them slowly into the phone. “Life on this planet as you know it will not be the same if you persist in this notion,” she said.”

“If she thought a press release drafted by her staff gave her too much credit, she would send it back insisting that they change “I” to “we” and pay tribute to others’ contributions, no matter how minuscule.

It was the single biggest key to her success. After so many years spent managing the emotions of toddlers, teenagers and politicians, the three neediest and most egotistical types of people in existence, she had honed her instinctive grasp of human motivation to a very fine point. And if there was one thing she had learned — the sort of thing that seems obvious, that everyone knows in theory, but that the majority of people are too needy or self-centered to put into practice with any consistency — it was that people love to be praised and love to be thanked, and no one ever complained about getting too much of either.”

“Not a single American newsmagazine featured her on the cover — not Time (which had made Newt Gingrich the Man of the Year in 1995), not Newsweek, not U.S. News. Feminism was out of fashion, and the culture wasn’t ready to appreciate the complexity of a woman who was both devoted to her family and a hard-charging, ruthless pol.”

“Pelosi hated how the House smelled, the air thick with smoke, the marble hallways musty with the scent of cigarettes. It was her House now, and things were going to be different. By 2006, most big cities and an increasing number of states had banned smoking in public areas and restaurants. Pelosi issued a rule eliminating smoking in the House’s halls and meeting rooms, though it was still up to members whether to allow it in their offices.”

“The smoking ban was a neat symbol of her rise to power: Pelosi had quite literally eliminated the smoke-filled rooms where men had been making decisions for so long. Her House would be neat, tidy, under control.”

“The debate now was between a president intolerant of criticism and a marine with his heart on his sleeve — not a bunch of antiwar activists or liberals from San Francisco. It would be hard to overstate the impact of Murtha’s announcement. One analyst later dubbed it the “Murthquake,” and antiwar activists credited Murtha with a seismic shift in the public debate. With his gravitas and conviction, he had taken something experts and liberals increasingly believed and given it the searing power of truth.

But where was Pelosi? She remained silent. In the days that followed, antiwar bloggers attacked her and other Democratic leaders for seemingly leaving the war hero out on a limb.

Pelosi let them criticize her even though she knew the truth: she and Murtha had orchestrated the whole thing, and agreed that it had to look like a one-man crusade. In fact, she had been in on the idea all along.”

“The reasons started with personal relationships. Not only did she know every one of her members by name — a difficult enough feat in a 435-member body that turns over every two years — but she knew their history, their district, their ideology, their spouse and kids and parents. If she found out your wife was having surgery or you were going through a divorce, she’d call repeatedly to check in. Orchids from her favorite DC florist would appear, for thanks or congratulations or sympathy, before you thought you’d even told anyone what was happening. The most powerful woman in America somehow had time to show up for a child’s school play or a parent’s memorial service. If your mother died, you got a handwritten condolence note along with a poem written long ago by Pelosi’s own mother.”

“She always had time to listen. Members referred to the endless meetings with Pelosi as therapy or prayer sessions: she knew that sometimes all people needed to work through a decision was to feel that they’d been heard, and she would take as long as it took to make that happen. Sometimes caucus meetings dragged on for hours as she insisted everyone get a turn to speak. Others were free to leave, but she stayed until the end. Previous Speakers were often remote figures: some members worked under Tip O’Neill for years without ever getting a private audience with him. But Pelosi held meeting after meeting after meeting. She never went into a discussion without a plan for how she hoped it would end, but she was open to persuasion and better ideas and would sometimes change course as a result.”

“In his speech, Obama read from a letter Kennedy had written before his death. In it, Kennedy wrote that health care was “above all, a moral issue.” As Obama made an impassioned case for urgency, Democratic lawmakers’ hearts stirred — here was that old Barack Obama magic that they’d missed in all the haggling over public options and cost curves. Obama confronted the myths being spread about the bill, promising that it contained no death panels, would not pay for abortion coverage and would not cover illegal immigrants.

Suddenly the president was interrupted by a shout from the audience: “You lie!” It was Joe Wilson, a Republican congressman from South Carolina. To Pelosi, who sat behind the president and seemed to glare at the assembled Republicans as he spoke, the tableau was a perfect illustration: the eloquent, high-minded African American president, his lofty ideals crashing headlong into the irrational anger of a white southerner who preferred his emotions to the facts. (After the speech, Wilson’s cell phone rang. It was his wife. Who, she wanted to know, was “that nut” who had shouted at the president?)”

“On a chilly morning in February, immigration protesters flooded the Capitol. They packed the marble rotunda outside Pelosis office and draped an enormous banner from the balcony above. The banner featured the face of a young Latina woman and the words “DREAM ACT NOW.” Frustrated at her inability to help them, Pelosi decided she could at least show them they weren’t forgotten. In her car on the way to work that morning, she called her staff and told them to send out an all-member request for Dreamers’ stories.

At 10 a.m., she took the House floor, wearing a blue shirt under a cream-colored pantsuit and her usual four-inch heels. Lashing out at the Speaker’s refusal to put immigration legislation on the floor, Pelosi said, “Why should we in the House be treated in such a humiliating way?” She wasn’t quite sure, as she began, how long she would continue to speak. Under the House rules, top party leaders can talk as long as they want — as long as they don’t sit down or take a break, even to go to the bathroom.

“We have a moral responsibility to act now to protect Dreamers, who are the pride of our nation and are American in every way, except on paper,” she said. And then she began telling their stories, interspersed with Bible verses. The nine-year-old from South Korea. The five-year-old from Mexico. The thirteen-year-old from Brazil. She read their names and American hometowns into the Congressional Record, one by one. As the hours passed, her voice grew hoarse, but she kept going.

The cable networks and Twitter realized what was happening and tuned in. More stories flooded in from across the country; Pelosi’s staff rushed to print them out and ferry them to her so she could keep going. At one point she asked for a rosary, and her friend Rosa De-Lauro passed her one. The speech resembled a Senate filibuster — except that in the Senate, the filibuster can be handed off between senators, allowing the main speaker to take breaks as colleagues fill in. Pelosi was on her feet speaking, alone, the entire time.

When she finally sat back down, to a round of applause from her colleagues, it was 6:11 p.m., eight hours after she had begun. Asked if anything like that had ever been done before, the nearest precedent the House historian could find was a five-hour speech against a tariff proposal delivered by Representative Champ Clark of Missouri in 1909. Pelosi’s appeared to be the longest continuous speech in the history of the House.”

“Pelosi had courted Ocasio-Cortez early, bonding with the idealistic young politician over a July lunch in San Francisco, where she insisted that her heart was with the progressives, even if she couldn’t always give them everything they wanted.

A week after the election, AOC, as she’d become known, joined a group of environmental protesters who staged a sit-in at Pelosi’s office to demand climate ac-tion. But the confrontation quickly turned into a lovefest: Pelosi declared that she found the activists inspiring, told the police to leave them alone and affirmed her plan to reinstate the special climate committee that the GOP had eliminated. It was a canny move that defused the idea of a rift with the left. AOC praised Pelosi’s commitment to grassroots organizing, and before long she announced her support for Pelosi as Speaker, noting that any alternative was likely to be less progressive, not more.”