The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power by Susan Page

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power by Susan Page https://susanpagedc.com/ The definitive biography of Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful woman in American political history, written by New York Times bestselling author and USA Today Washington bureau chief Susan Page. Featuring more than 150 exclusive interviews with those who know her best—and a series of in-depth, news-making interviews with Pelosi herself—MADAM SPEAKER is unprecedented in the scope of its exploration of Nancy Pelosi’s remarkable life and of her indelible impact on American politics. Before she was Nancy Pelosi, she was Nancy D’Alesandro. Her father was a big-city mayor and her mother his political organizer; when she encour­aged her young daughter to become a nun, Nancy told her mother that being a priest sounded more appealing. She didn’t begin running for office until she was forty-six years old, her five children mostly out of the nest. With that, she found her calling. Nancy Pelosi has lived on the cutting edge of the revolution in both women’s roles and in the nation’s movement to a fiercer and more polarized politics. She has established herself as a crucial friend or for­midable foe to U.S. presidents, a master legislator, and an indefatigable political warrior. She took on the Democratic establishment to become the first female Speaker of the House, then battled rivals on the left and right to consolidate her power. She has soared in the sharp-edged inside game of politics, though she has struggled in the outside game—demonized by conservatives, second-guessed by progressives, and routinely underestimated by nearly everyone. All of this was preparation for the most historic challenge she would ever face, at a time she had been privately planning her retirement. When Donald Trump was elected to the White House, Nancy Pelosi became the Democratic counterpart best able to stand up to the disruptive president and to get under his skin. The battle between Trump and Pelosi, chronicled in this book with behind-the-scenes details and revelations, stands to be the titanic political struggle of our time. Susan Page is the Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY, where she writes about the White House and national politics. She is the author of Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Arc of Power, a biography being published in April 2021. She also wrote The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, a New York Times bestseller published in 2019. Susan has covered eleven presidential elections, from 1980 through 2020, and is now covering her seventh presidential administration. She has interviewed the past ten presidents, from Richard Nixon through Joe Biden, and reported from six continents and dozens of foreign countries. As a reporter -- first for Newsday and then for USA TODAY -- she drove to Three Mile Island hours after the nuclear mishap was reported, traveled across Southeast Asia to chronicle the exodus of Vietnamese ‘boat people,’ and interviewed physicist Stephen Hawking through his computerized ‘voice.’ She has won every journalism award given specifically for coverage of the White House, including the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency, the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage, and the Merriman Smith Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure. She has served as president of the White House Correspondents Association and as president of the Gridiron Club, the oldest association of journalists in Washington. She was the moderator of the vice-presidential debate in 2020 between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. A native of Wichita, Kansas, she received a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University, where she was editor-in-chief of The Daily Northwestern. She received a master’s degree from Columbia University, where she was a Pulitzer Fellow. She is married to Carl Leubsdorf,

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're certainly appreciative that you tuned in today. Thanks for coming in for another podcast. Be sure to watch the video version. You're definitely going to watch it. This book just topped the New York Times bestseller list. It's Madam Speaker, Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power by Susan Page. We're going to get a chance to interview her today. To see this video interview, go to youtube.com,

Fortress Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, and take and see everything we're reviewing and reading over there. Go to all of our big groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, everywhere the Chris Voss Show is, and you can see the interview there and also get more details and order up the book. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com,

and their Micro-iDSD Signature. It's a top-of-the the range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones it has two brown burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and mqa files we're using in the studio right now i've loved my experience with it so far just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. Today, Susan Page is on the show. She is the Washington Bureau Chief of USA Today, where she writes about the White House and national politics. She is the author of Madam Speaker, Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power, a biography

of Nancy Pelosi published in April 2021. Her first book, The Matriarch, Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, published in 2019, was a New York Times bestseller as well. Susan has covered 11 presidential elections and is now covering her seventh White House administration. She has interviewed the past 10 presidents and reported from six continents and dozens of foreign countries. She has won every journalism award given specifically for the coverage of the presidency. And in 2020, she moderated the vice presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris. She frequently appears as an

analyst on TV and radio. Welcome to the show, Susan. How are you? I'm doing well, Chris. It's great to be with you today. Awesome sauce. And congratulations this morning. New York Times bestseller list. Yeah, I think that's kind of cool. So give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. I'm on Twitter at Susan Page and on Facebook at Susan Page USA Today. And my book is being sold every place books are sold. Amazon or your local bookstore, great to support local bookstores or Barnes and Noble or wherever you buy books.

There you go. There you go. What motivated you to write this book? What was it that said this is the book that I need to write next? You think of Barbara Bush and Nancy Pelosi as being pretty different people, and there are some big differences between them, but they both had the same appeal to me as people that work on biographies. One, I thought they were important, had an impact on our country. Secondly, I thought they were not fully understood, and I think underestimated in some ways. And thirdly, they were a little controversial.

Barbara was a little controversial. Nancy Pelosi, very controversial. And so those were the things that made me think this would be an interesting thing to explore. There you go. And so give us an arcing overview of the book, what it entails, what goes inside of it. I tried to do a 360 degree portrait of Nancy D'Alessandro Pelosi. So her grandparents immigrated from Italy. I hired a researcher in Rome to go to the villages that they left. I explored her remarkable childhood in Baltimore,

where she was born into political royalty. her father, the larger than life mayor of Baltimore. I went to San Francisco, where of course she got her own political roots. And I spent a lot of time talking to her. I ended up interviewing 150 people for this book. I had 10 interviews with Speaker Pelosi for this book. So I wanted to not be pro Pelosi or anti Pelosi. I wasn't arguing she was great or terrible. I was arguing she's been important. Is this important to you to do? These are two books about two women that have been just incredible influencers in politics and everything else. Was it important for you to do a second book on women and promote that? Or was it just this was somebody that you thought would be great for this story? So that's a great question,

because the second thing I said was somebody who's been underestimated. And I would be delighted to do a book about a man who's been underestimated. But I got to say, I found more women who fell into that category. And that was true for, I think, both of these women. Now, Nancy Pelosi, I think, underestimated a little less since the election of Donald Trump. And she emerged, of course, as the kind of the face of the Democratic opposition to President Trump. But through this long career where she's been really a remarkably consequential Speaker of the House, I think she has not always gotten the credit that she was due. What was your opinion last night? It was interesting. We had a seminal moment in

American history where for the first time we had two women and also women of multiracial background sitting behind Biden at a presidential address to Congress. What was your thoughts on that? I thought that was nice. Apart from what party they belong to, just the fact that our democracy is becoming a little bigger, a little more inclusive. I thought that was nice. So the thing I'm waiting for, Chris, is when the president speaking at the State of the Union, the joint said, we'll be female. We haven't had that yet. But I thought it was a nice tableau. I thought it was an encouraging thing for young women and for little girls to see. Yeah, it's a step in the right direction. I think hopefully we're making baby steps to the right thing. I certainly would like to see a female president. I think women have a whole lot more empathy and they care more about the future of stuff where a lot of us guys were just running around starting wars and stuff,

which is our thing. So as you said, though, with this interviewing Nancy Pelosi, this is pretty interesting. You got access to 10 different interviews with her. How did those interviews go? And I thought it was interesting. You got the contract for the deal, to my understanding, before you even knew if you were going to get interviews with her. How did that work out? So possibly a stupid thing to do. I'll let you touch that. But I signed the contract to do this book and to do the first book without talking to the subjects. And here was my, you can agree or disagree with my reasoning. My reasoning was I didn't want them to feel like they were giving me permission to do the book. I didn't want them to feel like they would have some say over what I covered in either book. And in fact, there were things in each book that they did not want me to include

that I included, but I wanted them to be works of journalism, not authorized biographies. Now that said, I had interviewed each of them over the years in covering politics. And I thought there was a good chance that they would give me, each of them would give me at least some interviews, but I went into the, I went into the, but I didn't have any deal. There was no arrangement. I go into the first interview with Speaker Pelosi and she offers me a dove bar. And of course she's a big chocoholic. So this is like a good sign that she's offered me a dove bar and she takes a dove bar. And I bite into this dove bar and the chocolate shell then shatters into little shards all over her carpet, all of her pristine off-white carpet in the speaker's office. So there I am

trying to make a good impression, desperately picking up little melting pieces of chocolate. And I thought she is never going to let me back in her office. Now she did 10 interviews and all, but she never again served food. I thought that was a great story too when I heard it, because I've seen her, I've seen that they made a big deal of it. So they made it into a thing, but I saw her open her fridge drawer once and she loves chocolate and all that stuff. So as you sat down with her and made the choices to lay out this book, what sort of aspect, like when I sit and interview people, I lay down a guide rule of, okay, how do I want to do this interview and stuff? What was your

parameters that you sat down and said, how do I want to do this book and lay this out for the reader? So in the first interview, I wanted her to understand that it was going to be a serious book. It was going to be fair-minded. It wasn't going to be either an advertisement for or an attack on her. And so in that first interview, it was pretty general stuff about how she was operating as speaker. And then in future interviews, I would give her staff a heads up saying, I really want to talk at this interview about her mother and father. Or I really want to talk in this interview about her experiences as the mother of five children. Because this was 12 things were happening that was every day is a newsmaking day for Nancy Pelosi.

And I wanted her to just have some. Not to get whiplash when she comes in after some big showdown with president Trump. And I say, tell me about your mom. Yeah, it's definitely him. It's been an interesting five years.

That's for sure. Especially for her, but then also just an extraordinary sort of response that she's had to, I don't think, let me ask you this. Do you think any Speaker of the House could have done better with dealing with Donald Trump over the last five years than she did? Another Speaker of the House would have done things differently. There's not just one approach, even to a president who is as disruptive as President Trump was. But I think that Democrats believe, even Democrats who weren't crazy about Nancy Pelosi staying in power, Democrats came to believe that she was just

the right person at the right time. That given the challenges that President Trump's election was going to pose to Democrats, that she had this incredible background of dealing with problems and people and the caucus that made her, it's like her whole life was training for this final showdown. And we, I guess we do think this is, we do think she's coming to the end of her, her career. I think this is probably her last term as speaker, probably her last term as a member of Congress. So there's a little bit of a valedictory quality, I think, to the things that she's doing now. And you lay this out in the book from her beginnings, from her childhood, from being born to being all the way through here and her different influences. Tell us about the

story you weave. You talk about her father and her family, et cetera, et cetera. What's interesting is when I was interviewing people in San Francisco who had known Nancy Pelosi for decades, some of them were unaware that she came from a political family in Baltimore because, of course, she has a different last name than her father. She took her husband's name when they got married. She had moved from one coast to the other, but she was born into what amounted to political royalty in Baltimore. The D'Alessandros of Baltimore were as prominent as the Kennedys were in Boston. Her father was a five-term congressman from Baltimore. He then became a three-term mayor. He ran for the Senate.

At one point, he was trying to run for governor. That didn't work out. But he was a big figure in Baltimore and in Democratic politics generally. He was close to FDR. He named his second son Franklin Delano Roosevelt D'Alessandro for a baby, getting a name like that, a mouthful. He knew Harry Truman. He called Harry Truman boss. He was mayor of Baltimore at a time. Baltimore was a loomed a little larger on the American scene than it does now. And at a time that big city mayors were really kingmakers in the Baltimore News Post from hours after her birth of her in her mother's arms in a hospital bed, surrounded by her five brothers and her father. Would it be fair to say she was born into a political sort of dynasty of some sort, or full awareness and proudness and the whole animal of politics? So her father, a prominent politician, her brother also became a mayor of Baltimore and her mother way ahead of her time, smart, restless, ambitious, entrepreneurial,

risk taker, love to bet, love to play the ponies at Pimlico. Sometimes got in debt to the bookies in little Italy and organized politics, did the political organizational job for her husband. So big Nancy D'Alessandro was also a force in Nancy Pelosi's life. And so do you think that she's more, does she have the aspects that you found in your book of more of the characteristics of her father or her mother? Is there a dominant? So I think here's my thesis. She was her mother. She was her mother's daughter until she was 47. She that is she was active in politics, but she never ran for office. She didn't think about running for office. She focused on raising her five children. She thought of herself as a fundraiser, an organizer, not as a candidate. When she was 47

years old, another woman, Sala Burton, a member of Congress from San Francisco who was dying, urged her to run for office. And she decided to run for that congressional seat. And at that point, she became her father's daughter, the person who was actually in office. So I think there was a kind of pivot there in middle age. And that was what's most interesting about Nancy Pelosi is she starts very late in life to get into politics or at least run for office. And then she has an enormous amount of children in a very short period of time. And of course, now she has a huge grandchildren family. Can you tell us a little bit about that? So she's got five kids. She has nine grandchildren with whom she is close. And

she did get a late start. A lot of members of Congress get elected as soon as they can find a district to run in. But she makes this point. She says that raising five children, and she had these five children in a span of six years and a week, That is a pretty rapid pace of building a family. You can imagine what that household must have been like. She says that managing that household with five kids was the best possible training to be Speaker of the House, because it's always chaos. You're trying to impose order on chaos. You've got all these people with grievances, some of them real and some of them imagined. You're constantly forming shifting alliances. You need to try to persuade either members of Congress or your children to do something they don't want to do and maybe persuade them it was

their idea in the first place. She says the skills that she learned as a mother are the skills she uses every day as Speaker of the House. That's awesome. And that's what I always assume, because we have five kids and all the grandchildren that That's awesome. And that's what I always assume because we have five kids and all the grandchildren that come from that. You definitely can learn to manage people. I've had people say, how are you so good with kids and stuff? And I'm like, I've had a lot of them. How do you feel that your book, or how do you think that your book shapes up around other Pelosi biographies? Is it different or shaped differently? Or how do you feel that you categorize within some of the other

competing biographies of her? There are a couple other biographies of Nancy Pelosi. None of them all have value. There was an early biography of her by Mark Sandelow, who was a San Francisco Chronicle reporter who covered her. And when she became speaker the first time in 2007, he wrote a biography of her that was really helpful to me, especially about her history in California politics. But my book is the first one that takes her up to present day. The book ends with January 6th. It is based on more interviews than I believe she has ever done with a reporter working on a biography of her. For Mark Sandalo, for whatever reason, she didn't give him any interviews for the book, although he had interviewed her in his job as covering her for the San Francisco Chronicle. So I think I have the benefit of a little bit of perspective that the other books do not have. But

you know what? The other authors might make a similar case. So you should read them all and decide for yourself. There you go. And then you have 150 interviews. So I thought it was interesting. You've got the 10 interviews with Pelosi, and then you've got 150 interviews of people or knower, and you've got that wonderful mix that you can mix together and present. Yeah i was i felt fortunate in the people who agreed to talk to me president obama i had an interview with him for the book newt gingrich who had been a long time foil of nancy pelosi i interviewed him he described he said that he disagreed with pelosi on policy but thought she was really skilled at their mutual craft. And he called her a fellow

pirate. Really? You know, and for Newt Gingrich, I think fellow pirate is probably intended as a compliment. Definitely. I was talking about your book with my big clubhouse app. I don't know if you've gotten on the clubhouse app yet, but we usually have a pretty big rooms in there. We have our little click that shows up every night in our club. And I was talking about your book and pulling my audience for questions for you and promoting your book, of course, as well, too. And I was reading down through the page for your book on the publisher, and I came to Newt Gingrich's name as like a review on the book. And I'm like, what am I seeing correctly? So that was quite surprising. I was like, that's something then. I wanted those. So those blurbs, I don't know if they sell books or not. I hope so. But I have a

blurb from Madeline Albright, who I interviewed for the book. She was very helpful. But I didn't think this is some Democratic case for Nancy Pelosi. So I also thought, let's get a Republican in there. Yeah, there you go. There you go. I like your approach to the book. It almost sounds like you try and give as fair as possible, but almost the conduit through your interviews and everything and the details. You're just trying to write a history that seems to be fairly unbiased. Is that kind of how you approached it? Yeah, I approach it like I approach my job at USA Today. And sometimes you do stories that have a positive tilt, and sometimes you do stories that have a negative tilt. But the important thing for me is to try to be three-dimensional.

None of us are all good or all bad. And what I wanted to look at was who is Nancy Pelosi and how has she managed to get so much power and hold on to it and wield it in a way very few Pauls have managed to do. She does have a lot of, that was some of the questions that I got last night was, how is she dealing with the AOC sort of area of her thing and managing that? And a lot of people feel that they push her around, but I think I corrected them and said, I don't think that's the case. I think Pelosi is an incredible manager. Yeah, there's definitely been some friction. Their relationship has been complicated. I think that members of the squad early on tried to push her around. And I think that they are more reluctant to do that now because Pelosi, there's a phrase that John Bresnahan, who is now a reporter for Punchbowl News, he was a longtime reporter, congressional reporter for Politico. He did a profile about 11 years ago for Politico about Pelosi. And he described her as an iron fist in a Gucci glove, an iron fist in a Gucci glove. And that is just about the perfect description of how Nancy Pelosi wields

power. She uses a Gucci glove when she can. She'll persuade you. She'll coach you along. If she needs to persuade you in a firmer way, she will pull out that iron fist. And I think that is a lesson that members of the squad have learned. Somebody asked last night the story about the finger, that similar moment in the thing. And somebody said, I'd like to know what all the men thought in the room. And I'm like, you can look at their faces. Anybody who's been schooled by their mom knows, has that face like, oh, wow. Okay. I don't know if you want to comment on that moment.

That was. Look at General Milley. He looks like he's praying. He's a general. He may be praying. Most of the other men are like looking at their shoes. And it seems to be a cabinet room full of only men and Pelosi. Actually, Liz Cheney is in the room.

It's just that she's obscured by the man sitting next to her. That was the last time that Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump ever had a conversation. October 2019. Think about that. They then go for a year and a couple months with him as president and the Speaker of the House. Never speak again. It's supposed to be a meeting about Syria. It became a conflict over impeachment.

She stood up and jabbed her finger at him, then led a Democratic walkout. Trump, as Pelosi was leaving, referred to her as a third-rate politician. He was speaking to Steny Hoyer, the Democratic majority leader. Steny Hoyer told me when I talked to him for the book that he didn't hear him say that, but that if he had heard him, he would have turned to the president and said, if she's a third-rate politician, I'm a fifth-rate politician, and you're not a politician at all. But here's something funny about that picture. Okay, so the only reason we have that picture is the White House immediately put it out because they thought it made Pelosi look unhinged.

And Pelosi immediately distributed it everywhere, made it her banner on her Twitter account. She used it in fundraising appeals because she thought it made it look like she was in charge. But here's a funny thing. In doing the book, I came across another picture of Pelosi doing the exact same gesture to Barack Obama. In the Oval Office, they're meeting, they're standing up face to face. She is jabbing her finger at him, right hand, identical look on her face and identical gesture. And he has reached forward and put his hand over her hand. And it is not entirely clear whether he's trying to calm her or trying to protect himself. Either way, I think every good son knows the mom finger. That's she's done. That's it. That's mom's

upset. Mom's not good. It's time to run for the hill there's another great moment and the story that you told that i had heard before about the small tearing that she was doing during the the address of donald trump and then of course what she finalizes in and that's and it's when i saw the harris and and her on the dais last night on the stage i was like thinking of that moment do you want to tell that story if you would i remember that night so clearly the 2020 state of the union what did you think when she stood up and tore up the speech i thought that i was in a dream state i thought that i was dreaming i fortunately i think i was watching it on on something where i could stop it and rewind it one of these web you know dvr things and i was, did I just walk? And I was kind of like half watching in my thing and it was the end.

And I'm like, let's see what happens here. And I watched it. And I was just like, it was surreal. I was like, wait, this is, I must be like sleep or something. This is not, this is not happening. And I rewinded and I'm like, Holy mother. And you can tell the vice president Penceence is is just pence was i don't see anything i can't see anything that is happening and afterwards i'd never seen anything like that i've been in washington 150 years i'd never seen anything like that and afterwards there were some pictures that that zoomed in on her speech text before she talked and it's

such all these little tears in the margin and there was all this speculation she she walked into that speech planning to do this it was all a strategy a theme she told me but i talked to her about this and in an interview and she said that's not what happened she said that what happened was she couldn't find a pen so she's sitting up there and trump come president trump comes in and hands her the speech text, which is customary at a State of the Union address. And she's speed reading it, scanning through it before he delivers it. And she says something, he says in the speech text that she thinks is not true.

And she wants to make like a little mark there so she can get back to this point later on and challenge it as not being true. And she can't find a pen. You're speaker of the house. You do not really carry your purse up with you to the dais for the State of the Union. There's a little drawer. There was a little drawer in front of her. She opens the drawer. It's empty. No pen. So she makes a little tear in the margin of the paper so she can find this thing that she thinks is not true. Then she finds a second thing and makes a second little tear. Then she finds a third thing. She makes a third little tear. And by the time she gets to the end of the speech, there are rips up and down the

margin of the speech text of things that she thinks aren't correct. And she told me that she hadn't decided what to do about it. And then the president honored Rush Limbaugh, who, as you remember, was up in the first lady's box. So that kind of steamed the Democrats. They see Rush Limbaugh as a pretty toxic and partisan figure. And by the end of the speech, Trump had managed to do something he almost never did, which was get under her skin in public. And she said she decided that if he was going to shred the truth, she would shred his speech. And she stood up and she it was too thick to tear in half all at once. She divided into four sections, tore each of them in half, threw the paper down on the desk. As Mike Trump is in front of her basking in applause from the Republicans in the hall,

Mike Pence is next to her applauding, pretending I can see nothing. That has to go down as one of the greatest scenes ever in American history. Like hopefully 200 years from now, they're playing. It was extraordinary. I just sat there and I just went, this can't be happening. This is surreal. And I kept replaying it. And I was talking to people online. I'm like, did you, did I just, am I crazy? Did I just see what I saw? But yeah, it was, it was quite the statement, if you will. And Democrats, I think we're a little divided about Democrats generally march behind Nancy Pelosi wherever she wants to lead them when the issue is Donald Trump. And some of them thought that was a good thing to do to show that she didn't respect his speech. Other Democrats thought it was, it went too far, that it was disrespectful, not of Donald Trump so much as of the president who is there giving a big speech. So there was, it was one of

the few occasions in which there were some Democrats who had second, were second guessing Nancy Pelosi. Wow. As you write the book, what, was there any stories or any things that you found that surprised you and are going to really surprise readers when they buy the book and read it? The most surprising thing to me was her mom, both how interesting and complicated her mom was, what kind of training her mother provided. Her mother kept something called the favor file. And you don't need to ask me what the favor file is because it is exactly what it sounds like it is it is a big file of the record of favors that the dallas andros did for voters for constituents for people in their neighborhood big nancy would sit at a table a big table in their in their front room in their house in Little Italy, the house they moved into when Tommy D'Alessandro and she had been married.

And constituents would actually line up, sometimes spilling out into the sidewalk to come and say, I have a housing problem or my son's in jail. Can you help? Or my mother-in-law has an immigration issue. Can you help? And Nancy D'Alessandro, first as the wife of a member of Congress, and then as the wife of the mayor, would often be able to intervene with city agencies or whatever to help people. And she would keep a card that said, so-and-so came in on this day, needed this help. This is what we did. And then later on, when they needed, when some future person needed help that this person might be able to help on, they would turn them to return the favor. And, of course, they did expect people who had gotten favors in the favor file to show up and vote on Election Day.

So it is politics 101. Just one other thing about big Nancy D'Alessandro. She was very entrepreneurial and she invented a machine to give women facials. She promised that this machine would make your skin very youthful and wrinkle-free. And she patented it. She went and found the, actually my researcher went and found the patent applications at the U.S. Patent Office. And one of my kids last year went online to eBay and found one of these facial machines, Nancy D'Alessandro's Beauty by Vapor. He bought it for me. He gave it to me for my birthday. I plug it in. It still works. You pour in some water or some precious oils and it creates steam. Now, I can't guarantee

that it gives you youthful, wrinkle-free skin, but I can tell you it was still operational. That's pretty awesome. And I imagine this has a huge impact on Nancy and how she's raised and understanding the issues of politics. It made her sophisticated about politics. It made her able to understand what motivates people, what motivates voters. And it made her fearless. Before Nancy Pelosi told me that before she was allowed to open the front door, she was too young to open the front door, but Nadal wasn't there. She was calling city agencies and trying to track down help for people for the favor file. That's brilliant. Out of all the 150 interviews you did, what interview do you think is going

to surprise people the most? Or what did you think was the most insightful? I'd ask you what your favorite was, but I don't want to make you enemies with all the other 149. Any thoughts on that? There were a couple of interviews that were really interesting and fun. There's one though that was surprising. I did a lot of research into the friction between Nancy Pelosi and the squad, between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other three progressive young women

who make up the squad. I did an interview with Ilhan Omar, who is the Congresswoman from Minneapolis, who is a member of the squad. And she had an experience with Nancy Pelosi that is an example of her Gucci glove rather than her iron fist she won the Democratic primary to for this congressional seat which was over a crowded field an impressive field wasn't clear who was going to win in a very Democratic district, the most Democratic district in Minnesota, perhaps the most Democratic district in the

upper Midwest. And so Nancy Pelosi, she doesn't know, Nancy Pelosi calls her the next morning, the morning after the primary and says, congratulations on winning the Democratic primary. I'll see you in Congress in November, because there was no question that she was going to win this election. And it was as though Nancy Pelosi was like checking off a box. Okay, Ilhan Omar, she's all set. And Ilhan Omar said, who was a refugee to this country, told Pelosi she had a big concern, which was she wears a hijab around her head, covers her hair.

And she noted that there was a house rule that prevented headgear from being worn on the floor of the house. And she was worried that she would not be allowed to go on the floor of the house to vote and to debate because of that. And Pelosi said, don't worry about it. I can take care of that for you. And Ilhan Omar continued to worry about that, which Nancy Pelosi understood. And she started to check in with her over and over again, just to reassure her to see how things were going. So much so that when Pelosi would call Ilhan Omar's campaign office, aides would say to Ilhan Omar,

Auntie Nancy is on the phone. And of course, when she was elected and came on the House floor, Pelosi indeed had arranged for that rule to be changed so that she didn't have any problem. Now, that's Ilhan Omar has a that's the depth of a relationship that is going to take those two members of Congress a long way, even when they have conflicts. I think if I recall rightly, correct me if I'm wrong, AOC, the first day of office, I think she holds a sit-in in Pelosi's office, which is an interesting way to start a relationship. Yeah. It's like signing a contract to do a biography without checking with the subject first. It's like pretty risky.

It was actually even before she'd been sworn in. It was a sit-in by the Sunrise Movement. She didn't really know Pelosi. She had, I think, talked to her a few times, but AOC, of course, had ousted Joe Crowley, a very senior member of Congress who was close to Pelosi in that Democratic primary for climate change. And the Congresswoman-elect comes and joins them, which is either very gutsy or pretty stupid. Poke the bear. There you go. In your book, one of the questions that my audience had for you was, do you cover anything between Mitch McConnell and Pelosi? So you do not want to go to Thanksgiving dinner that has both Mitch

McConnell and Nancy Pelosi at it because they do not get along. Here's a story that hadn't been told before that Pelosi herself didn't tell me this, but I found it in doing research for the book. Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies and Pelosi contacts McConnell and says, I would like to have Justice Ginsburg lie in state that is in the rotunda. That is a very great honor, accorded to very few. And Mitch McConnell says no. He says no, because as he noted, there's no precedent for a Supreme Court justice to lie in state. Pelosi's view was Ruth Bader Ginsburg was not just any Supreme Court justice. She had been an iconic figure, especially for women and girls. Mitch McConnell was not moved. So Nancy Pelosi had Ruth Bader Ginsburg lie in state on the House side. She couldn't use the

rotunda because that would require Mitch McConnell's permission. The rotunda is between the two houses of Congress. She had the ceremony in Statuary Hall, which is on the House side, not quite as grand a setting as the rotunda, invited both Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, to the ceremony. Neither of them attended. If you were a betting person, how much do you think that made a difference in the election with her passing away and how it was treated and stuff by politicians in that way that you talk about? How big of a difference do you think that brought out the vote? Or if you want to expand on, or if you want to speculate on that.

Chris, I'd be interested in your view on this. But my view is this election in 2020 was all about Donald Trump. And I'm not sure I think other things figured into impeachment. We thought impeachment was going to be the huge political issue. The issues that mattered were Donald Trump and especially Donald Trump's handling of the coronavirus pandemic. So I'm inclined to think other things were really on the margins. What do you think about that? If you were a betting person, and I bet you are, what would you say? I would definitely agree with you. It definitely came down to that. I did see a lot of women, though, who after she passed, and of course, the way it was treated, and of course, there was an interesting aspect to it where you couldn't go

to the funeral en masse. There probably would have been tons of people found to be for coronavirus. I think I saw a lot of my female co-friends and stuff that were saying, I'm standing up to make sure I vote for my daughter. Women's rights. This is an important thing. We need to make sure and stand up. I don't know how much of a difference that made on the scale and weighing it, but I thought it was definitely interesting.

So I guess we'll have to leave that to the historians to decide. I don't know how much of a difference that made on the scale and weighing it, but I thought it was definitely interesting. So I guess we'll have to leave that to the historians to decide, just smarter people than myself. So one question that my audience also have, is there any vulnerable moments of Nancy Pelosi that anyone's seen, you've seen, or maybe you document in the book where there's issues of, there's areas of vulnerability? Because we always see that political Nancy Pelosi and there's that mask there and stuff. Does anyone ever get behind the mask other than her immediate family, maybe? She's pretty disciplined. She's pretty guarded. She's very private. I asked Barbara Bush if I could see her high school transcripts and she laughed and said, sure, and wrote a letter saying, although I fear she will be disappointed, I give Susan Page permission to see my transcripts. I asked Pelosi if I could see her high school transcripts. And she acted like, she looked like I had asked to rifle through her closets.

And she said, no, she said, no, she's shy. She's a private person. So I think it is hard to see. I think it's hard to get through that guardedness and that discipline. I will tell you about an interview I did with her two weeks ago. Now, this was an interview not for the book, which was already printed at that point, but an interview for USA Today. And it was the first time I had a chance to talk with her about January 6th. And she said that she was up there presiding over the house when a security agent came up and said, you have to leave. And she didn't think it was something that was going to be very serious. She did not understand what was happening. In fact, so much so that she left

her phone up there thinking she was going to be right back. So they escort her out. Of course, at that point, it's clear that the security situation is becoming very perilous. They take her to a secure location where other congressional leaders are as well. They watch this on TV, as all of us were doing. I said to her, if the mob had caught you, would they have killed you? And she said, yes. She said that was what they had set out to do. And then she said, but they would have had a battle on their hands because I'm a street fighter. And then she, this 81 year old woman lifts up her foot pretty high,

shows me her four inch stilettos, which are at a signature and says, besides, I would have had these as a weapon. That tells you a little about how fearless Nancy Pelosi can be. That is a brilliant story, because I've always wondered what she thought. I'd like to get an honest opinion someday from Mike Pence if it's even possible to get one out of him. But, I mean, anyone with half a brain knew that was we really came close to just the most worst episode in American history probably ever at that moment as we get around it out is there

anything we haven't touched on your book that can encourage people to buy it and and everything else on top of what we've already covered any anything that we may have missed that you think is a great encouragement for readers? Let me just mention what I concluded after doing all this research, which is we know Nancy Pelosi is in the history books because she's the first woman to be speaker. She is, I think without question, the most powerful woman in the history of the American government. But the fact is, she would be in the history books if she were male because of some of the things that she did as Speaker. She was the one personally responsible for pushing through that unpopular bank bailout in 2008 that voters didn't like, but economists say probably prevented us from heading into another depression. And she is singularly responsible

for enactment of the Affordable Care Act, the big comprehensive version of that bill. Now, you may think some Americans think it's great. Some Americans don't like the Affordable Care Act, but we would not have it if Nancy Pelosi had not been Speaker of the House at the time it was being considered. And that is something that Barack Obama told me when I interviewed him for this book. There you go. Now, I noticed behind you, if you don't mind, there's four, five, I think, or more baseballs. Are you a collector of baseballs or is that? My husband is a lifetime baseball fanboy and we have he has baseball signed by Joe DiMaggio and Cal Ripken Jr. and Willie Mays. So we actually have he has about two dozen balls. You just can't see them all here. He's also you

may on the other side is a USA license plate game. I don't know if you can see that. He that is also just a family favorite. We play the license plate game quite a bit. I remember playing that when we do the drives across America. The ABC, is that it? Yeah. My husband in particular does it. We used to, before the coronavirus, just does it in D.C. because there's so many people from across the country here. We hope that can resume once we get past this pandemic.

Yeah, we're almost out of it. So give us your plugs where people can find out more about you and, of course, order up the book. One of my kids actually created a webpage for me, which is called susanpagedc.com. And I don't know where else they can go. They can follow me on Twitter. There you go.

Order the book up from your local booksellers and Amazon too. Take and get a copy of it. I've got a copy and it's wonderful and it's really insightful. You go into really great detail and everything else. Thank you so much, Susan, for being on the show. It's been an honor to have you and wonderful interview. And thank you very much. Chris, it has been an honor to be on your show. Thank you very much. And order of the book, Madam nancy pelosi and lessons of power by susan page i think you'll love it and you can check out her other book on barbara bush which i and barbara

bush was just such a wonderful person she's like the grandma to everybody at least that's how i saw her there you go to be honest thanks for tuning in go to youtube.com for chest chris foss all of our groups on facebook twitter youtube or and uh what is it instagram and linkedin thanks to all of you for tuning in, and we'll see you guys next time.