My first glimpse of the U.S. Capitol was in 1963 when my family took a trip to Washington so my older sister could visit colleges.
We paid a cab driver to give us a night tour of the monuments. I will never forget how they glowed, like stars resting on earth, the Capitol dome the most incandescent. I was in seventh grade.
I ended up attending college in Washington. Sometimes when I didn’t have class, I would spend a few hours inside the Capitol. It held a mysterious allure. I could rub my fingers along the sandstone walls in the Rotunda or walk across the same floor tiles that lawmakers did two centuries earlier. I felt the presence of ghosts around every corner, down every corridor.
When I returned to Washington in the 1990s as a reporter and was issued credentials that gave me access to much of that vast building, it was like being handed a free pass to all the rides at Disney World.
Like any reporter, I could approach a senator or House member and strike up a conversation, ask questions while scribbling furiously in my notebook. The two-dimensional cut-outs that appeared on TV and in the newspapers became flesh and blood. Many were thoughtful and courteous, respectful of where they worked and the responsibilities they chose to shoulder. Republicans and Democrats. For sure, some were just perfect haircuts reciting crafted, but empty soundbites, unscrupulous in their ambition and unworthy of the station they had reached. Look no further than Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, key promoters of President Trump’s persistent lie that the election results were a fraud. The siege of the Capitol was the result.
But never had I felt luckier, given admittance to this working monument to our highest ideals and a living, breathing history book.
Now it has been sullied. An army of conspiracists, racists, white nationalists, anti-Semites, Christian absolutists and believers in bizarre political theories (Democrats are Satanists and secret pedophiles) invaded the Capitol to subvert the government.
Five people died, including a Capitol police officer. Other law enforcement officers were beaten with pipes, bats and batons. Some of the insurgents had weapons and more were later found. In the time leading up to the riot, some of the would-be usurpers signaled their dark intentions on the Internet. Once inside, they hunted the halls for the vice president and top congressional leaders, carried zip-tie handcuffs and erected gallows near the Capitol grounds.
What could have resulted is almost too hard to even contemplate. But the cries among many since the attack that “this is not us” apparently are wrong. For some of us, clearly it is.
Once on a story about repairs to the Capitol dome in 1998, I ascended high up into the Rotunda with a member of the Architect of Capitol’s staff.
Before me was a nest of catwalks, trusses and girders. I felt like I was seeing the Great Oz behind the curtain, the nuts and bolts that concealed the outward grandeur.
“You see that dome used as a symbol for this country here and abroad,” William Allen, the Capitol’s architectural historian at the time told me. “You could show it to anybody on the streets of London and Rome. It’s more than a parochial symbol.”
I looked down from my perch on the tourists below as they wandered among the paintings, sculptures and statuary. Who could ever have imagined that one day it would be filled with a violent, rag tag mob bent on preventing the certification of a legally elected winner of the presidential election, then a week later home to hundreds of armed troops from the National Guard. They were among the more than 20,000, M4s at the ready, deployed to the city in the event of another attack.
In the wake of the siege, the broken windows and damaged doors of the Capitol will be repaired. The stain of the feces and urine the insurgents left — and the blood — will be washed away. But no soap or disinfectant will be strong enough to wipe away the memory of one of the darkest days in our history, when a president, blatant in his ignorance of our history, dismissive of the Constitution and ruthless in his mendacity, incited a dangerous mob to storm the temple of our democracy.
Throughout his presidency, Trump has attacked our institutions, including Congress, its traditions and rules, and its authority as a co-equal branch. But this time, as the rioters scaled the walls, overran the police and stormed through the marbled corridors in search of blood, it was for real.
A stunned nation could only watch in disbelief.
During the Civil War, when the current Capitol dome was under construction, the cost raised criticism. But President Abraham Lincoln explained how necessary it was to continue the project.
“If the people see the Capitol going on,” he said, “it is a sign that we intend the union shall go on.”
At this perilous moment, Lincoln’s words ring like a call to arms. They speak to us from another age, like the Capitol dome itself. Built during a time of disunion, it has remained a symbol of our shared beliefs. Amid the darkness that descended over the Capitol Jan. 6, his words should echo louder than ever.
