New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Former Capitol police chief ’s horror story, and love story
Steven Sund doesn’t anticipate my question. I don’t expect his answer.
Sund is telling the audience at Ferguson Library Wednesday night about his perspective of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on “the People’s House,” aka, the U.S. Capitol. Sund may have had a better vantage point than anyone that day. As chief of the U.S. Capitol Police, he was guiding his officers’ showdown with President Donald Trump’s mob of supporters while pleading for assistance from other departments as well as the National Guard.
Sund is on a book tour for “Courage Under Fire: Under Siege and Outnumbered 58 to 1 on January 6.” He’s playing defense and offense with the book and tour. He explains his decisions that day, which were immediately questioned when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for his resignation, ending a distinguished 30-year career. He’s also calling for the overhaul of a failed system that kept soldiers in the National Guard cooling the heels of their combat boots through almost five hours of violence, even though they were within 2 miles. He was snared in red (white and blue) tape in the cradle of America.
He has an important story to tell, and as the moderator of the discussion, I try to stay out of his way. He chuckles that it makes my job easy. But part of my job is to bring something unexpected to the conversation.
So I try this. “We’ve talked here about presidents and generals and speakers and American heroes holding the fort,” I say. “But by the time I finished reading the book I felt the one person I wanted to meet was your wife.” The audience laughs. “She was like a silent hero through this,” I continue. “I’m hoping you can tell the audience about her and what it was like for you to relive this again. You had to relive this already (while testifying for more than six hours as part of Jan. 6 hearings), but then you sat down and wrote a book about it.” Then he surprises me. “(My wife is) here, there she is,” Sund responds.
He points to Maria Sund, sitting in the corner, framed by holiday lights rising from Bedford Street below us. “She’s been through everything with me. … But think of this. When you think of my story and the impact it had, there are 2,223 stories like that. This affected every civilian person on my staff. Not to mention the other 17 agencies that came out.”
He talks of her standing by his side at officers’ funerals. Of answering the phone to hear him say, “Honey, I’m going to be late coming home” as she hears shots in the background from gunmen trying to keep officers pinned down.
“She is absolutely my rock. But never, ever underestimate … the impact (being a cop) has on family and spouse. I’m lucky …”
We move on to questions from the audience. One woman, who says she works in health care, also surprises Sund by referring to the book as “an autopsy.”
It’s not a bad metaphor. The highlight of the book is Sund’s 87-page, minute-byminute account of the riot. I read those pages at 3 a.m., which made it all the more chilling. It turned the book into an American horror story. It’s the cameos from Sund’s wife and kids that bring the welcome balm of a love story.
Two years after the attack, neither Sund’s own investigation nor the Jan. 6 panel have provided all the answers. When I ask if there is one elusive truth he most wants revealed, he responds, “It would have to be with the intelligence … What happened? Why was the intelligence so badly missed?”
For one thing, he says a better warning from the agencies in charge of collecting intelligence would have swayed him to double the height of the fence that day to 8 feet.
As we wrap up, I mention that Ferguson Library, and the City of Stamford, took stands to protect democracy last week by declaring themselves as book sanctuaries. Given the setting, I ask Sund if he has any book recommendations. He mentions James M. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era,” which won a Pulitzer Prize after its publication in 1988.
“Anything with the Civil War,” replies the man who led officers who were turned into soldiers during a modern battle between two sides of America.
The first person to greet me when the event concludes is Maria Sund. I ask about other stops on the book tour and she holds up her phone to reveal another surprise. The tour will eventually take them to California, Seattle, Dallas and Las Vegas, but for East Coast stops, they travel by train. When they arrived at Union Station, about a mile and a half from Capitol Hill, they were greeted by some of Sund’s former officers carrying copies of the books for him to autograph.
“He was signing them on the backs of their motorcycles,” she says. “They were all lined up when we pulled up. It was crazy. … It says a lot.”
Throughout our conversation, Sund repeatedly summons the word that has grabbed him the most media attention in recent days: optics. He accuses Pelosi and her charges of blocking his efforts to summon the National Guard to the scene over a perceived fear of bad political optics.
America is all about optics, imagery and symbols, and that’s not always a good thing. In Sund’s case, the visuals reveal a man who no longer wears a badge or uniform. But sometimes a uniform is just laundry. And sometimes a shield can be forged by words. In his actions, Sund continues to strive to protect and serve his country.