On the Capitol's most historic man cave, as on much else, Nancy Pelosi has left her mark.
In her final weeks as the nation's first female House speaker, a reflective Pelosi has been hosting small groups in a ground-floor hideaway tucked in a narrow hall off the beaten path, between two well-traveled corridors. It's the Board of Education room — the name is an insiders' joke dating to Prohibition, when "Cactus Jack" Garner, the House speaker from Texas, retreated there with favored buddies for after-hours drinks. Another Texas speaker, Sam Rayburn, renewed the practice through the 1940s and 1950s; Vice President Harry Truman, a former senator, was in the Board of Education room when he got word that President Franklin Roosevelt had died.
It was men only, of course, because that pretty much described Congress in those decades: Women were 1% to 3% of the membership.
