Exclusive: Inside the room where Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence shared an emotional embrace in front of America’s leadership class

It lasted surprisingly long, roughly 20 seconds.

They gripped each other’s hands as they leaned in to whisper.

The former Vice President and former Speaker of the House, before each was awarded the inaugural Yale Patriot Public Service Award, paused to embrace each other.

When Nancy Pelosi walked into the room, more than halfway through the event, a hush fell over the crowd and all turned to look.

She worked her way through the front, shaking hands, sharing whispers and short side hugs with familiar faces; of which, it seemed, there were several in the crowd.

But most surprising of all was when she finally found her seat—next to former Vice President Mike Pence.

The two have sat side by side many times before, famously behind Trump during his 2020 State of the Union, when she ripped the President’s speech in half as Pence disparagingly watched.

The House Speaker Emerita—who is completing her final term after nearly four decades representing San Francisco—and the former vice president—who spent January 6, 2021, resisting his own president’s demand that he overturn a certified election—came together in Washington D.C. at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, hosted by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Lester Crown Professor in Management Practice and Senior Associate Dean at Yale School of Management.

We watched it happen from the floor as Fortune ‘s representatives at the closed-door gathering, whose off-the-record ground rules were lifted by everyone named in this article.

Whatever else may divide them, the two stood shoulder-to-shoulder as the inaugural recipients of the Yale Patriot Public Service Award for Executive Leadership, built on the idea that they had put the country ahead of their party and themselves.

It was “shocking, historic and emotional to all,” Sonnenfeld told Fortune of the unexpected embrace.

Pence later posted about the event on X.com.

Two awards, one thesis The award, inaugurated this year to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, went to Pelosi for “Legislative Leadership” and to Pence for “Executive Leadership.” Sonnenfeld, who has run the semiannual CEO Caucus for decades, designed the awards explicitly to honor “Americans of both parties who have devoted their lives to public service and rendered it with integrity, civility and devotion to country above party.” The presenter list was a bipartisan reunion in its own right.

Former Democratic House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt spoke forcefully about how Pence “put country over party, and more importantly, country over self.” He told the room, “Mike Pence is a patriot.