Dianne Feinstein / The Times 29.9.2023

 One November morning in 1978 Dianne Feinstein, then a member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors (city council), was telling reporters in City Hall that she would not be making a third bid to become mayor. A centrist in America’s counterculture capital, she had recently met a wealthy financier who would become her third husband, and had decided to quit politics.

As Feinstein spoke several shots rang out. A disgruntled former Supervisor named Dan White ran past her. She found Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected official, dead in his office, and a bullet hole in his wrist when she tried to feel his pulse. White had also killed George Moscone, the mayor.

Two hours later, remarkably composed though her clothes were still stained with Milk’s blood, Feinstein announced the deaths to a gaggle of journalists gathered in a corridor and identified White as the likely killer.

The double murder changed Feinstein’s life. Within a week she had been chosen to  replace Moscone, making her San Francisco’s first woman mayor. That platform helped her become California’s first female US Senator and the first woman to chair the Senate’s powerful Intelligence Committee. 

Over the subsequent three decades, despite losing two husbands to cancer, she went on to become a champion of gun control and abortion rights, a scourge of the CIA, and the longest-serving female senator in American history.

But her longevity ultimately proved her undoing. When first elected to a male-dominated Senate she was widely seen as a challenger to the male-dominated status quo, and a trailblazer for women. By the end of her career she had become the embodiment of a political establishment that had been overtaken by events. She believed in bipartisanship and consensus-building, but American politics had become deeply polarised and confrontational.

Towards the end of her life, with her mental powers clearly waning, she failed robustly to challenge the excesses of President Trump and his Republican supporters in the Senate, particularly on his nomination of hardline conservatives to the Supreme Court. Her signal achievements on gun controls and abortion rights were being rolled back. Once a role model for young Democrats, she came to be seen as an anachronism and an obstacle by progressives demanding a much stronger response to Trumpism.

Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein (born Dianne Emiel Goldman) was born in San Francisco in 1933, the oldest of three daughters of Leon Goldman, a surgeon whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland and who became the first Jewish professor at the University of California’s medical school.

Her mother, Betty, was the daughter of refugees from Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution and became a model. She and Goldman lived in San Francisco’s exclusive Pacific Heights neighbourhood and moved in rarified social circles, but in private she was prone to violent mood swings and abusive to her children.

Despite her Jewish ancestry Feinstein was educated at San Francisco’s elite Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, where she enjoyed the order and the rituals. She studied history at Stanford, graduating in 1955, and won a fellowship to the Coro Foundation which teaches leadership skills in public life.

In a rare departure from convention, she eloped with and married a lawyer named Jack Berman in 1956. They had a daughter, Katherine, who later became a judge in San Francisco, but the couple divorced three years later. In 1962 she married Bertram Feinstein, a neurosurgeon 19 years her senior.

In 1960 Feinstein was appointed to the California Women’s Parole Board by Pat Brown, the state governor, who was one of her father’s patients. For the next six years she determined sentences for women convicted of crimes of every sort including the provision of backstreet abortions in a state where abortion was still illegal.

In 1969, backed by rich friends and family and portrayed in the press as a “dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty”, she won a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. She threw herself into the job with the industry and attention to detail that would become her trademarks, and became the Board’s first female president. She twice ran for mayor, in 1971 and 1975, but lost both times. 

In 1976 the New World Liberation Front, a left-wing terrorist group, left a bomb on a window ledge outside Feinstein’s home, where her second husband was dying of colon cancer. It failed to explode only because the temperature fell sharply that night. The same group then shot out the windows of her beach house on Monterey Bay. Two years later she became mayor of San Francisco following another act of violence, the assassinations of Moscone and Milk.

Feinstein restored a sense of order to a city reeling from violence and beset by the onset of HIV/Aids within its sizeable gay community. During her nine years in charge she banned handguns, restored the city’s famous cable car system and hosted the 1984 Democratic National Convention. She was touted as a potential running mate for Walter Mondale, the Democrats’ presidential nominee in 1984, but in the end he opted for Geraldine Ferraro, a New York congresswoman who thus became the first woman to appear on a presidential ticket.

Feinstein also married her third husband, an investment banker and philanthropist named Richard Blum, and she would later become one of the wealthiest members of the US Senate with homes in Washington DC, San Francisco, the Colorado resort of Aspen and Hawaiii. Blum died of cancer in 2022.

In 1990 Feinstein ran for governor of California and lost to Pete Wilson, a Republican. The following year the Senate’s all-male Judiciary Committee approved Clarence Thomas’s nomination for the US Supreme Court despite allegations of sexual harassment levelled against him by Anita Hill. The year after that Feinstein rode a wave of outrage to win a seat in the US Senate, as did her fellow Californian, Barbara Boxer (making California the first state to elect two female senators), Washington state’s Patty Murray and Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. 

The number of female senators doubled in what was dubbed “the Year of the Woman”. Bill Clinton became President, and Joe Biden put Feinstein and Braun straight on to the Judiciary Committee, which he then chaired, in an effort to restore its battered reputation.

Feinstein enjoyed an early legislative triumph. Spurred by the killings of Moscone and Milk, she managed to have a ban on assault weapons enacted in 1994. When an opponent, Idaho’s Larry Craig, sought to patronise “the gentlelady from California”, she shot back: “I am quite familiar with firearms. I became mayor as a product of assassination and put a finger through a bullet hole trying to get a pulse. I was trained in the shooting of a firearm when I had terrorist attacks, with a bomb in my house when my husband was dying, when I had windows shot out. Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.”

The ban expired in 2004, since when the US has been plagued by mass shootings.

Feinstein’s greatest achievement was to expose the CIA’s secret programme of detaining and torturing suspected terrorists in the ‘War of Terror’ waged by President Geroge W.Bush following al-Qaeda’s attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001.

As chair of the Intelligence Committee from 2009 and 2014 she tenaciously pursued the truth despite fierce opposition from the CIA and, to a lesser extent, President Obama’s administration. In the end she managed to publish a damning report which, despite some redactions, exposed the full extent of the CIA’s brutality and its failure to elicit valuable intelligence. She called the torture and detentions “a stain on our values and our history”.

Feinstein was no left-wing radical, however. She was a notoriously hard taskmaster, demanding the highest standards from her staff. “I don’t get ulcers. I give them,” she liked to say.

From her earliest days in the Senate she showed unqualified respect for that institution’s arcane rules and traditions. She refused, for example, to support restrictions on the filibuster despite its use by opponents to thwart gun control legislation. She chaired the Senate Rules Committee from 2007 to 2009.

She was also a centrist who believed in bipartisanship and working with Republicans to seek consensus wherever possible. “The heart of political change is at the centre of the political spectrum,” she would say. She was socially liberal but hawkish on national security issues. She was a strong supporter of the military, of law and order, and of mass surveillance by the intelligence services to prevent terrorism. She labelled Edward Snowden a “traitor” for leaking classified information from the National Security Agency.

For most of her Senate career her moderation did her no harm in progressive California, a state for which her growing seniority delivered many benefits including the creation of the 1,242 square mile Joshua Tree National Park. She was re-elected five times with handsome majorities. In 2012 she received 7.86 million votes, the most ever secured by a candidate for the US Senate.

That changed with Trump’s presidential victory in 2016, and the radicalisation of the Republican party. Her emollience and respect for decorum in an increasingly polarised Senate dismayed younger, more progressive Democrats who demanded a much more confrontational approach.

In 2018 Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh, an arch conservative, to the Supreme Court. Feinstein, the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee which handled confirmation battles, failed for weeks to reveal sexual assault allegations levelled against him by Christine Blasey Ford. The California Democratic Party refused to endorse her for re-election that November, but she won anyway.

Worse followed. In 2020, 38 days before the presidential election, Trump nominated another conservative, Amy Coney Barrett, to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court even though Republican senators had refused to confirm an Obama nominee, Merrick Garland, in 2016 because it was an election year.

Feinstein was widely seen to have botched the acrimonious confirmation hearings. At the end of them she embraced Lindsey Graham, the committee’s highly partisan chair, telling him: “This is one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.”

By then Feinstein was in her late eighties, the oldest sitting member of Congress and heavily dependent on her staff. Once so sharp and supremely well prepared, she appeared forgetful and bewildered. Her mental acuity was being openly questioned in the US media, and her long absences were preventing the Judiciary committee from confirming President Biden’s nominees.

Her popularity in California plummeted. In 2023, four months before her 90th birthday and a year after her third husband’s death, she announced that she would not seek re-election the following year. Once a symbol of a new era in politics, she had become a symbol of one that was over. The trailblazer had run out of road.

(Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein, US senator, was born in San Francisco on June 22 1933, and died on September 28 2023, aged 90)