The steely centrist who was the longest-serving female senator
Dianne Feinstein 1933–2023
Over her six decades in politics, Dianne Feinstein broke barrier after barrier. She was the first woman mayor of San Francisco, thrust into office in 1978 when her predecessor was murdered in City Hall. She was the first woman to stage a major-party run for California governor in 1990; two years later, she and Barbara Boxer became the state’s first woman senators. In D.C., she was the first woman to chair the Senate Intelligence Committee and ultimately became the longest-serving woman senator, with a 31-year tenure. Major achievements included spearheading a 10-year assault-weapons ban in 1994 and overseeing the 6,000-page “torture report” that detailed the CIA’s post-9/11 program of holding terrorism suspects in secret prisons and subjecting them to waterboarding and other torments. Feinstein, whose pearl necklaces and regal demeanor belied a steely core, championed liberal causes such as abortion rights and gun control, but earned a reputation as a pragmatist who sought bipartisan consensus and wasn’t afraid to buck liberal orthodoxy. “Toughness,” she once said, “doesn’t have to come in a pinstripe suit.”
She grew up in San Francisco, where her father was “a renowned physician,” said the Los Angeles Times. The family projected stability but was terrorized by Feinstein’s mother, an alcoholic prone to “mystifying rages,” who once chased Feinstein with a carving knife. Feinstein studied history at Stanford University, then interned researching criminal justice for the San Francisco district attorney. That led to further city positions, and in 1969, Feinstein, then married to the second of her three husbands, successfully ran for the city Board of Supervisors. Over nine years there she won a reputation as a flinty centrist who didn’t shy from a fight, said The New York Times. But after two mayoral campaigns fizzled, she “seemed washed-up in politics,” and at age 45 announced she was quitting.
Then “fate intervened,” said the San Francisco Chronicle. A disgruntled former city official fatally shot Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in City Hall, leaving board president Feinstein acting mayor. Announcing the murders to a stricken city, she earned national attention, with the Chronicle calling her “reassuring and strong.” She would win two more terms as mayor, governing as a “sometimes imperious” micromanager who “demanded immediate action” on quality-of-life issues. Sidelined by term limits, she ran for governor in 1990, narrowly losing to GOP Sen. Pete Wilson. Two years later, she was elected to fill the Senate seat Wilson vacated and was to be reelected by large margins five more times.
She soon made an impact with the 1994 assaultweapons ban, a measure many had considered a lost cause. In the ensuing decades, Feinstein regularly fielded “criticism from opposite ends of the political spectrum,” said The Washington Post. Liberals bristled at her “law-and-order approach toward governance” and her support for the death penalty and tight border restrictions— though she changed her mind on the death penalty, as she did on same-sex marriage rights. She “frustrated conservatives” with her staunch support for gun control. Some right-wing lawmakers branded her a “traitor” when she first insisted on investigating CIA interrogation methods and then forced the release of the summary of the Senate’s report in 2014. In a stirring floor speech, she called the agency’s actions “a stain on our nation’s values and history.”
Donald Trump’s 2016 election “put Feinstein’s brand of bipartisanship out of step within her own party,” said NPR.org. Many Democrats were upset when she ran again in 2018 at age 85, some murmuring that her mind was no longer sharp. When she returned to work early this year in a wheelchair after a bout with shingles that had sidelined her for months, she appeared confused and unsteady. Yet while she did announce that she wouldn’t run again in 2024, she refused calls to step down. Even during the fractious Trump years, Feinstein maintained her commitment to working across the aisle. America needs “people who understand working together isn’t a bad word,” she said in 2017. “We do need to compromise—and that is not a bad word.”