Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Senate women recall Feinstein’s tireless fight
Tribute a glimpse into senator’s collegial side
WASHINGTON — When Washington Sen. Patty Murray received a call early Friday morning that Sen. Dianne Feinstein had died, she immediately started calling her fellow female senators.
The Democrat’s first call was to Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who had worked with Feinstein almost as long as she had. Murray and Feinstein were elected in 1992 — “the year of the woman” — and Collins was elected just four years later. Murray then called several other female Senate colleagues, hastily arranging a tribute.
“My immediate response was my women Senate colleagues that have been her friends and her family for so long, and that we needed to be together on the floor,” Murray said in an interview in her Capitol office Friday afternoon.
They were all there when the Senate opened at 10 a.m., just hours after Feinstein had died at her home in Washington after serving more than three decades in the Senate. Standing near Feinstein’s Senate desk, now draped in black cloth, the senators — along with some of their male colleagues — described her indomitable, fierce intelligence, her impact on the Senate and her deep knowledge of every issue she touched. They talked about how she had paved the way for so many women as the first female mayor of San Francisco, one of California’s first two female senators and the first female chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
But the women also talked about their private times with Feinstein that were at odds with her tough public persona — how she would invite them out to dinners, how she would sometimes give them the clothes off her back, and how she brought them together for bipartisan gatherings as their ranks in the Senate grew from just a handful to one-quarter of the chamber. Several of them teared up as they spoke.
It was a peek into Feinstein’s friendships and also the private, collegial side of the Senate that the public rarely sees — and that has faded in recent years as Congress has become more partisan and divided. Feinstein often received criticism from the left flank for her bipartisanship.
“I think it’s important that people understand that here in the United States Senate, a place that can be so divisive at times, that true friendships actually exist,” said Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican.
Murkowski spoke about sharing dinners with Feinstein when the Senate would stay in town over a weekend and they weren’t able to fly home to their faraway states. She joked that Feinstein, always impeccably dressed, probably wouldn’t have approved of the shoes she was wearing.
As the senators spoke, Feinstein’s daughter Katherine watched from the gallery, sitting with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Members of California’s House delegation lined the back wall.
Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis, a Republican, said Feinstein was “particularly kind to other women senators. She was the first to invite other women senators to dinner, to lead our gatherings and to focus our attention on things that are good for all Americans without regard to political ideology.”
Feinstein was one of the leaders and hosts of regular bipartisan dinners with all the women of the Senate, even as the group got a bit too large for them all to sit around one table and as the gatherings became a bit less frequent.
When eating with Feinstein, said Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Feinstein “would have a little parting gift for you, a little coin purse or something to show you just truly who she was.”
On the Senate floor, Murray teared up again as she recalled seeing Feinstein there just Thursday, casting her last vote.
“I’m so sorry I didn’t hug her when she went back out that door yesterday,” Murray said.