Dianne Feinstein obit

Dianne Feinstein, Longest-Serving Female US Senator, Dies at 90

• Oldest member of Congress was elected in ‘Year of the Woman’
• She led probe of CIA’s interrogation techniques after 9/11

 

She was not on the list.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was first elected to the U.S. Senate from California in 1992 in a wave election known as "the Year of the Woman" and went on to champion gun control, died today, NPR has confirmed. She was 90 years old.

Feinstein's rise in politics began on Nov. 27, 1978, when her city was jolted by two political assassinations at City Hall. As president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, she announced the news to a shocked press corps.

"As President of the Board of Supervisors, it is my duty to announce that both Mayor [George] Moscone and Supervisor [Harvey] Milk have been shot and killed," Feinstein said in a firm but clearly stunned voice.

At that moment, Feinstein became interim mayor and went on to win election and later reelection, serving as mayor until 1988.

Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown – a longtime political ally of hers – said Feinstein's handling of the assassinations crisis cemented her reputation.

"It was a dramatic demonstration of how in the face of total and complete disaster, somebody could stand up to settle the ship," Brown said in 2022.

After the city hall assassinations, Mayor Feinstein signed a local gun control ordinance, angering a fringe gun rights organization called the White Panthers. Collaborating with groups unhappy with the mayor's pro-growth, pro-business and other moderate policies, the White Panthers managed to collect enough signatures to place a recall of Feinstein on the ballot in 1983. The recall failed, catapulting Feinstein into easy reelection later that year.

As mayor, Feinstein governed from the center – winning support from business groups, law enforcement unions and the city's more conservative voters. Her moderate governing style often angered San Francisco's more liberal activists. In 1982 she vetoed legislation that would have allowed same sex couples to form domestic partnerships entitling them to city benefits, hospital visitation rights and more. She also refused to sign "comparable worth" legislation guaranteeing women equal pay to men who work similar jobs.

In a 2001 interview with C-SPAN, Feinstein attributed her political philosophy to her upbringing.

"My mother was a Democrat. My father was a Goldwater Republican. So we had a split family," Feinstein said.

Achieving national standing

In 1984, San Francisco hosted the Democratic National Convention. Feinstein landed on the cover of Time magazine and made the short list to be presidential nominee Walter Mondale's running mate.

By then the AIDS epidemic was ravaging her city. The federal government under President Ronald Reagan mostly ignored it. A young physician at San Francisco General Hospital, Paul Volberding often briefed Mayor Feinstein on what was needed to fight the disease.

"I don't recall any moment in the early epidemic when I was told, 'No, we can't do that because we don't have the resources,' " recalled Volberding, who became one of the pioneers in AIDS treatment.

In fact, in the mid-1980s, San Francisco alone was spending more on AIDS than the entire federal government. "And that really goes to her leadership and a great credit to her," Volberding said.

Election to the Senate

In 1990, after leaving the mayor's office, Feinstein ran for governor. She lost narrowly to Republican Sen. Pete Wilson. But a year later, the political climate changed with the Senate confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas.

When law professor Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual misconduct when they worked together, members of the Judiciary Committee, including Democratic Sen. Howell Heflin of Alabama, questioned Hill's integrity and motivation.

"Are you a scorned woman? Do you have a militant attitude relative to the area of civil rights?" Sen. Heflin drawled.

Feinstein used those widely criticized hearings as a springboard to the U.S. Senate.

"​​Many people took a look at that all-male Judiciary Committee and frankly felt they badly botched the job," Feinstein said campaigning in 1992. Her platform included writing a woman's right to an abortion into federal law.

"The Congress must pass it and the president must sign it. And if he vetoes it, we must override that veto," she said.

Feinstein won the Senate seat, making history as part of the so-called Year of the Woman.

In Washington, she advocated gun control, overcoming stiff odds to pass a federal ban on assault weapons in 1994. Later that year she almost lost reelection. But she developed a reputation as a workhorse, someone who did her homework, and wasn't afraid to rock the boat.

Report on torture by the CIA

In 2014, over objections from the Obama administration, she took to the Senate floor to release a comprehensive report on torture by the CIA following the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Releasing this report is an important step to restore our values and show the world that we are, in fact, a just and lawful society," Feinstein said.

The 500-page summary report by the Intelligence Committee Feinstein chaired revealed in stark detail CIA mistreatment of prisoners, including things like waterboarding and sleep deprivation.

Tom Blanton, who heads the National Security Archive at George Washington University, says the investigation Feinstein directed made the intelligence community accountable.

"I think the Senate torture report was probably the high point of Sen. Feinstein's entire Senate career," Blanton said.

Reelection at age 85

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 put Feinstein's brand of bipartisanship out of step within her own party. Democrats who hoped Feinstein would step aside for a new generation of candidates were disappointed – even angry – when she sought and won another 6-year term in 2018 at the age of 85. Some news reports cited apparent memory lapses.

In the fifth year of her final term in office, a serious bout of shingles forced Feinstein to miss nearly 100 votes while she recovered at home in San Francisco.

When she returned to Washington almost three months later, she appeared even more frail with lingering side effects from shingles that limited her ability to work.

Former aide Jim Lazarus believes her reasons for staying in office, rather than enjoying retirement, were intensely personal.

"I just don't think she could see what else to do on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. She felt well enough and alert enough and strong enough to serve," Lazarus said.

A role model for women in government

Feinstein's most enduring legacy may be opening more doors for women in politics. She was San Francisco's first female mayor, although she wasn't always as much of a feminist as advocates would have liked.

But Malia Cohen, who served on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors before being elected to the state Board of Equalization, remembers meeting Feinstein at City Hall on a third grade field trip where Feinstein told her class one of them could be mayor one day.

"I believe that I'm standing on her shoulders. And I wouldn't be here without her leadership," Cohen said.

Feinstein's third husband Richard Blum died in 2022. She is survived by her daughter Katherine, a now-retired judge who served on the state superior court in San Francisco.

While some Democrats felt Dianne Feinstein was too moderate and stayed in office too long, she'll also be remembered as a woman who led her city through a moment of extraordinary grief and became an effective champion for important national issues in the U.S. Senate.

Although Feinstein was not always embraced by the feminist movement, her experiences colored her outlook through her five decades in politics.

“I recognize that women have had to fight for everything they have gotten, every right,” she told The Associated Press in 2005, as the Judiciary Committee prepared to hold hearings on President George W. Bush’s nomination of John Roberts to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court.

“So I must tell you, I try to look out for women’s rights. I also try to solve problems as I perceive them, with legislation, and reaching out where I can, and working across the aisle,” she said.

Her tendency for bipartisanship helped her notch legislative wins throughout her career. But it also proved to be a liability in her later years in Congress, as her state became more liberal and as the Senate and the electorate became increasingly polarized.

One of Feinstein’s most significant legislative accomplishments was early in her career, when the Senate approved her amendment to ban manufacturing and sales of certain types of assault weapons as part of a crime bill that President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994. Though the assault weapons ban expired 10 years later and was never renewed or replaced, it was a poignant win after her career had been significantly shaped by gun violence.

She had little patience for Republicans and others who opposed her on that issue, though she was often challenged. In 1993, during debate on the assault weapons ban, Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, accused her of having an insufficient knowledge of guns and the gun control issue.

Feinstein spoke fiercely of the violence she’d lived through in San Francisco and retorted: ‘’Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.”

Two decades later, after 20 children and six educators were killed in a horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, first-term Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas similarly challenged Feinstein during debate on legislation that would have permanently banned the weapons.

“I’m not a sixth grader,” Feinstein snapped back at the much younger Cruz -- a moment that later went viral. She added: “It’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here a long time.”

Feinstein campaigned jointly with Barbara Boxer, who was running for the state’s other U.S. Senate seat, and both won, benefiting from positive news coverage and excitement over their historic race. California had never had a female U.S. senator, and female candidates and voters had been galvanized by the Supreme Court hearings in which the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Anita Hill about her sexual harassment allegations against nominee Clarence Thomas.

Feinstein was appointed to the Judiciary panel and eventually the Senate Intelligence Committee, becoming the chairperson in 2009. She was the first woman to lead the intelligence panel, a high-profile perch that gave her a central oversight role over U.S. intelligence controversies, setbacks and triumphs, from the killing of Osama bin Laden to leaks about National Security Agency surveillance.

Under Feinstein’s leadership, the intelligence committee conducted a wide-ranging, five-year investigation into CIA interrogation techniques during President George W. Bush’s administration, including waterboarding of terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons. The resulting 6,300-page “torture report” concluded among other things that waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” did not provide key evidence in the hunt for bin Laden. A 525-page executive summary was released in late 2014, but the rest of the report has remained classified.

The Senate investigation was full of intrigue at the time, including documents that mysteriously disappeared and accusations traded between the Senate and the CIA that the other was stealing information. The drama was captured in a 2019 movie about the investigation called “The Report,” and actor Annette Bening was nominated for a Golden Globe for her portrayal of Feinstein.

Feinstein closed out confirmation hearings for Justice Amy Coney Barrett with an embrace of Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and a public thanks to him for a job well done. “This has been one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in,” Feinstein said at the end of the hearing.

Liberal advocacy groups that had fiercely opposed Barrett’s nomination to replace the late liberal icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg were furious and called for her to step down from the committee leadership.

A month later, Feinstein announced she would remain on the committee but step down as the top Democrat. The senator, then 87 years old, did not say why. In a statement, she said she would “continue to do my utmost to bring about positive change in the coming years.”

Feinstein was born on June 22, 1933. Her father, Leon Goldman, was a prominent surgeon and medical school professor in San Francisco, but her mother was an abusive woman with a violent temper that was often directed at Feinstein and her two younger sisters.

Feinstein graduated from Stanford University in 1955, with a bachelor’s degree in history. She married young and was a divorced single mother of her daughter, Katherine, in 1960, at a time when such a status was still unusual.

In 1961, Feinstein was appointed by then-Gov. Pat Brown to the women’s parole board, on which she served before running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Typical of the era, much of the early coverage of her entrance into public life focused on her appearance, and she was invariably described as stunning, tall, slender and raven-haired.

Feinstein’s second husband, Bert Feinstein, was 19 years older than she, but she described the marriage as “a 10″ and kept his name even after his death from cancer in 1978. In 1980, she married investment banker Richard Blum, and thanks to his wealth, she was one of the richest members of the Senate. He died in February 2022.

In addition to her daughter, Feinstein has a granddaughter, Eileen, and three stepchildren.

“She was one of the most effective legislators in recent memory because of her willingness to work across the aisle in good faith in order to solve complex problems,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who served with her on the Judiciary Committee.

Feinstein was also a renowned proponent of gun safety legislation. As fellow advocate Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said on Friday morning: “For a long time, between 1994 and the tragedy in Newtown in 2012, Dianne was often a lonely but unwavering voice on the issue of gun violence.”

Three California House Democrats — Reps. Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee — are all running for the full six-year term in the 2024 election. Feinstein’s interim replacement will serve through next year, and Gavin Newsom’s selection is a fraught choice that’s certain to alienate people.

Her death, confirmed by two people with knowledge of the situation, brings Senate Democrats’ functional majority to 50 votes, with Republicans holding 49 votes. Two other Democratic senators tested positive for Covid this week — and the majority of the caucus is calling on indicted Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) to resign.