It was the right call to hang it up. But it was surely not an easy one for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), even at age 89. A preternatural tenacity has kept California’s longest-serving senator going during a political career that has spanned more than half a century, with fate occasionally stepping in to give it a push.
In 1969, she earned the distinction of being the first woman elected to the San Francisco board of supervisors without being appointed first, and in 1978, became the board’s president. But pretty much everyone – including Feinstein herself – thought nothing greater awaited.She had run twice for mayor and lost. Feinstein was deemed too much of a staid institutionalist, and her stances too moderate, for freewheeling San Francisco.
But on the day she told reporters she would not be making a third bid for the city’s top job, and in fact had decided to leave politics, a disaffected former supervisor named Dan White climbed through a basement window in City Hall and assassinated both Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Feinstein, who had rushed into Milk’s office at the sound of shots and discovered her colleague’s body, soon found herself the city’s first female mayor. As it turned out, her steadiness was precisely what the traumatized city needed at that moment. Feinstein was, as The Post put it at the time, the one whose “collected and compassionate voice has been urging this city back to life.”
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Feinstein would serve in that job for nine years with distinction, but it looked, once again, that her story might end there. She was passed over to be Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984 and lost a race for governor in 1990.
And yet, just two years later, she would be in the vanguard of what would become known as “the year of the woman.”
Amid national outrage over Anita Hill’s treatment by the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee (then-chaired by Delaware’s Joe Biden) during the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, Feinstein was one of four women elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. Their arrival tripled the number of women in a chamber that had never seen more than two. Today, there are 25.
Feinstein won that race easily, though an opponent in the Democratic primary ran an ad comparing her to haughty, entitled hotel magnate Leona Helmsley, a convicted tax evader.
She would make her mark in Washington quickly, as a leader in the push for an assault weapons ban, enacted in 1994. When Idaho Republican Larry Craig suggested that “the gentlelady from California needs to become a little bit more familiar with firearms,” Feinstein asserted a moral authority few others could match: “I am quite familiar with firearms. I became mayor as a product of assassination. I found my assassinated colleague and put a finger through a bullet hole trying to get a pulse.”
Feinstein never seemed to care all that much about ingratiating herself. She became notorious as one of the hardest bosses to work for on Capitol Hill.
Her voting record was largely progressive, but not predictable. More hawkish than many in her party, she defended targeted killing with drone strikes and government surveillance programs, but as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she commissioned a scathing 6,700-page report that in 2014 called the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects what they were: torture. What’s more, the report concluded, the CIA’s methods were ineffective.
In recent years, though, it was hard to miss the fact that the tough-minded senator seemed to be slipping. Speculation about whether she was experiencing cognitive decline began making it into the media.
Feinstein, despite representing one of the most liberal states in the country, was increasingly out of step with her party on such issues as eliminating the filibuster. In 2020, she generated outrage when, as ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, she hugged Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) at the end of Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett’s contentious confirmation hearings and pronounced them “the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.”
The Nation went so far as to run a headline in 2021 that declared: “Dianne Feinstein Is an Embarrassment.”
Now, Feinstein’s day has come and gone; even she has been forced to recognize it. Democratic opponents are already lining up, and had she run a sixth time for reelection next year, she probably would have lost.
Hers has not been a graceful end. But as many times as she has been dismissed as a throwback to another era, I will always think of her as a bridge from a male-dominated Washington. Which is why I hope it will not be forgotten how much Dianne Feinstein has done to get us all to where we are now.