Late Senator Feinstein Hailed as ‘Trailblazer’ After 31 Years in US Senate
© AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite
Subscribe
Following the announcement of US Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) death on Friday, US political figures sounded off their praises. Feinstein’s career began as a lawmaker on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the 1970s and ended with her as one of the most powerful in the US Senate.
“Dianne Feinstein was one of the most amazing people who ever graced the Senate, who ever graced the country,” US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on Friday. “As the nation mourns this tremendous loss, we know how many lives she impacted and how many glass ceilings she shattered along the way.”
US President Joe Biden, who once served alongside Feinstein in the US Senate, hailed her as “a pioneering American,” a “true trailblazer” and a “cherished friend.”
The elder lawmaker died on Friday at the age of 90, following the visible deterioration of her health over previous months. She was the oldest lawmaker in the Senate.
Feinstein had previously announced her intention to retire at the end of her term in early 2025, although she had long faced calls to resign from fellow Democrats and the majority of the Californians who she represented in the Senate.
Early Life
Feinstein was born Dianne Emiel Goldman on June 22, 1933, in San Francisco, California. Her Jewish grandparents had formally adopted Russian Orthodox Christianity in order to live in St. Petersburg, Russia, before the 1917 Russian Revolution, which abolished the Pale of Settlement rules that restricted Jews to living in the Russian Empire’s westernmost reaches. They kept that formality when they emigrated to the United States and passed it on to Feinstein’s parents, but throughout her life, Feinstein listed her religion as Judaism.
Feinstein graduated from Stanford University in 1955 with a Bachelor’s in History and worked for a nonprofit for several years before being appointed to California’s Women’s Parole Board in 1960.
In 1956, she married her first of three husbands, Jack Berman, who worked in the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office. They divorced three years later. In 1962, she married again, this time to neurosurgeon Bertram Feinstein, whose name she kept after he died of colon cancer in 1978. In 1980, she married Richard Blum, an investment banker, who died in 2002 of cancer.
Dianne Feinstein
© AP Photo / J. Scott Applewhite
San Francisco Politics
She was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the city council, in 1969. She subsequently mounted several campaigns to be elected mayor, but lost both elections. In 1976, a left-wing group attempted to assassinate her with a bomb on her windowsill, but the explosive failed to detonate. In 1978, she was elected President of the Board of Supervisors, placing her in the number-two position beneath the mayor.
Months later, former city supervisor Dan White burst into City Hall and assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk out of revenge for having been denied the ability to return to office after resigning by Moscone, and for having been politically marginalized by the liberal mass politics of Moscone and Milk (the latter of whom was a gay Jewish man from the Castro district who had emerged as an adept political organizer). Feinstein was elevated to the mayor’s office, becoming San Francisco’s first woman mayor, and was re-elected in 1980.
Feinstein served two terms as mayor of the Golden Gate City, a very liberal place where her moderate Democratic politics riled feathers. She was criticized by the city’s large LGBTQ community for failing to support key legislation in support of same-gender partnerships and support for HIV/AIDS sufferers, but won acclaim for restoring the city’s historic cable car network and raising Frisco’s skyline higher than ever before. She also cut her teeth in many of the key political issues that would become hallmarks of her career in Washington, such as gun control.
Congressional Career
In 1990, Feinstein ran for Governor of California on the Democratic ticket, but lost to Republican US Senator Pete Wilson, who resigned in 1991 to take the state executive office. Feinstein subsequently ran in a special election for the Senate seat Wilson had vacated. She won, and remained in the US Senate until her death 31 years later.
She would become one of the most powerful lawmakers in the US Senate, leading the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Rules Committee, and becoming the seniormost Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
15 August 2023, 23:54 GMT
Feinstein championed gun control legislation, most importantly the 1994 Crime Bill which included the nation’s first national assault weapons ban. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Feinstein became an increasingly vocal supporter of the US National Security State, supporting the US invasion of Iraq and the PATRIOT Act and several intelligence programs that spied on and collected the data of US citizens. She denounced leaks about such abuses, called NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a “traitor” for revealing the National Security Agency’s illegal domestic spying program, and called for the leaker behind the Cablegate files to be punished “severely.” The leaker was ultimately revealed as then-US Army analyst Chelsea Manning.
Feinstein was also supportive of laws that limited Americans’ free speech rights, including laws against flag desecration and in support of internet censorship, most notably the 2010 Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA).
In an interesting twist and true rarity in US politics, Feinstein supported Taiwan’s eventual reintegration into China. She also supported increased dialogue with China and cross-Pacific ties, going back to her time in San Francisco politics. Feinstein once joked that “in my last life maybe I was Chinese.”
Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Senator Dianne Feinstein speaks after a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, April 3, 2014.
© AP Photo / Molly Riley
Final Years
Feinstein’s mental decline had become apparent by 2020, when she was nearly 87 years of age. Media reports indicated Democrats were aware of her decline and struggling with a response.
She was reported to have trouble remembering colleagues’ names or recent events - troubles that the public slowly began to glimpse over the following years. In February 2023, she announced her retirement at the end of her term in 2025, but the following day she forgot about the announcement in comments to the press. That March, she contracted shingles, an illness caused by the same virus that causes chickenpox, which further debilitated her. In August, she yielded control over her estate to her daughter, but retained her Senate seat, despite facing extensive pressure from colleagues and constituents alike to retire.
The visibility of her decline came amid debates about Biden’s age as he seeks reelection in 2024, leading to an increase in use of the term “gerontocracy” - which means “rule by elders” - to describe US politics.
When Feinstein passed away on Friday, she was one of the wealthiest US senators. As early as 2005, she was reported to have a net worth of between $43 million and $99 million by 2005, with many of her assets reportedly placed in blind trusts. After her husband Richard Blum’s death in 2002, she also received money from his estate. Blum was reportedly a billionaire, but the two kept their finances separate, according to her biography.
