Over the course of 52 years in elected office, Dianne Feinstein believed she could use the system for good. Despite everything, she still does. rtraister reports
From left, 1971: The first female president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. 2022: The oldest sitting U.S. senator. Photo: Bettmann Archive via Getty Images ; Philip Montgomery for New York Magazine This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.
The next day, San Francisco’s daily papers blared news of Feinstein’s stunning upset on their front pages. The press homed in on Feinstein’s “dark-haired, blue-eyed beauty” and made sure to note that the woman who would, as the top vote-getter, soon assume control of the Board of Supervisors was dressed in “a fashionable blue Norell original with a bolero top and a wide white belt.”
Feinstein is now both the definition of the American political Establishment and the personification of the inroads women have made over the past 50 years. Her career, launched in a moment of optimism about what women leaders could do for this country, offers a study in what the Democratic Party’s has not been able to do. As Feinstein consolidated her power at the top of the Senate, the party’s losses steadily mounted.
Reached by phone two days after 19 children were murdered in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in late May, Feinstein spoke in halting tones, sometimes trailing off mid-sentence or offering a non sequitur before suddenly alighting upon the right string of words. She would forget a recently posed question, or the date of a certain piece of legislation, but recall with perfect lucidity events from San Francisco in the 1960s.
Feinstein’s mother, Betty Rosenburg, fled the Bolshevik Revolution with her czarist Russian Orthodox father, traveling across Siberia by hay cart. She grew up to be a model, and after marrying Goldman and bearing three daughters, she became alcoholic, abusive, and suicidal. She raged and threatened to kill Dianne and her sisters, calling them “kikes” and “little Jews,” and once tried to drown her youngest daughter in a bathtub.
That same year, California governor Pat Brown, a patient of Dianne’s father’s, offered her a paid job on the California women’s-parole-and-sentencing board. For six years, she had the power to determine sentence length for women who had been convicted of everything from public drunkenness to violent crimes. She took a reformist approach to criminal justice, calling for rehabilitation rather than long sentences in narcotics cases.
Feinstein’s 1969 race for the Board of Supervisors might have found echoes in Ocasio-Cortez’s groundbreaking 2018 campaign, but the differences between the two women’s early paths are stark. Ocasio-Cortez ran a low-budget grassroots campaign out of her small Bronx apartment and was outspent by Joe Crowley, her heavyweight Democratic-primary opponent, 18 to one.
Feinstein and several of her colleagues on the board were warned that they were targets. Packages full of dynamite were delivered to two board members, and in December 1976, when Feinstein was caring for her husband Bert Feinstein, then dying of cancer, a bomb was discovered outside 19-year-old Katherine’s window. It would have killed her except that the temperature had dropped that night, leading the device to misfire.
At around 10:30 a.m., Dan White entered through a basement window of City Hall and went to meet the mayor. Afterward, Feinstein heard her former colleague rushing by her. She couldn’t have known he had already shot and killed Moscone. “Dan,” she called to him. “I have something to do first,” White told her as he asked Milk to come into his office.
This does not mean that Feinstein is a centrist, ideologically speaking. She has a solidly Democratic voting record and has occasionally taken positions progressively ahead of her party, though in other instances she has practically acted as a Republican. If she has hopscotched around the middle, it’s because she believes stability and progress — “the heart of political change” — flow from strong, functioning institutions built on consensus.
Yet decades later she stayed away from the front lines of the movement for marriage equality. In 2004, she would publicly lambaste then-Mayor Gavin Newsom for issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in San Francisco, which she was sure provoked a conservative backlash that helped George W. Bush win reelection. “The whole issue has been too much, too fast, too soon,” Feinstein said after the 2004 election, betraying her tactical distrust of explosive social change.
Still, it is hard to convey to those who have grown up in a world in which Feinstein and Boxer and Murray and Braun were the system, in which Hillary Clinton was considered, twice, the inevitable next president, in which Kamala Harris is now the vice-president, exactly what the victories of Feinstein and other women in her freshman class represented.
If women changed the Senate’s image, they did not always change its character. Political representation is a funny thing. The absence of women and minorities from governing institutions is ghoulish. But the seemingly obvious remedy — putting those people in power — can often involve new participants simply recapitulating the standards set by those who preceded them.
“If you weren’t good at responding to that kind of Socratic interrogation technique, she didn’t make your job easy,” said the aide. “On the other hand, do I admire a senator who was as focused on how fast constituents got responses as she was on a foreign-aid package? I sure did.” She told me in our conversation that the institutions meting out criminal justice have become more progressive in the 60 years since she was on the sentencing board. But that’s not actually true, mostly because the kind of bipartisan cooperation Feinstein values so highly has centered on the expansion of a carceral state, via legislation like the 1994 crime bill authored by Joe Biden and supported strenuously by Feinstein.
She is probably most famous for her push, as soon as she got into the Senate, for an assault-weapons ban. She had been spoiling for this fight for decades; back when she was mayor of San Francisco, her controversial ban on handguns provoked a recall campaign . In 1993, Idaho Republican Larry Craig challenged her by saying, “The gentlelady from California needs to become a little bit more familiar with firearms and their deadly characteristics.
When I suggest to Feinstein that the partisan hardening has been asymmetrical, that her Republican colleagues have grown more radical and rigid while she and many of her fellow Democratic leaders have been all too willing to compromise, she responded, “Well, yes. I think that’s not inaccurate. I think it’s an accurate statement. What did you first say about Democrats moving?” I repeated that it was the right that has gotten more inflexible while the Democrats have been willing to cede ground.
“I think the Senate is a place of freedom,” she told reporters. “And people come here to speak their piece, and they do, and they provide a kind of leadership. In some cases, it’s positive; in some cases, maybe not. A lot of that depends on who’s looking and what party they are.” Of that “appalling moment” with Graham, Cleve Jones recalled thinking, “Oh my goodness, you just really cling to this notion of civility and bipartisan discourse. One can marvel at it. But it’s genuine. It’s the core of her.”2006: During Samuel Alito’s nomination hearing.2018: During Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh.2020: Her infamous embrace of Lindsey Graham during the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett.2021: Paying her respects to Bob Dole in the Capitol.
That Feinstein may be wrestling with dementia is in fact among the most sympathetic things about her. Getting very old can be hard, lonely; her third husband died of cancer this spring. It is pretty awful now to watch her tell CNN’s Dana Bash, in 2017, that she will stay in office because “it’s what I’m meant to do, as long as the old bean holds up” — and put her finger to her head.