Dianne Feinstein dies at 90: Longest serving female senator in US history

Hours later, gunshots rang out in City Hall. A former supervisor, Dan White, had fatally shot Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States. Mrs. Feinstein rushed to Milk and felt for a pulse. “My finger,” she later told the Los Angeles Times, “went into a bullet hole in his wrist.”

Then serving as board president, Mrs. Feinstein, who died Sept. 28, had the duty of announcing the deaths. The image of her standing before television cameras amid the panic, solemnly promising that just as the city had recovered from the devastation of the 1906 earthquake, “so too can we rebuild from the spiritual damage” of the killings, propelled her to the national spotlight.

By the city’s succession laws, Mrs. Feinstein was elevated to mayor, an office she held for nine years before losing a bid for California governor in 1990. Two years later, she won election to the Senate, where she rose to become chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee and the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. During more than three decades in office, she delivered muscular support as well as withering criticism of the CIA, helped mold the federal bench, championed an assault weapons ban, and held down the center of the Democratic Party as it moved swiftly to the left.

Mrs. Feinstein’s death, at her home in Washington, was announced in a statement from her office, which did not give a cause. She was, at age 90, the oldest sitting member of the Senate and the subject of increasing scrutiny over her fitness to serve. Mrs. Feinstein was hospitalized in February with shingles, an illness later reported to have been complicated by encephalitis.

She returned to the Senate in May after a nearly three-month absence. Her inability during that time to vote on Biden administration judicial nominees, along with gathering evidence of her cognitive decline, led even some admirers to urge the senator to resign to avoid tarnishing what was by all accounts a remarkable legacy as a stateswoman. In August she was briefly hospitalized after a fall at her home in San Francisco.

Dianne Feinstein, NSA’S top congressional defender, has built respect over decades of service

Mrs. Feinstein won her Senate seat in what became known as the Year of the Woman, an election that sent 24 new women to the House of Representatives and brought the total number of female senators to six.

The precipitating event was the 1991 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, who became the second Black justice on the high court. The proceedings pitted Anita Hill, a former colleague of Thomas’s who also was Black, against an all-male, all-White Senate Judiciary Committee that, in the view of many women, did not engage respectfully with Hill’s allegations that Thomas had sexually harassed her.

“Every woman that watched that changed,” Mrs. Feinstein told the New York Times in 2018. “I think change happened at that moment.”

Mrs. Feinstein sometimes spoke of the difficulties of being a woman in power, including the tendency of observers to remark on her appearance. Time magazine once described her as “a casting director’s idea of a Bryn Mawr president who must be bodily restrained from adding gloves — or perhaps even a pillbox hat — to her already ultra-conservative banker-blue suits and fitted red blazers and pearls.”

Mrs. Feinstein spent much of her career fielding criticism from opposite ends of the political spectrum. She disappointed liberals with her law-and-order approach toward governance and her long-standing support for the death penalty, even as she frustrated conservatives with her support for gun control and same-sex-marriage rights. While some women celebrated Mrs. Feinstein as a trailblazer, others resented what they considered her insufficient attention to women’s issues.

“I’ve lived a feminist life,” Mrs. Feinstein, who supported abortion rights, once told an interviewer. “I had to quit a job because there was no maternity leave. I raised a child as a single mother. I put together legislation. I haven’t been a marcher, but I’ve lived it.”

Mrs. Feinstein’s centrism dated to the earliest years of her political career. Her elevation to the office of mayor came on the heels of upheaval, including the mass suicide at Jonestown in Guyana — many followers of cult leader Jim Jones were from San Francisco — and attacks by the New World Liberation Front terrorist group, which placed a bomb outside the bedroom window of Mrs. Feinstein’s daughter. For a time, Mrs. Feinstein owned a handgun.

“The lesson Dianne took from this craziness was that she had been right — that all this polarization and bitterness that was extant in the town had now led to these murders,” her biographer, Jerry Roberts, once told the New Yorker magazine, referring to the assassinations of Moscone and Milk. “That’s when she started talking about how the center is so important.”

Of all the legislation that crossed Mrs. Feinstein’s Senate desk, the bill with which she was most associated was the assault weapons ban that President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994. The uphill effort showcased Mrs. Feinstein at her most determined. When a more senior senator, Larry Craig (R-Idaho), questioned her experience on gun issues, she reminded him that she had become mayor of San Francisco as a result of a double assassination. “I know something about what firearms can do,” she said.

The assault weapons ban expired in 2004. After the mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012, in which 20 first-graders and six adults were gunned down, Mrs. Feinstein spearheaded an unsuccessful effort to renew the law.

President Biden, who said he recruited her to serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee when he was chairman, called her “a pioneering American” in a statement Friday, adding: “There’s no better example of her skillful legislating and sheer force of will than when she turned passion into purpose, and led the fight to ban assault weapons.”

Her centrism — and her influence — were vividly on display during her service on the Senate Intelligence Committee, where in 2009 she became the first female chair. On many issues, she ranked among the most outspoken champions of the CIA and other intelligence organizations.

When President Barack Obama sought to give the Defense Department — and not the CIA — authority for drone strikes on potential terrorists, Mrs. Feinstein used a classified amendment to a spending bill to forestall any such move, according to news accounts.

In 2013, when The Washington Post and London’s Guardian newspaper exposed massive secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, Mrs. Feinstein defended the program and other efforts like it. “It’s called protecting America,” she declared.

Yet even as she championed the nation’s intelligence agencies, she subjected them to aggressive oversight in a duality that aroused admiration as well as occasional perplexity among observers of her career.

Her support for the intelligence community made especially explosive the investigation she led into the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the CIA against terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Obama ended the program shortly after succeeding George W. Bush in the White House.

Deeply disturbed by testimony to the committee about secret CIA prisons known as “black sites,” Mrs. Feinstein called for the investigation shortly after taking the chairmanship.

The committee’s 6,700-page “torture report,” an executive summary of which was publicly released in 2014, alleged that CIA interrogation techniques — including waterboarding, sleep deprivation, physical abuse, confinement in a coffin-size box and threats against suspects’ families — had been far more brutal, more widespread and less effective than the agency previously claimed.

Then-CIA Director John Brennan insisted that the interrogation techniques “did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives.” He and Mrs. Feinstein had earlier faced off in a high-stakes confrontation when Brennan accused committee investigators of improperly obtaining materials from a CIA computer network.

Feinstein: CIA searched Intelligence Committee computers

Mrs. Feinstein, who denied Brennan’s charges, gave a dramatic speech on the Senate floor in which she accused the CIA of improperly searching computers used by her staff members and seeking to intimidate them with calls for a Justice Department review of their conduct. An internal CIA investigation later supported those claims, and Brennan apologized.

In the 2014 midterm elections, Republicans regained control of the Senate, and Mrs. Feinstein lost her committee chairmanship. “History will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by law,” she had said when the torture report was released, “and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again.’ ”

Supreme Court controversies

On the Judiciary Committee, which she joined during her first term in the Senate, Mrs. Feinstein became known as an independent-minded vote.

During the Bush…