Dianne Feinstein: The 3 moments that made her 'a political giant'

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a six-term Democrat from California and the oldest member of the upper chamber of Congress, died Thursday at the age of 90. She was immediately hailed as a pioneer.

“She was a political giant,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. “Every race she won, she made history, but her story wasn’t just about being the first woman in a particular political office, it was what she did for California, and for America, with that power once she earned it.”

Here are three moments that showed why Feinstein was such a unique force for change.

The murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone

It was late 1978, and Feinstein, then 45, was already contemplating life after politics. In fact, that’s exactly what she told reporters in the San Francisco City Hall press room on the morning of Nov. 27 — that her current role as the first female president of the city’s board of supervisors might be her last.

Feinstein had been elected in 1969; two years later, she ran for mayor and lost. Then she tried again in 1975, this time as the frontrunner. She didn’t even make the runoff. The winner, George Moscone, was a pro-labor progressive. Feinstein was a centrist. She had concluded, as she told the New Yorker in 2015, that she was unelectable.

An hour after that news conference, Feinstein saw her fellow supervisor Dan White — a former police officer who had resigned a few weeks earlier and who apparently wanted his job back — run past her small second-floor office. She called out to White, but he didn’t answer. Moments later, Feinstein heard gunshots.

What happened next would change her forever.

“I went down the hall,” Feinstein told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008. “I opened the wrong door. I opened [Supervisor Harvey Milk’s] door. I found Harvey” — the city’s first openly gay elected official — “on his stomach. I tried to get a pulse and put my finger through a bullet hole. He was clearly dead. ... I remember it, actually, as if it was yesterday. And it was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life.”

“I could smell the gunpowder,” she once told the Los Angeles Times.

It fell to Feinstein to deliver the crushing news. “Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot ... and killed,” she told a crowd that had gathered near the doors of City Hall. People gasped. A woman screamed. “The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.”

Though Feinstein struggled to speak those words, she found her voice that day. Next in the line of succession, she was sworn in as acting mayor, then ably shepherded her riven city through challenge after challenge: riots that erupted after White was convicted of manslaughter rather than murder; the AIDS crisis; and conflicts over gay rights, crime and gun control. She was elected in her own right in 1979, then reelected in 1983.

“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,” San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jerry Roberts told the New Yorker. “That’s when she started talking about how the center is so important.”

‘The year of the woman’

Feinstein was never an activist for feminism; her upper-crust background made her too small-c conservative for that. But the nuns at her elite Catholic school also “emphasized to the students that their purpose was to make a difference, and that they should not be limited by their gender.”

Feinstein seemed to internalize that ethos. At Stanford, she won the highest student council office a woman could hold — vice president — and she eloped right after graduating. When she and her first husband divorced, she carried on as a single, working mother. She was the first female president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, the first female mayor of the city and the first female to win a major-party nomination for governor of California.

But Feinstein’s biggest glass-ceiling breakthrough came in 1992, when she won a special election by nearly 2 million votes to become California’s first female senator. In the wake of the controversy over Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill, Feinstein was part of a wave that elected a record-setting four women to the U.S. Senate and 24 women to the U.S. House. The press hailed 1992 as “the year of the woman.”

But more important than any catchy label was what Feinstein did with her new clout. Shortly after arriving on Capitol Hill, she secured a seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee and told its chairman, then-Sen. Joe Biden, that she wanted to sponsor an assault weapons ban.

Though Feinstein once owned a handgun — to protect her family, she said, from terrorists who had planted a bomb in a flower box outside her daughter’s bedroom window — she eventually launched a citywide campaign urging residents to surrender their firearms.

“The leadership basically said, ‘If you want to do this, terrific — you’re on your own,’” a former staff member told the New Yorker. “She went out, senator to senator, buttonholed people, found out what was necessary to cobble together enough votes.”

The ban, which stopped the manufacture, sale and transfer of assault weapons, passed in 1994. It expired a decade later — and no politician has ever been able to revive it.

The torture report

Much has been made in recent years of Feinstein’s health challenges and cognitive decline; she has been largely absent from Senate life for years.

But Feinstein remained a potent legislator well into her 70s and 80s — and her principled battle with the CIA and the Obama administration over the “enhanced interrogations” of terror suspects stands as proof of that potency.

In 2009, right after President Obama took office, Feinstein became the first female chair of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee. Ever the pragmatist, she was generally supportive of the intelligence community. But she was disturbed by interrogation tactics adopted by the Bush administration after 9/11 — and the existence of “black sites,” where suspects could be secretly subjected to waterboarding and other brutal techniques.

Feinstein called for a full investigation of the CIA program, and the committee voted in favor of it, 14-1. She then spent the next six years overseeing what became known as the torture report — “over 7,000 pages” in its complete form, according to Feinstein, “with over 32,000 footnotes.”

The CIA and the Obama administration fought the report’s publication for 11 months. Eventually, a 500-page executive summary was released, stripped of much of its excruciating detail. But its conclusions — that the torture was worse than previously reported, and that it was not an effective way of collecting intelligence about terrorists — made a huge impact. Feinstein considered it the most important work of her career.

“The release … cannot remove that stain,” Feinstein said at the time, “but it can and does say to our people, and the world, that America is big enough to admit when it’s wrong and confident enough to learn from its mistakes.”