The first female California senator made a profound mark embracing progressive causes such as an assault weapons ban and damning the CIA’s use of torture.
Dianne Feinstein, San Francisco supervisor, mayor and United States senator from California over more than four decades, will be remembered as a political giant whose calm at a moment of civic turmoil soothed a broken city, and who waged fearless battles against guns and torture. She was, quite simply, an extraordinary American woman.
And yet, when I heard the news that she had died, I surprised myself by quietly exclaiming, “What a relief!”
It was awful to watch Feinstein’s all-too-public decline in recent years, her refusal to step down despite her obviously diminishing cognition and health, and to read about her family’s internecine battles over her late husband’s estate. What a terrible note to end on.
But a graceless end should not obscure DiFi’s shining accomplishments and her place in American history.
I first became aware of Feinstein, as many in my generation did, in November 1978, after San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were killed at City Hall by their former colleague, Supervisor Dan White.
I’d just graduated from college and was still living in Berkeley.
For years afterward, I thought that I had dreamed that the terrible news had broken on the same day that I had seen the Talking Heads play “Psycho Killer” at a free concert in Sproul Plaza. But no, it wasn’t a dream. The Talking Heads had in fact appeared on the UC Berkeley campus the day of the assassinations. That always seemed an ironic coincidence worthy of Joan Didion, another great California woman and contemporary of Feinstein.
At trial, White’s attorneys introduced the now infamous Twinkie defense, putting a psychiatrist on the stand to testify that White’s high consumption of sugary foods led to his diminished capacity.
