Dianne Feinstein: A remembrance

In 1984, Mayor Dianne Feinstein sat behind her desk in her office at San Francisco Hall, and greeted me, then a young L.A. Times reporter writing a profile of her city as a run-up to the Democratic National Convention.

I hope you’re prepared, I’m very busy, Feinstein told me

No hello. No nice-to-meet you. No vapid pleasantries then, or ever. I got my 15 or 20 minutes, and the requisite quotes, and left her to get back to the business at hand.

I would talk to Feinstein, who died on Friday at age 90, many times in the decades to come. I wrote lengthy investigative pieces for the L.A. Times about her campaign donors, and her relationship with friends of her wealthy investor husband, Dick Blum. Yes, she was pro-development, but not for any nefarious reasons. As a Sacramento Bee columnist, I opined about her work in the U.S. Senate on water, judicial appointments, and torture. I came to admire her.

She was always busy, invariably prepared, the consummate professional, and could be funny. In a phone conversation, during my time at the Bee, she asked me whether my hair had gone gray. I told her it was turning, unlike hers.

Well, I have my resources, she said, with a chuckle.

The woman I met in 1984 was strong, gutsy, no-nonsense, and a trailblazer who broke glass ceilings. As mayor, she presided over a city that was grappling with, dying from and grieving over the AIDS epidemic. It also was undergoing an economic boom and a demographic transformation that drove out blue collar San Franciscans.

Feinstein was a bit uncool in the coolest of cities, sometimes an impolitic politician and a centrist long after bipartisanship became passé.

The city was still dealing with the grievous wounds inflicted on Nov. 27, 1978, when ex-Supervisor Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.

Feinstein, then the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, heard the deadly gunshots, smelled the residue, and saw White scurrying away. She was the first to find Milk’s body. When she tried to stop the bleeding, her finger slipped into the hole torn by the bullet.

Feinstein had run for mayor twice and contemplated leaving politics. But the city’s succession rules meant she became mayor. She’ll forever be remembered for delivering the horrible news of the assassinations to reporters, the city, and the world that day.

She led the city for the next nine years, weathering a recall attempt over her support for gun control, and an assassination attempt when someone planted a bomb at her home. She took to carrying a gun for self-defense.

Feinstein was a bit uncool in the coolest of cities, sometimes an impolitic politician and a centrist long after bipartisanship became passé. She got booed at a state Democratic Party gathering for proclaiming her support for the death penalty. Herb Caen, the late Chronicle columnist who served as the arbiter of what it meant to be a San Franciscan, poked sexist fun at Feinstein’s “Planet of the Apes” hairdo. She was not part of Caen’s in-crowd. She was her own woman, empowered by her own core, and she could be fierce.

In 1987, President Reagan’s interior secretary stood on O’Shaughnessy Dam and tweaked the city’s environmental sensibilities by proposing that the dam be razed, Hetch Hetchy, the city’s source of water, be drained, and the valley restored. It is, after all, in Yosemite National Park.

Feinstein would have none of it, telling me that the pristine Sierra water was San Franciscans’ “birthright.” Reagan’s interior secretary is all but forgotten. Water flows from Hetch Hetchy via a pipeline to San Franciscans’ faucets.

When she ran for the U.S. Senate in 1992, the Times assigned me to review her tax returns. Knowing my limitations, I used company money to retain a certified public accountant to help me decipher the returns.

Blum felt I had sandbagged him by bringing the accountant, to which I plead no contest. After I completed the review and returned to my office, he called and proceeded to ream me with especially graphic expletives.

I later mentioned the rant to Feinstein’s communications director, Kam Kuwata. A short while later, Feinstein called and apologized profusely, telling me she understood I was simply doing my job. The call wasn’t necessary, and though I understood she was doing damage control, it was a classy move. At her election night victory party, held at the Fairmont Hotel ballroom, the senator-elect made a point of greeting me.

In the Senate, she made her name by pushing for the 1994 assault weapons ban, and over the years would go out of her way to help state legislators in Sacramento push through their gun control measures.

Although she was decidedly liberal on gun control, she was a centrist on most issues. She was a skeptic about the expansion of gambling in California, opposed legalization of cannabis until her final campaign for senate, and remained pro-police when more liberal members of her party urged less-than-tough on crime positions.

In 2004, Feinstein criticized newly elected San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris at the funeral of a slain San Francisco police officer after Harris, a capital punishment opponent, declined to seek the death penalty against his killer. Officers in the cathedral stood and applauded Feinstein. Harris remained seated.

In 2003, when newly elected San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom authorized the issuance of marriage licenses to same sex partners, Feinstein declared that it was “too much, too fast, too soon,” though she came around to support the effort.

Although she was decidedly liberal on gun control, she was a centrist on most issues.

On the Senate floor in 2010, she paused to remember Oliver “Billy” Sipple, the former Marine who on Sept. 22, 1975 grabbed Sara Jane Moore’s gun as she tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford outside a hotel in San Francisco. A few days later, Herb Caen ran an item that outed Sipple as gay. Sipple’s courageous act had tragic fallout when much of his family shunned him.

“It was a gay man who grabbed her gun, which deflected the shot aimed at our president,” Feinstein said when the Senate voted to end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the policy that had forced gay military men and women to remain closeted.

I cannot speak to reports of memory loss and confusion in the final months of her life. But in 2016, she came to the Sacramento Bee editorial board armed with thick binders and charts to talk about one of her favorite topics–water. She held forth for an hour, answering our questions, turning only once to an aide for clarification on some obscure point. She 82, and knew the fine points of a topic that few others understand–and that no California politician today has taken the time to master.

She flummoxed environmentalists–and her longtime ally, fellow California Sen. Barbara Boxer–by joining with Bakersfield Republican Kevin McCarthy to strike a deal to deliver more water to Central Valley farmers.

Her greatest achievement came in 2014 when she released Senate Intelligence Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, detailing torture inflicted by the CIA on people detained after the Sept. 11 attacks.

She released the report against the wishes of the Obama Administration, and Republicans including Devin Nunes, then the congressman from Visalia who was incoming chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

“The important thing is that America recognizes its mistakes and takes the steps necessary to correct them,” Feinstein told me when I worked for the Bee. “In so many countries, that doesn’t happen.”

A Senate Republican, Richard Burr, shrugged that the report would be remembered as a footnote. Maybe so, but Hollywood told the story in “The Report,” and Annette Bening played Sen. Feinstein.

Feinstein stayed a term too long, although if I had been the Bee’s editorial page editor in 2018, I would have urged that we endorse her. California needed a senator with gravitas during Donald Trump’s presidency.

There are people who believe Feinstein’s legacy will come down to her final few years in office, when she became frail, sometimes confused, and evidently had memory issues. Those people don’t know Dianne Feinstein. She is much more than a footnote.