![Dianne Feinstein in her office after she was elected mayor of San Francisco, circa 1979](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2023/10/01/TELEMMGLPICT000351296146_16961722835750_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqA7N2CxnJWnYI3tCbVBgu9T0aesusvN1TE7a0ddd_esI.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Dianne Feinstein, trailblazing US senator and former San Francisco mayor – obituary
She was on the scene when her mayoral predecessor was shot dead, and in the US Senate she pushed for a ban on the sale of assault weapons
![Dianne Feinstein in her office after she was elected mayor of San Francisco, circa 1979](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2023/10/01/TELEMMGLPICT000351296146_16961722835750_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqA7N2CxnJWnYI3tCbVBgu9T0aesusvN1TE7a0ddd_esI.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Dianne Feinstein, who has died aged 90, spent more than 30 years as a Democratic senator for California, blazing a trail for women in American politics; previously she had been the first female mayor of San Francisco, stepping up after George Moscone, the progressive incumbent, and Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay supervisor (or councillor), were assassinated.
On the morning of November 27 1978, Dianne Feinstein, a widow of seven months, had been on the verge of quitting politics. Looking up from her desk in City Hall she saw Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor, rush into Milk’s office. “I heard the door close. I heard unmistakable shots… I smelled the gunpowder,” she testified at White’s trial.
Her first thought was that White – who had resigned his post, changed his mind, but had not been allowed to return by Moscone – had taken his own life. It transpired that he had shot Moscone 90 seconds earlier; he now pulled the trigger on Milk.
“I found Milk’s body… I tried to get a pulse but couldn’t because of the blood,” she said, describing how her fingers had entered a bullet hole on his wrist as she knelt on the blood-soaked floor.
![San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein leading 15,000 marchers in memory of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in San Francisco, Nov 1979](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2023/10/01/TELEMMGLPICT000351298365_16961725667160_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Still in her blood-stained clothing, Dianne Feinstein announced the deaths to a distraught crowd of hundreds gathered on the steps of City Hall. “She was poised. She was eloquent. She was restrained. And she was strong,” observed the San Francisco Chronicle.
Under the state’s succession rules she was now mayor. “I went through a mini-Lyndon Johnson syndrome,” she said, referring to the vice-president who had stepped up after President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. “There was no transition team, decisions had to be made, things had been started, the budget was in preparation.”
Re-elected by the voters of San Francisco in 1979 and in 1983, she oversaw an increase in the number of high-rise buildings and greater recognition of civil rights, but angered the large gay community by vetoing legislation to recognise same-sex partners.
She also oversaw the rebuilding of the city’s cable-car system, which reopened in time for the 1984 Democratic National Convention in the city, and she was widely tipped as a running mate for Walter Mondale in that year’s presidential election, though in the end he chose Geraldine Ferraro.
![Senator Dianne Feinstein (on Capitol Hill, Washington, 2017): renowned for her composure](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2023/10/01/TELEMMGLPICT000351296081_16961723937770_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqIbTDq2tM-BCxND-etb_WlK_JuvlXy3Xq7MATOpSMYWc.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In her prime the raven-haired and blue-eyed Dianne Feinstein, who stood nearly 6ft tall in heels, was renowned for her composure. When she greeted Queen Elizabeth II on a 1983 visit to San Francisco, an opponent observed with grudging admiration that it was hard “to tell who was more regal” .
In 1990 she stood to be governor of California, but lost to the Republican senator Pete Wilson. When he resigned from the Senate to take up the governorship, she successfully won the special election held in 1992 to replace him.
In the Senate she became known for championing gun control, environmental protections and human rights. She introduced legislation that in 1994 led to a decade-long moratorium on the sale of assault weapons, though the ban was not renewed in 2003; she exposed the CIA’s brutal detention and interrogation practices in the post-9/11 War on Terror; and she promoted abortion rights.
In recent years, however, Dianne Feinstein’s consensual approach seemed increasingly out of tune with a bitterly divided America, often disappointing her more radical colleagues. At the 2020 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett, a President Trump nomination, the 87-year-old irked fellow Democrats with her embracing and thanking of the Republican Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham.
Despite calls for her to step aside, Dianne Feinstein remained in office until her death, becoming the longest-serving female senator. In February she had announced her intention to retire – though not until 2025, at the end of her term. “So don’t hold your breath,” she added.
![Senator Feinstein, Democrat of California, laughing with a convention delegate at the Democratic National Convention, August 14 2000 in Los Angeles](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2023/10/01/TELEMMGLPICT000351296912_16961726412780_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
Dianne Emiel Goldman was born in San Francisco on June 22 1933, the eldest of three daughters of Leon Goldman, a prominent surgeon, and his wife Betty, née Rosenburg, a former model and nurse. Their forebears had emigrated from Poland and Russia respectively and both families were of Jewish origin, though her mother’s family practised the Russian Orthodox faith.
Her mother was an alcoholic whose unpredictable behaviour was later revealed to have been caused by undiagnosed brain damage.
On one occasion she chased Dianne around the kitchen table with a carving knife; on another she tried to drown Dianne and her sisters, Yvonne and Lynn, in the bath. Dianne recalled her father frantically trying to wake the comatose woman, making her vomit the sleeping pills on which she had overdosed.
She was educated at Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, a private Catholic girls’ school in San Francisco, though in her teens she embraced her Jewish heritage. Aged 16 she beat 26 other contestants to be named rodeo queen at the state’s Grand National Junior Livestock Exposition.
Her introduction to politics came through her uncle Morris, who took her on outings to City Hall to observe what he called “the Board of Stupidvisors”. Reading history at Stanford University, she was elected vice-president of the student body.
She worked at the Coro Foundation, a public-affairs leadership programme, but in 1956 caused a scandal by eloping to marry Jack Berman, a Navy veteran who had served as a trial lawyer in the Philippines war crime trials. He was described in his San Francisco Chronicle obituary in 2002 as a “story-teller, civil rights advocate, gambler [and] boxing aficionado”.
The marriage was dissolved amid much bitterness in 1959 “on grounds of extreme cruelty”, and in 1962 she married Bertram Feinstein, a Canadian-born neurosurgeon.
Meanwhile, she was appointed director of the League of Women Voters, served on the prison board of the California Institution for Women, and in 1965 became the youngest member of the state’s parole board.
Governor Pat Brown, one of her father’s patients, appointed her to a commission examining women’s detention facilities and she became known for berating officials about poor prison conditions, budget cuts and the dearth of rehabilitation programmes.
This and other crime-related responsibilities brought her sufficient public recognition to be elected in 1969 to the 11-member San Francisco Board of Supervisors. By winning the most votes she became its president. She first ran for mayor in 1971 and 1975 but was unsuccessful.
![Senator Feinstein takes her seat at a business hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in May 2023](/https/www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/obituaries/2023/10/01/TELEMMGLPICT000351296171_16961727802230_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqqVzuuqpFlyLIwiB6NTmJwfSVWeZ_vEN7c6bHu2jJnT8.jpeg?imwidth=350)
In 1976 she was the target of two assassination attempts by the Left-wing New World Liberation Front, who placed a bomb at her home that failed to detonate, and shot out the windows of her beach home at Monterey Bay.
The title of her biography by Jerry Roberts, Never Let Them See You Cry (1996), came from an interview she gave to a women’s magazine about succeeding in the workplace. “She always put on a very brave, professional and very polished public image, even when she was experiencing a lot of anguish and private pain,” Roberts said.
Dianne Feinstein’s second husband died in 1978 and in 1980 she married Richard Blum, an investment broker who died last year. She is survived by a daughter from her first marriage, Katherine Feinstein, who took her stepfather’s surname and is president of the San Francisco Fire Commission.
Dianne Feinstein, born June 22 1933, died September 28 2023