Flags are at half mast in San Francisco’s city hall for a woman who was born here and died in Washington DC at the end of a remarkable life. It was inside that building that the most dramatic and pivotal event of Dianne Feinstein’s political career took place, when a murderer made her mayor, the mayor who would become one of the country’s strongest leaders in response to the Aids crisis. That role gave her the visibility to run for the Senate in 1992, and she held onto that seat to her dying day, showing up on Thursday to cast a vote in the budget battle, hours before her death at 90.
Senator Feinstein began her political career being ahead of her society and ended it by being behind it. This is not surprising for a public life in politics that stretched through 60 years of dramatic social and political change. But it may be hard to perceive for those who don’t know she was early on a champion for women’s rights – including her own just to participate, at a time when that was groundbreaking – and for rights and recognition for queer people at a time when most politicians would only mention them to demand punishment and ostracization for them.
She was one of California’s first two women senators (Barbara Boxer won office in the same 1992 election) and the nation’s first two Jewish women senators, the first female member of the Senate judiciary committee, first woman to chair the Senate rules committee, and in 2009, the first woman to preside over a presidential inauguration.
Obama, of course, was that president, and he later opposed her years of effort to expose widespread torture by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during George W Bush’s “global war on terror”. Feinstein, as head of the Senate intelligence committee, fought both presidents, the CIA’s director and various Republicans to release a scathing summary report on that torture. But she also defended the National Security Administration’s surveillance of US citizens.
She was often a contradiction and always a patrician, born into wealth and becoming far wealthier through her third marriage in 1980 to the billionaire financier Richard Blum. She was also in her Senate career an important advocate for reproductive rights, environmental protection and gun control. But in recent years, she seemed like a ghost moving among ghosts, acting as though collegiality, bipartisanship and adherence to norms still prevailed in a Senate in which most Republicans had long been ruthless, reckless partisans whose one goal was power.
Upon news of her death on Friday, many recalled her patronizingly clueless response to young members of the Sunrise Movement occupying her office in 2019 to press for passage of the Green New Deal. She had remarkable achievements in old-school environmentalism, with legislation that protected millions of acres of the California desert, then did the same for redwood forests and Lake Tahoe. But she too often deferred to business interests – as Mother Jones noted: “She brokered a monumental restoration agreement on the valley’s overstressed San Joaquin River in 2009, but then helped override species protections for fish on that same river in 2016.”
First elected to the San Francisco board of supervisors in 1970, she became its first woman president. On the morning of 27 November 1978, the former policeman Dan White, who’d resigned from his seat on the board of supervisors, snuck into San Francisco city hall through a basement window carrying a gun. He demanded the liberal mayor, George Moscone, restore him to his position, and when Moscone declined, White fired several bullets into the progressive, finishing him off execution-style with a bullet to the head, then ran past Feinstein’s open office door as she called to him, and murdered the supervisor Harvey Milk, the country’s first openly gay man elected to a public office.
Feinstein was the first to try to come to Milk’s aid; she reached for his wrist to take his pulse, only to have her finger go into one of the dead man’s bullet wounds. Cleve Jones, Milk’s friend and aide, remembers her sleeve and hand were red with Milk’s blood when he got to city hall later that morning. Cleve, who remains a political activist to this day, told me on Friday: “I have so many conflicting feelings about Dianne Feinstein. We have never been close friends, but we have quite a history and even at those moments when I was the most angry with her for whatever reason, we always had this bond that we both were there in city hall looking down at Harvey’s body, and that was something that changed both of our lives forever.”
The video of a shaken Feinstein telling the press, to audible gasps and cries, that the two officials had been murdered and that the suspect was Dan White, is still riveting. She stepped into the mayor’s seat later that day and won re-election for two full terms. She picked a gay man, Harry Britt, to take Harvey Milk’s seat. Jones recalled: “There was a time when every candidate for public office refused to acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people. There’s no question that Dianne Feinstein was one of the very first political leaders in the country and the world to acknowledge the existence of our community, to seek our vote, and to attempt to represent us on the issues that matter.”
He continued: “When Aids started, it unleashed an incredible amount of cruelty. People were celebrating what was happening to us because first it was seen as a gay disease.” The Black community was also hugely impacted, and so “that initial reaction of homophobia compounded by racism led to some really horrible demagoguery”. Feinstein, he says, “rejected all that hatefulness with love and compassion and a belief in science”. Under Feinstein’s leadership, San Francisco led the world in Aids research, treatment and advocacy. Jones told me that watching her decline was sad, because “whether I agreed with her or not on her issues and her class loyalty, she was brilliant, truly brilliant” in her prime.
When I moved to San Francisco at age 18 in 1980, Feinstein had been in city government for a decade. I never saw her in person, but she was omnipresent throughout my adult life, first as my mayor, then after a few years out of office my senator. She was a highly recognizable figure, tall and upright, with a helmet of black hair and boxy skirt suits, and she was often mocked locally by constituents far to the left of her. Like so many public figures, Feinstein was full of contradictions, sometimes brave and ahead of her time, sometimes mired in the status quo.
But early on she did make waves by her very existence as a woman who entered the political arena at a time when women were unwelcome and largely absent there; later, she made more when she fought the CIA to expose their human rights abuses and took on the gun industry with her campaigns for banning assault rifles and regulating gun access. She deserves to be remembered for the full range of her achievements and positions, good and bad.
• This article was amended on 3 October 2023. An earlier version stated that Harvey Milk was the country’s first gay public official, rather than the first openly gay man elected to public office.
Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility
