Dianne Feinstein’s legacy will be defined by these moments

SAN FRANCISCO — Few figures have shaped California politics like Sen. Dianne Feinstein.

The San Francisco Democrat is the longest-serving woman in the history of the U.S. Senate. Her long-anticipated announcement this week that she would retire rather than seek another term in 2024 sets an end date on more than 30 years in Congress and has ignited a succession scramble among ambitious House Democrats.

Feinstein’s signal achievements on firearms and oversight required her to overcome some of Washington’s mightiest entrenched interests, most notably the gun lobby and the federal intelligence apparatus. She has also delivered for California in ways that have drawn less attention beyond the state, including an act protecting millions of acres of desert in southern California. She has led some of the body’s most influential committees in the Senate and Judiciary panels, overseeing high-stakes appointment fights and investigations.

“It would be impossible to write the history of California politics, it would be impossible to write the history of American politics without acknowledging the trailblazing career of Sen. Dianne Feinstein,” Sen. Alex Padilla — who worked for Feinstein as a district staffer in the 1990s — said on Tuesday.

But her in-state standing has plummeted in recent years as restive California Democrats argue Feinstein is no longer suited to represent the deep-blue state. Her critics see her as an out-of-touch centrist who has not adapted to a more combative political era, and colleagues and staffers have increasingly questioned Feinstein’s mental fitness as she approaches her 90th birthday.

Despite those frustrations, Feinstein will retire as one of California’s most important political figures of the past four decades. Here are five chapters of her career that will define her legacy.

Tragedy in San Francisco

On the morning of Nov. 27, 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Dianne Feinstein’s political career was at its nadir. She had lost successive mayoral races, including one in which she was seen as the frontrunner but was defeated by the more-progressive Mayor George Moscone. She told reporters she had no intention to run a third time.

A morning of horror and bloodshed changed everything. Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk — who had made history as California’s first openly gay elected official — were assassinated at City Hall by fellow former Supervisor Dan White. Feinstein discovered Milk’s body and informed the press. She navigated the chaotic political aftermath to become acting mayor and then win two full terms.

“That resurrected her career,” said Jerry Roberts, a longtime journalist who wrote a biography of Feinstein. “She did a good job getting through the funerals and the riots, and she frankly did a good job of putting together the votes to be elected the acting mayor.”

Feinstein would guide the city through a turbulent time at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. She survived a recall attempt after enacting a handgun ban, which presaged her push in the Senate to outlaw assault weapons.

“She basically did a really good job of keeping the city stabilized,” said Bill Carrick, her longtime campaign consultant. “The post-assassination period was very tumultuous and she was a very steady hand.”

The assault weapons ban

Feinstein lost her first statewide race, finishing behind then-Sen. Pete Wilson in the 1990 campaign for governor. She decisively won her Senate seat by defeating Wilson’s Republican successor. Then-Rep. Barbara Boxer also won her 1992 Senate race, giving California an unprecedented two women senators. Despite outsize attention for breaking barriers, it wasn’t easy.

“Things that were said at that time were so outrageous – like ‘I, I can vote for one woman but I can’t vote for two,’” Boxer said in an interview. “There was so much prejudice out there, you can’t even imagine.”

Feinstein cracked the all-male Senate Judiciary committee with a nod from then-chair Joe Biden. She also almost immediately began pursuing what would become a defining achievement. Spurred by the assassinations of Milk and Moscone and by a mass 1993 shooting in downtown San Francisco, Feinstein worked to prohibit assault weapons.

The bill passed the Senate but faced a more strenuous fight in the House, where Feinstein linked it to a larger crime bill that expanded the death penalty. Even with the Clinton White House helping to whip votes – and Feinstein flipping Republican Rep. Henry Hyde by stressing youth shooting deaths – the measure appeared doomed on the eve of a House vote, with Feinstein lamenting the “degree to which the National Rifle Association controls this body.” But in a dramatic finish, the measure cleared the House floor by two votes.

“What’s clear to me all these years later, as it was then — crystal clear — it would not have happened without Dianne Feinstein,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, who was also a freshman member at the time. “She was the moving force.”

Victory required compromises like a 10-year sunset. After expiring in 2004, the law has never been renewed — and Feinstein has never stopped trying. When Biden called for a ban this year, shortly after a mass shooting in Los Angeles, the president recounted working with Feinstein in 1994. Back then, Feinstein told the Los Angeles Times Biden was ultimately supportive but initially skeptical, telling her it “could bring down the whole crime bill. But he said it would be a good lesson for me if I wanted to try.”

The CIA report

The assault weapons bill set Feinstein against the NRA. Her quest to uncover intelligence abuses spurred an extraordinarily contentious fight with a less predictable foe: a Democratic administration.

As chair of the powerful Intelligence Committee, Feinstein was determined to examine the Central Intelligence Agency’s program of detention and interrogation after the Sept. 11 attacks. She pursued the investigation during President Barack Obama’s administration, clashing bitterly with a fellow Democrat over reckoning with America’s wartime conduct. The result: The public can read the bulk of a 700-plus page executive summary cataloguing how the CIA’s torture and detention of terrorism suspects did not produce valuable intelligence and was more brutal than the agency had publicly acknowledged.

“The major lesson of this report is that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the Intelligence Community's actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards,” Feinstein wrote in a foreword. Instead, CIA personnel, aided by two outside contractors, decided to initiate a program of indefinite secret detention and the use of brutal interrogation techniques in violation of U.S. law, treaty obligations, and our values.”

Initially, CIA director (and fellow Californian) Leon Panetta worked with Feinstein and her staffers by sharing a tranche of documents that Senate staffers pored over inside a secure facility in northern Virginia. After three years of work, they sent a damning report to the White House.

“I really felt that Senator Feinstein, as chair of the Intelligence oversight committee, understood the responsibility to not only determine what happened but also to determine the lessons from that period in time,” Panetta said in an interview.

That collaborative spirit evaporated by the time John Brennan became CIA director in 2013. Brennan disputed the report’s conclusions, contradicting an internal agency summary and delaying publication. A larger conflict erupted over access: Brennan’s counsel filed a report with the Department of Justice alleging Senate staffers had accessed CIA documents without authorization; lawmakers accused the CIA of tapping into Senate staff computers.

It came to a head in March of 2014. Feinstein delivered a Senate floor speech describing how she learned “chilling” and “horrible” details of an “un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation” that entailed “significant CIA wrongdoing.” She demanded the CIA apologize for breaching the computers Senate staff were using, which Brennan ultimately did after an inspector general’s report vindicated Feinstein.

In the ensuing months, Feinstein would negotiate the fine points of redactions with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who flew to San Francisco to meet with her. She faced blowback until the very end. Just days before the committee published its executive report, Secretary of State John Kerry lobbied Feinstein to hold off. She did not. Now the report is an indelible part of her record and a primary document of the country’s history.

“I think it was Dianne’s hope that, if she persisted and she presented what happened, that although it would be difficult, although it would offend a lot of people in the process, that nevertheless she would serve the national interest,” Panetta said. “She knew what needed to be done, and she was experienced enough to know how the bureaucracy can be a barrier to finding the truth.”

The non-endorsement

 
By 2018, many California Democrats had become disillusioned with Feinstein. Her relative centrism and deference to Senate decorum struck progressives as unacceptable under a Trump administration they regarded as an existential threat.

It wasn’t the first time Feinstein rankled the party faithful. She drew boos when she told a 1990 California Democratic Party gathering that they should support the death penalty. Rather than seeing that as a liability, her campaign team put the footage in a television spot.

But politics had shifted. California voters had legalized marijuana and decriminalized drug possession. Then-Gov. Jerry Brown had signed a “sanctuary state” law barring cooperation between local law enforcement and immigration authorities.

As Feinstein ran her final reelection campaign, the California Democratic Party publicly repudiated her twice: Activists denied her the endorsement during the primary and, in the summer, endorsed State Senate Leader Kevin de León’s challenge from her left.

“We were trying to make a decision on who we thought would be a good U.S. senator that would be more ideologically in tuned with where the party was, because we felt like the party was much more progressive than where Dianne Feinstein was,” said Susie Shannon, a party official and DNC member. “We were moving in a certain direction in the state, in the Legislature, in things we were passing, that we didn’t feel was being reflected in the votes of our U.S. senator.”

It wouldn’t matter on Election Day. Feinstein crushed de León, defeating him by roughly a million votes. But the endorsement drama hinted at events to come.

The end

A series of events in Feinstein’s final term crystallized Democratic frustrations and raised questions about her fitness to lead. Just months after winning reelection, she angered many progressives by lecturing young climate activists with the Sunrise Movement who urged her to support the Green New Deal.

But the fallout from that incident was dwarfed by the reaction to how Feinstein, as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, handled Supreme Court confirmation battles. Democrats had already questioned why Feinstein waited months to disclose an allegation against nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Then, during an acrimonious fight over appointee Amy Coney Barrett, Feinstein praised the committee hearings and physically embraced Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The left erupted. Feinstein stepped down as chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her statewide approval rating plunged underwater in a respected poll and, by March 2022, had dipped to its lowest level on record.

Criticisms went beyond policy. Colleagues and staffers raised increasingly dire concerns about Feinstein’s memory and her cognitive state as she went deeper into her eighth decade. Democratic senators aired those concerns in a 2020 POLITICO story, and an extensive 2022 piece in the San Francisco Chronicle detailed deepening worries about Feinstein’s mental faculties.

Those late-career qualms will be part of Feinstein's story. But they are only a final chapter in a career her colleagues celebrated with a minutes-long standing ovation after the senator announced her intentions.

Feinstein “got shit done by working with people on both sides of the aisle and refusing to get caught up in unnecessary nonsense,” said John Burton, a former California Democratic Party chair. “To those lining up to run for her seat, I hope you honor the fact that this powerful lady blazed the trail for you."