She will be called icon and trailblazer many times today, and it still won’t be enough. ?? pic.twitter.com/BgJXBt4Ghk
— tré easton (@treeaston) September 29, 2023
There are many tributes, but it will be hard to beat this one. The Washington Post reprints a profile from 1984, about a history most of us never knew — “Dianne Feinstein makes the vice-president shortlist” [Unpaywalled gift link]:
After a while it begins to feel relentless. Here come the national news magazines, and the suburban dailies, and the eastern papers, and Cable News Network and the “CBS Morning News”; here come Brussels and Tokyo television men, wondering if she might spare them a moment or two. Here comes the AM radio man, following her even into a late-night television appearance, asking about it again…
Last Saturday, in a two-hour visit at his home in North Oaks, Minn., Walter Mondale interviewed Dianne Feinstein about her possibilities as Democratic candidate for the vice presidency of the United States. “A symbol of the very best in America,” Mondale said afterward, as the two of them smiled broadly for reporters. It was a laboriously publicized visit, like nearly everything connected with the present fuss over the vice presidency; it has been duly noted that in his first 10 days of interviewing potential running mates, Mondale interviewed and thus publicly flattered Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, a southerner; Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a black; and Dianne Feinstein, a woman.
A Jewish woman, at that.
A Jewish woman from San Francisco, which in other parts of the country has what advertising people might call an “image problem.”
She knows the odds on this…
A kind of bruised sound is creeping into her voice.
“I mean, after all the b.s. you can take in this job, well, I can hold my head high,” Feinstein says. “And that’s nice, too.”
The mayor of San Francisco is sitting, as she says this, on a bench alongside Stow Lake, which is a small and locally cherished man-made lake in Golden Gate Park. She is wearing a slightly sweaty T-shirt, blue warm-up pants, running shoes and tortoise-shell sunglasses. She is the mayor of an odd, fickle, 700,000-person city, a woman shoved into office by a double murder, elected to a standard term, subjected to an unyieldingly nasty recall campaign, upheld by a vast majority of the voters and ushered nearly without opposition into a second mayoral term….
Rest in Peace, At Last: Dianne Feinstein, TrailblazerPost + Comments (83)