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 — …
Rest in Peace, At Last: Dianne Feinstein, TrailblazerPost + Comments (83)
[Trigger warning: The story of her childhood is almost as harrowing as the story of the Moscone / Milk murders.]
… The whole city was benumbed already by the Jonestown deaths, and when just over a week after Jonestown the news came crashing down from City Hall-that the conservative former supervisor Dan White, ostensibly in a rage over Moscone’s failure to give him back the supervisor’s seat White had quit, climbed through a basement City Hall window and shot to death both Moscone and gay supervisor Harvey Milk — then, for the people who kept gathering in quiet, desperate memorial services, the thing was nearly too much to bear.
And Feinstein kept saying it would end, that it would be over, that the city would go on. The Board of Supervisors made her mayor, and from the moment she had to walk into the City Hall corridor to tell the small assemblage of reporters that Moscone and Milk were dead — the tapes, played again and again in the aftermath, recorded some reporter’s full scream — Feinstein did what she had to do with such grace that even her most ardent political enemies soften still when they remember it. “It is my duty to make this announcement . . .” She stood up straight and sounded steady and yet compassion somehow resonated from her every time she spoke, or moved among a grieving crowd. “As we reconstructed the city after the physical damage done by the earthquake and fire, so too can we rebuild from the spiritual damage . . .”
She had run for mayor twice in her career, and been beaten both times so badly that the severity of the trouncings astonished her. She had convinced herself that she was unelectable, that it was time for her to leave city politics. And now, in a city cracked by death, with a massive anti-discrimination suit facing the police department and a $130 million budget deficit brought on largely by the tax-cutting initiative Proposition 13, Dianne Feinstein was the mayor of San Francisco…
And if you are a woman, you must, of course, yell twice as hard and look twice as mean, until after a while they get used to you, Feinstein says. If you have been mayor for 5½ years by then and if your name is mentioned in the same sentence as “vice president” by people not simply out to flatter, then the pressure to be tough starts at last to ease off.
“I’m finding it less and less now,” she says. “I think I’ve made the point.”
And that was almost forty years ago!
Senator Dianne Feinstein was a pioneering American.
Serving in the Senate together for more than 15 years, I had a front row seat to what Dianne was able to accomplish.
Dianne was tough, sharp, always prepared, and never pulled a punch, but she was also a kind and loyal friend,… pic.twitter.com/I2zQvOkDud
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 29, 2023