29th September, 2023
Dianne Feinstein, a long-serving Democratic U.S. senator from California has died at 90, multiple news channels reported on Friday.
As senator, Feinstein was a gun control advocate who spearheaded the first federal assault weapons ban and documented the CIA’s torture of foreign terrorism suspects,
She was also a Washington trail-blazer who among other accomplishments became the first woman to head the influential Senate Intelligence Committee.
During almost 31 years in Senate she amassed a moderate-to-liberal record, sometimes drawing scorn from the left.
Feinstein joined the Senate in 1992 after winning a special election and was re-elected five times including in 2018, along the way becoming the longest-serving woman senator ever.
Feinstein’s political career was shaped by guns.
She became San Francisco’s mayor in 1978 upon the assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.
Feinstein was president of the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors when Moscone and Milk were gunned down by a former supervisor, Dan White.
After hearing the gunshots, she rushed to Milk’s office. While searching for his pulse, her finger found a bullet hole.
Feinstein said the horror of that experience never left her and she went on to author the federal ban on military-style assault weapons that lasted from 1994 until its 2004 expiration.
“This is a gun-happy nation, and everybody can have their gun,” Feinstein said after a May 2021 mass shooting in her home state as she lamented years of congressional failure to pass new gun control laws to guard against “the killing of innocents.”
Born on June 22, 1933, Feinstein grew up in San Francisco and graduated from Stanford University. She was elected in 1969 to the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors and became its president in 1978, a position she held until Moscone’s killing.
She became San Francisco’s first woman mayor and was elected to two full terms.
She ran for governor in 1990, winning the Democratic primary but losing to Republican Pete Wilson in the general election.
Feinstein then ran in 1992 for the Senate seat that Wilson had previously held, easily defeating the Republican appointed to the seat.
She became California’s longest-serving senator and its first woman elected to the chamber.
Feinstein’s first marriage ended in divorce. She then married Bertram Feinstein, a surgeon.
After his death, she married Richard Blum, an investment banker, in 1980. He died in 2022.