Dianne Feinstein, the grande dame of California Democrats who became the mayor of San Francisco after a horrific double assassination at City Hall in 1978 and then gained national stature as an influential voice in the United States Senate for more than 30 years, died on Thursday night. She was 90 and the Senate’s oldest member.
Her death was confirmed by family members.
Her death comes a few months after she announced that she intended to retire at the end of her term in January 2025. The news concluded a protracted guessing game as to whether she would seek another term on Capitol Hill at her advanced age, and it set off a scramble among California Democrats eager to succeed her.
Ms. Feinstein’s political life first gained traction during a volatile period in San Francisco and played out in tense Senate years, when an impeached President Bill Clinton was acquitted and the nation went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Throughout, she was an eloquent champion of civil rights and gun control who defended and also denounced national security measures in the age of terrorism.
A tough campaigner who often embraced conservative ideas, Ms. Feinstein (pronounced FINE-stine) was San Francisco’s mayor from 1978 to 1988. After losing a race for governor of California to Pete Wilson, a Republican, in 1990, she won a special election for his old Senate seat in 1992, then a full six-year term in 1994, and was re-elected by large margins in 2000, 2006 and 2012.
When she won a sixth term in 2018, she was already the oldest member of the Senate, having outlasted four presidencies and seen the beginning of a fifth, that of Joe Biden.
She achieved remarkable political breakthroughs as a woman, becoming San Francisco’s first female mayor; the first to be considered as a presidential running mate, in 1984 (Walter F. Mondale eventually chose Geraldine A. Ferraro); the first major-party candidate for governor of California; the state’s first woman elected to the Senate; and, in time, a fixture among the oldest members of the Senate. She presided over President Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural ceremonies, another first for a woman. And in November 2022, after 30 years in the Senate, she surpassed Barbara A. Mikulski’s record as the longest-tenured female senator in American history.
Ms. Feinstein called herself a political centrist, and she sometimes changed her mind. She opposed and later supported same-sex marriage and the death penalty. Her most notable reversals, however, followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
She voted for the war in Iraq and, for a time, backed President George W. Bush’s policies on detaining and interrogating terrorist suspects, most of whom were moved to the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba in 2006.
But by 2007, Ms. Feinstein favored closing Guantánamo, and in 2014, as chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she oversaw a damning report detailing the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 program of detaining terrorist suspects at secret prisons around the world and subjecting them to torture techniques, ostensibly to uncover and prevent future attacks. Mr. Obama had ordered an end to such inhumane practices after he took office in 2009, although human rights groups have said that many continued for years.
“My words give me no pleasure,” Ms. Feinstein told the Senate when the report was released. “Nevertheless, such pressure, fear and expectation of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security. 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.”
To constituents and to a nation drawn to the story of her often difficult life, Ms. Feinstein seemed a paragon of dignity in conservative suits, perfectly coiffured and as regal as Queen Elizabeth II when they met in San Francisco. But the resolute face was lined with hardships: a childhood of abuse by a mentally unstable and alcoholic mother, a painful divorce that left her a young single parent, and the deaths of her father and her second husband after lingering struggles with cancer.
By age 45, still unknown outside her hometown, she seemed washed up in politics. She was president of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, the city-county legislature, and an all but hopeless aspirant for mayor. She had already lost twice in the city’s nonpartisan mayoral races, in 1971 to Joseph Alioto and in 1975 to George Moscone. And her life had been threatened: A bomb had been planted at her home, reportedly by members of the New World Liberation Front, one of several underground radical groups operating in the Bay Area. The bomb did not explode, but the windows of her vacation house were later shot out.
On Nov. 27, 1978, at the end of her tether, Ms. Feinstein told City Hall reporters that she intended to quit political life. Two hours later, shots exploded down the hall from her office. She ran toward the gunfire and, moments later, knelt beside a dying mayor. Mr. Moscone and Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay supervisor, who was shot in another office, had been killed by Dan White, a disgruntled former supervisor, who was quickly captured and eventually imprisoned.
A complete obituary will appear shortly.