#956: There Will Never Be Another Dianne Goldman Feinstein Blum
Woke up quite early yesterday, only to find out that the dean of the United States Senate, California’s Dianne Feinstein, had passed away at age 90. “It’s the end of an era,” many commentators lamented throughout the day. That term ‘end of an era’ - doesn’t even come close. The senator was a throwback to a time when civility, bipartisanship and a touch of both elegance and eloquence pervaded its halls. Senator Feinstein was, from a strictly political point of view, both a dynamo and a doyenne. Just mere hours before her passing, she cast the final vote of her long, long career - an ‘aye’ vote on a procedural short-term government funding plan. She was then helped back to her office, completed the days work, went home, and died in her sleep.
Already, there are some ancillary issues surrounding and clouding her passing: precisely whom California Governor Newsome will select to replace her, and the question of why she did not retire sooner, seeing that in the past year she was either absent at home, or hospitalized (due to a nasty case of Shingles that led to encephalitis, a rare complication that causes inflammation and swelling in the brain). I for one hope that discussions based on that last year of her long, productive life won’t erase all that she accomplished. For make no mistake about it: this elegantly-dressed, perfectly coiffed lady was a political superheavyweight.
Over more than a 30-year period (which encompasses 2 mammoth books published in 2000 and 2010), I interviewed her on numerous occasions; I will long remember her graciousness, her pluck and sheer class. She was, in a infrequently-used phrase, the living embodiment of an “iron fist inside a velvet glove.”
What follows is based on the two biographic entries in my books, “The Congressional Minyan” and “The Jews of Capitol Hill.” As much as I have written about her (and you will now hopefully read), my words don’t come within 50 furlongs of presenting Senator Dianne Goldman, Feinstein Bloom in toto. She was and shall always be sui generis . . . one of a kind.
As the child of a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Dianne Emiel Goldman was raised in two religious traditions. As a teenager, she attended the exclusive Convent of the Sacred Heart, where she was the only Jewish student, and went to synagogue on Friday nights. It was the Goldmans’ hope and expectation that once grown, Dianne and her two younger sisters would make their own choices as to religious affiliation. Speaking about her dual upbringing from the distance of more than forty years, Dianne Feinstein said, “I was brought up supposedly with some Catholic religion and some Jewish, and I was to choose . . . but I don’t think that works very well. You are what you are.” When she was twenty, Dianne Goldman decided what she was; she officially converted to Judaism. Born in San Francisco on June 22, 1933, the future Dianne (the unusual spelling is said to be in tribute to her late maternal aunt Anne) Feinstein was the eldest child of Dr. Leon and Betty (Rosenburg) Goldman. Her father, a prominent surgeon and professor at the University of California, San Francisco, was the son of Orthodox Jews. Leon’s father, born Samuel Gelleorivich, is said to have stowed away at the age of fourteen on a ship bound for Boston in order to flee a pogrom in his hometown of Griva, “in a region of Russian-ruled Poland.” His mother, Lily Kaflin, came from Vilna. In America, Samuel Gelleorivich became Sam Goldman. “A shoemaker by trade, he made his way west to Sacramento and, in 1895, moved south to San Francisco, where he opened a dry goods store on Market Street. He would eventually have 11 children.” Following the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, Sam moved across the bay to Berkeley and eventually wound up in Southern California, where he “speculated in wildcat oil wells and worked as a retail merchant before finally returning to the San Francisco Bay. Sam Goldman helped found several synagogues in California; his son Leon would become a prominent donor to San Francisco’s Mount Zion Synagogue. Leon, who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and earned his medical degree at the university’s campus in San Francisco, would be greatly assisted by one of his elder siblings, Morris, “a successful businessman and streetwise gambler.” Dianne’s mother, Betty, told her daughters that she had been born Pasha Pariskovia in St. Petersburg, Russia, and had fled the revolution with her family as a child. This was simply not true. The Rosenburgs—who had both Jewish and Eastern Orthodox sides to the family—came first to Eureka in Northern California, where there was a large Russian settlement. Betty, who in her younger years called herself “Bessie,” was a sickly child. By all accounts, she spent several years in a sanitarium, likely suffering from encephalitis (ironically, the same malady that was partially to blame for Dianne’s death many, many years later).
By the 1920s, the Rosenburgs had come to San Francisco, where Betty found a job modeling clothes at Maison Mendesolle, a boutique in the upscale Saint Francis Hotel. (n.b. Maison Mendesolle still exists in 2023 and specializes in vintage clothing and jewelry. It is no long housed in the St. Francis.) Leon and Betty’s marriage announcement did not sit well with her family. As a result, the couple eloped to Reno, Nevada, where they were married by a Conservative Rabbi on January 19, 1931. Dianne and her sisters did not know that their parents had been married by a rabbi; Betty always told her children she was Russian Orthodox. As Dianne would recount many years later, “My father thought my mother was Jewish. But she wasn’t.” Mrs. Goldman suffered from an undiagnosed brain disorder (likely encephalitis) . As her daughter, the senator, would reveal many years later, “She was prone to great bouts of hostility and irrationality that sometimes manifested themselves in really undeserved punishments for us.”
As a result of their mother’s unpredictability, Dianne and her younger sisters, Yvonne and Lynn, “lived in a great deal of fear.” Late in life, with the invention and perfection of the CAT scanner, the source of Mrs. Goldman’s problem was finally diagnosed as “Chronic Brain Syndrome.” (Generally speaking, C.B.S. is defined as a “Global deterioration in intellectual function, behavior and personality in the presence of normal consciousness and perception.”) Speaking of her childhood in a 1990 interview, Dianne Feinstein recounted, “It was not always easy with my mother, but she was still a good mother. She took good care of me and my sisters. I think I can say I was happy growing up.” (Dianne’s sister Yvonne was born in 1936, her sister Lynne in 1941.) Writing about Dianne and her sisters in a 1994 biography, Jerry Roberts described their lives: “They attended private schools, wore expensive clothes, were indulged with riding, tennis, and piano lessons, and were treated to white-gloved teas and luncheons at fine hotels and restaurants in fashionable Union Square.”
It is apparent that the two stabilizing influences in her young life were her father, a kindly man, and her father’s brother Morris, a clothing manufacturer with a passion for politics. Uncle Morrie was “a colorful San Francisco character in the style of Guys and Dolls.” Morrie lived at the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill, and held “informal membership in the ‘Third Base Gang,’ a fraternity of bookies, bettors and bagmen.” Where Dianne’s father was a Republican, Uncle Morris was often identified as a “frequent finance chairman” for local Democratic politicians. Morrie was connected to Arthur “Artie” Samish (1897–1974), who in his day was easily “the most influential and powerful individual lobbyist in California.” Morris Goldman introduced his favorite niece to politics by taking her to Monday-afternoon sessions of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, which he derisively referred to as the Board of “Stupidvisors.” It was Uncle Morris who planted the seeds of Dianne’s political ambitions. “Dianne, you get an education and you can do this job,” he would tell her. One of her classmates at Convent of the Sacred Heart, Cynthia Arden Brown, was the daughter of then–California attorney general (and future governor) Edmund G. “Pat” Brown. (Fortuitously, her father also happened to be Brown’s personal physician.) Upon meeting Brown (1905–1996), Dianne Goldman “impressed him with her interest in political life.” He decided to keep an eye on the teenager.
In 1951, following her graduation from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Dianne entered Stanford University. After a brief fling at premed—and after nearly failing a course in genetics—she changed majors to political science and history. While at Stanford, she modeled clothes on her uncle’s television show, played golf, taught horseback riding, and joined the Young Democrats. As a senior, she ran successfully for student body vice president. While campaigning at a fraternity house, she was severely heckled, picked up, and carried into a shower stall, where she was drenched. Rather than lash out, Feinstein took things in stride; she turned up the heat in her campaigning, and once in office used her newfound influence to deny the culprit fraternity a much-sought-after permit for an overnight party.
Upon graduating in 1955, Dianne became an intern at the San Francisco–based CORO Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing promising young adults with concrete experience in the realm of politics and public service. While on assignment to the San Francisco district attorney’s office, Dianne met and began working for a thirty-three-year-old prosecutor named Jack Berman. They eloped and were married on December 2, 1956. Just a few days shy of eight months later, July 31, 1957, Dianne gave birth to her only child, a daughter named “Katherine Anne.” The Bermans had “fundamental disagreements” over the role that a woman should play. “Berman wanted his wife to be a wife and a mother to their daughter. . . . She saw herself in this role but also wanted a career in the public sector.” The Bermans were divorced in 1959, leaving Dianne to raise a two-year-old child by herself. Jack Berman (1922–2002) would be appointed judge of the San Francisco Superior Court in 1982 by then–California governor Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown, the son of his old boss.
For the next several years, Dianne Goldman Berman took care of her daughter, explored various career paths, and worked as a volunteer in John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign. She also studied the Stanislavsky method of acting. After a few less-than-stellar acting appearances and a trip to New York—where she had gone to “browse the want ads and check out jobs and apartment prices [while] attending eight Broadway plays in five days”—she put her acting ambitions out to pasture. In 1961, she approached Governor Brown about the possibility of working for the state. Soon thereafter, Brown appointed the twenty-eight-year-old to the California Women’s Board of Terms and Parole, the body that set prison terms and parole conditions for female inmates in the California penal system. Feinstein (known at the time as Berman, of course) served on the board for the next five years, reviewing more than five thousand parole applications and formulating her positions on such issues as abortion and capital punishment. While serving on the Board of Terms, Feinstein became vehemently anti–death penalty: “Though you may owe it to your fellow-man to put a criminal out of commission, there is no moral or religious ground that gives you the right to terminate the life of another human being.”
Years later, she would change her point of view and come to support capital punishment as a means of deterring certain types of heinous crime: “In those days I saw the criminal justice arena very differently than I do now [1990]. The nature of the problem has changed. . . . I began to see that there are people who have no regard for other people’s lives—and over time came to forge the view that by your acts you can abrogate your own right to life.” This change of heart, derided by her political opponents as waffling or mere opportunism, would be used against her in future campaigns.
On November 11, 1962, twenty-nine-year-year-old Dianne Berman married a forty-eight-year-old neurosurgeon named Bertram Feinstein. Feinstein (1914–1978), a native of Winnipeg, swept the young divorcee off her feet. He was “charming, warm and witty . . . every inch a distinguished gentleman.” Within a few years of marrying they moved into a thirteen-room house on Lyon Street in Pacific Heights, home of some of San Francisco’s wealthiest residents. In 1968, San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto appointed Dianne Feinstein to a blue-ribbon committee on crime. With her increased visibility, she decided to chance a run for the eleven-member San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Bucking the odds—no woman had been elected to the board in nearly half a century—Feinstein, spending an unheard of $100,000, put together a coalition of liberals, gays, environmentalists, and minorities. Bert aided his wife’s campaign by putting up hundreds upon hundreds of signs with “DIANNE” in large red letters. (As a result, to this day most San Franciscans refer to her simply by her first name.) Feinstein overwhelmed the eighteen other candidates, capturing more votes than any of them. In one fell swoop, she became both a member and president of the board of supervisors.
Dianne Feinstein went on to serve nearly nine years on the board of supervisors. Additionally, she served as its president from 1970 to 1972, 1973 to 1976, and again in 1978. Not having to work for a living, she became the board’s first full-time supervisor. Early in her career she evinced what can only be called “tone deafness” when it came to women not so well off as herself. Shortly after her first campaign, for example, she argued that women made superior public servants because they were untainted by the need to make a living: “A woman does not have to make decisions based on the need to survive. She can cut through issues, call shots as she sees them. Many bad decisions are made by men in government because it is good for them personally to make bad public decision.”
During her eight years on the Board of Supervisors, she gained a reputation for being its most knowledgeable authority on criminal justice issues. She pushed for an increase in the number of police officers patrolling the city’s streets and sought much-needed revamping of the entire criminal justice system. Rather than announcing what her solutions would be to the problems and challenges facing “The City,” she brought in experts who would investigate, summarize and then make suggestions. This was indeed something new. San Francisco has long been known as a wide-open city—one eminently tolerant of the aberrant, the wild, and the woolly. Over the years it has been the home of such “dens of iniquity” as the Barbary Coast, Haight-Ashbury, the Castro District, and North Beach. San Francisco is often called the City by the Golden Gate; locals refer to it either as “Baghdad by the Bay” or, as the late San Francisco columnist Herb Caen, would have it, “Fagdad by the Bay.”
In 1970, Supervisor Feinstein made the politically unpopular move of tightening zoning restrictions “in order to limit or abolish adult nightclubs and movie theatres.” Going against the prevailing political wisdom, which would have had her simply look the other way and maintain the status quo, she instead did what she thought was right. After visiting a local pornographic movie house with members of her staff, the supervisor reported, “We have become a kind of smut capital of the United States. . . . As a woman I feel very strongly about it, because part of what is happening, what is shown on the screens, works to the basic denigration and humiliation of the female.”
At the same time, Dianne Feinstein was developing quite a following in San Francisco’s gay community. “She conferred legitimacy on many gay activist groups by attending rallies during her campaign, authored and obtained passage of a measure to ban job and hiring discrimination against gays, and favored a state law that would legalize all private sexual conduct between or among consenting adults.” Soon, Dianne Feinstein was the most visible member of the board of supervisors. In 1971 and again in 1975, she ran unsuccessfully for mayor, placing third in both races. In the 1975 campaign, State Senator George Moscone (1929–1978) was elected mayor. By that time, San Francisco was going through a trying time of political upheaval. Those were the days of the Reverend Jim Jones’ People’s Temple, the attempted assassination of President Gerald Ford, the Symbionese Liberation Army (which kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst), and the New World Liberation Front. Feinstein herself was the target of two separate bomb attacks in 1976 and 1977. After the second failed attempt—this at her vacation home in Monterey— she took to carrying a .38-caliber pistol for protection.
Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone
Feinstein’s personal life was particularly difficult as well. In 1975, her father—whose surgical students called the “Coach”—succumbed to cancer at age sixty-nine. In April 1978, her husband Bertram, who was director of the Neurological Institute at Mount Zion Hospital, succumbed to the same disease at age sixty-four. The violence of the era began cresting on November 18, 1978, when nine hundred members of the Reverend Jim Jones’ People’s Temple committed mass suicide in the wilds of Guyana. Nine days later, November 27, both Mayor Moscone and the city’s first openly gay supervisor, Harvey Milk (1930–1978) were gunned down in their city hall offices by deranged former supervisor Dan White. Just hours before the double assassination, Feinstein had told a reporter that she would be retiring at the end of her term. By the end of the day, Feinstein was the acting mayor of the City of San Francisco. She garnered high marks for the manner in which she led the city during its days of shock, anguish, and disbelief. An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle stated, simply: “She was poised. She was eloquent. She was restrained. And she was reassuring and strong.” Dianne Feinstein served as mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988. Early in her first term, she married Richard C. Blum, a “lean and 6’4 self-made millionaire,” who was founder and co-chair of Mayor Moscone’s Fiscal Advisory Commission. Blum’s wealth (reported at somewhere between $40 million and $50 million) would become a source of difficulty a decade later. During her mayoralty, Dianne Feinstein (she maintained the name under which she had entered elective politics) was twice reelected and once subjected to a vicious recall drive. The latter occurred in early 1983, after she had angered the far left by not supporting tighter restrictions on handguns and vetoing a domestic-partners law “which would have granted some benefits such as insurance, to unmarried couples (straight and gay) who registered at city hall.” Feinstein easily survived the recall drive, receiving more than 80 percent of the vote. This victory all but guaranteed her winning her next election as mayor.
During her second term, Feinstein, although popular, angered gays and women by closing gay bathhouses and refusing to close off a street for an abortion rights rally. When questioned about some of her supposedly anti-feminist positions, she stated flatly: “I’ve lived a feminist life. I had to quit a job because there was no maternity leave. I raised a child as a single mother. I put together legislation. I haven’t been a marcher, but I’ve lived it.” By 1984, Feinstein’s popularity and respect among her colleagues had risen to the point where Walter Mondale seriously considered asking her to run for vice president with him on the Democratic ticket. Feinstein was eventually passed over for another woman, New York Congresswoman Geraldine A. Ferarro. It is likely that what ultimately kept Feinstein off the ticket was concern about her husband’s finances. Ironically, Ferarro (1935–2011 ) came under repeated attack during the 1984 campaign about her husband’s financial dealings. Dianne Feinstein left the office of mayor after 1988; San Francisco city law permitted only two consecutive terms. In 1990, she became the first woman to run for governor of California. She drew as her opponent Republican U.S. Senator Pete Wilson. Running on a “pro-environment, abortion rights platform that also [included] a plank in favor of the death penalty,” Feinstein was hard-pressed to say precisely where and how she differed from Senator Wilson. He attacked her for leaving San Francisco with a $172 million deficit. Feinstein countered that the shortfall was nothing out of the ordinary—a fact that Wilson, a former mayor of San Diego, would certainly understand. Republicans also questioned Richard Blum’s finances; he was underwriting a goodly proportion of his wife’s campaign. Feinstein angrily replied, “This is all his business. I have nothing to do with it. It’s his—and it was before we were married. . . . Clearly there’s a strategy here that’s really basically pretty sexist. It’s sort of implicit that somehow the woman can’t be doing all this by herself.”
With few issues dividing or distinguishing them, the campaign devolved into a series of personal charges and countercharges. In the end, Feinstein held Wilson to less than an absolute majority: 49 percent to 46 percent. 1992 will go down in American political history as the “Year of the Woman.” On November 10 of that year, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer were both elected to the U.S. Senate, thereby becoming the first and second Jewish women to serve in the upper chamber. Feinstein handily defeated (54 percent to 38 percent) Senator John Seymour, a wealthy political consultant and former state senator from Orange County, whom Governor Wilson had appointed to fulfill the final two years of his six-year term. In winning the election, Feinstein garnered more votes—5,853,621—than any senatorial candidate in U.S. history. By prior agreement, Feinstein was sworn in ahead of Boxer, thereby becoming both California’s senior senator and the first Jewish woman elected to that body. Feinstein got a seat on the Appropriations Committee, where she could watch out for California’s multifaceted economic interests, and Judiciary, where, after the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill debacle, it seemed prudent for Committee Chair Joseph Biden of Delaware to appoint a woman. (Feinstein thereby was able to add yet another “first” to her resume: first woman ever appointed to the Senate Judiciary Committee.)
Although Feinstein did not support the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and quietly opposed President Clinton’s health-care plan (which she had originally supported), she carved out a generally liberal position on most issues. In her first term she managed to append an assault weapons ban onto the Clinton crime bill. When Idaho Republican Larry Craig, who was against the ban, challenged Senator Feinstein’s knowledge of firearms, she froze him in his tracks by responding: “I know something about what firearms can do; I came to be Mayor of San Francisco as a product of assassination.” The assault weapons ban was enacted into law. In 1994, Senator Feinstein easily won the Democratic primary for the Senate, leading the field with 74 percent of the vote. In the general election, she squared off against multimillionaire Representative Michael Huffington of Santa Barbara. The Republican Huffington, who had spent more than $5 million of his own money to capture his House seat in 1992, spent nearly $30 million of his own funds in 1994, making their Senate race the most expensive in U.S. history. Huffington began the Senate race with an advertising barrage extolling former secretary of Education William Bennett’s Book of Virtues. In his commercials, he sought to take the moral high ground, arguing that California suffered from a moral malaise. Feinstein came under attack for casting the deciding vote for the 1993 tax increase, and for being a “career politician.”
The press had a field day with the Huffingtons, deriding Arianna for being the “Edmund Hillary of social climbing,” and publishing stories about her involvement in the Movement for Spiritual Awareness. Amidst the charges and countercharges, Huffington made a fatal mistake: he endorsed Proposition 187—a measure that would have banned all state spending on illegal immigrants. Feinstein opposed it. Less than a month before the election, it was revealed that the Huffingtons had employed an illegal alien as a nanny—a charge hurled against many people seeking office that year. Huffington offered proof that Feinstein had likewise employed an illegal alien; the charges failed to stick. Feinstein eked out a 47 percent to 45 percent percent victory. (In 1997 Huffington and his wife, Ariana, divorced. The next year he announced that he was bisexual. His wife became a noted liberal, and to this day runs the eponymous and widely-read Huffington Post. Her ex-husband became a film producer and chair of the Log Cabin Republicans.) This would turn out to be Feinstein’s last close reelection. In 2000, she defeated San Jose–area Congressman Tom Campbell 56 percent to 37 percent. Campbell (1952– ), a libertarian Stanford law professor, had nearly won the Republican nomination to run against Barbara Boxer in 1992.
In 2006, Feinstein overwhelmed former state senator—and author of the above-referenced Proposition 187—Dick Mountjoy 59 percent to 35 percent. In the latter race, it was shown that Mountjoy’s (1932–2015 ) Web site had erroneously reported that the conservative Republican had served in the Korean War aboard the USS Missouri. When ship records later confirmed that he had actually served aboard the USS Bremerton, Feinstein questioned her opponent’s credibility. It also helped that Feinstein outspent Montjoy by a better than forty-to-one margin: $8,030,489 as compared to $195, 265. Throughout her many years in the U.S. Senate, Dianne Feinstein maintained a moderate-to-liberal voting record. She supported repealing both the marriage penalty and estate tax, and voted for the Iraq War Resolution in October 2002 and President George W. Bush’s $87 billion supplemental appropriation in November 2003. Once she cast these votes she began having regrets.
In April 2004, she said that she was “misled into voting for the war by an exaggeration of the threat.” As a member (and eventual chair) of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she sponsored legislation that would have “required the CIA to use only non-coercive interrogation methods found in the Army Field Manual,” thus ruling out waterboarding and other measures. President George W. Bush vetoed the bill in 2008. Understandably, she has been an unrelenting supporter of gun control measures and, along with Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, got fifty-four senators to sign a letter calling for more embryonic stem-cell research. She was also the only Democrat on the Judiciary Committee to vote in favor of an amendment authorizing prosecutions for flag desecration. Overall, Feinstein voted with her Democratic colleagues nearly 95 percent of the time. The senator and her husband (who died from cancer in 2022, lived in a Tudor house directly across the street from where Dianne Goldman grew up. Feinstein’s daughter, Katherine (born 1957), a former assistant district attorney and San Francisco police commissioner, was, until recently, the assistant presiding judge of the San Francisco Superior Court. She is married to real estate developer Rick Mariano. On September 18, 1992, Dianne Feinstein became a grandmother when Katherine gave birth to Eileen Feinstein Mariano. The senator also had three stepchildren: Heidi, Annette, and Eileen. In early 1996, Roll Call magazine estimated Feinstein and Blum’s net worth to be $50 million—the fifth-highest in Congress. Twenty years later Blum’s net worth had grown to an estimated $80 million.
Over the years, there has been much speculation that Feinstein would one day run for the job she “really, truly wanted”—California governor. Up until 2009, Feinstein still had not made up her mind if she was going to enter the 2010 race. “I’m not ruling it in,” Feinstein remarked on the eve of President Barack Obama’s inauguration. But she didn’t rule it out, either. “People will know within time,” she said. “I mean, this election is two years away.” As of mid-2009, the only announced Democratic candidate was—ironically—former California governor Jerry Brown, the son of her political mentor. Brown won - and wound up servimg 2 more terms.
Dianne Feinstein wound up running and winning her seat in 2012 and 2018 by wide margins. In late 2022 she announced that she would retire after her current term expired in 2024, thus setting off a race to replace her with 3 strong Democratic moderates, Representatives Adam Schiff, Katie Porter and Barbara Lee.
Senator Dianne Goldman Feinstein Blum has led an extraordinary life. She began breaking through glass ceilings long, long before writer Marilyn Loden (1946-2022) coined the term way back in 1978. She has led a life that was at once charmed and privileged, honorable and haunting. Throughout it all, she has given back to the people she served every ounce of strength, energy, grace, brains and courage she could muster.
Sad to say, we may never see her kind again . . .
Copyright©2023, 2010, 2000 Kurt F. Stone