Obituary: Dianne Feinstein, trailblazing senator who defied CIA and White House

The camera bulbs flashed and Dianne Feinstein took the podium, beaming confidently in front of hundreds of cheering supporters.

"Tonight, history is being made," she declared. "In California, two women will be elected to the Senate of the United States."

Ms Feinstein was one of them. The 1992 election that saw an unprecedented number of women - four- elected to Congress' upper chamber. The phenomenon, dubbed "the year of the woman", heralded a new era in Washington, and Ms Feinstein was part of it.

Ms Feinstein spent the next three decades in the Senate until her death at age 90, which her office announced on Friday.

By this point, Ms Feinstein has become a symbol not of progress but of Congress' aging leadership. She spent the last two years in office facing calls to resign over health and cognitive issues that kept her away from Washington for several months.

Yet her career was full of historic moments, of which her Senate election was only one.

She was a ferocious political operator who witnessed an assassination, led a major American city, fought for gun safety regulations, battled with the US intelligence apparatus, and served as the unofficial dean of California politics.

Senator Dianne Feinstein continued working until the very end of her life

She built a reputation as a dogged centrist willing to haggle with Republicans, though she faced criticism from liberals at home and in Washington later in her career as the Democratic party moved leftwards.

She now holds the record for the longest-serving female senator in US history.

"She was a political giant," California Governor Gavin Newsom, one of her many political acolytes, said in a statement on Friday.

"She broke down barriers and glass ceilings, but never lost her belief in the spirit of political co-operation. And she was a fighter - for the city, the state and the country she loved."

A shocking assassination

The senator was born Dianne Emiel Goldman on 22 June 1933 in San Francisco, the liberal stronghold where she forged her entire career.

Ms Feinstein later recounted a tumultuous childhood with a difficult and at times abusive mother.

She married Jack Sherman, a prosecutor, in 1956. They had one daughter, Katherine, and divorced in 1960.

In 1962, she married neurosurgeon Bertram Feinstein, who died in 1978. She wed her third and final husband, Richard Blum, in 1980; he died in 2022.

But Ms Feinstein was not interested in the traditional path for women of the time. She had attended Stanford University with ambitions to enter politics and quickly went to work.

Senator Dianne Feinstein continued working until the very end of her life

Her true political ascent began with an unspeakable tragedy.

In November 1978, a disgruntled former employee named Dan White entered San Francisco's city hall and fatally shot Mayor George Moscone, and supervisor and gay rights advocate Harvey Milk. Ms Feinstein, then president of the county board of supervisors, was an eyewitness to the horrific scene.

"I saw him come in. I said, 'Dan, can I talk to you?' And he went by, and I heard the door close, and I heard the shots and smelled the cordite, and I came out of my office. Dan went right by me. Nobody was around, every door was closed," she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008.

"I went down the hall. I opened the wrong door," she continued. "I opened [Harvey Milk's] door. I found Harvey on his stomach. I tried to get a pulse and put my finger through a bullet hole. He was clearly dead."

Hours later, Ms Feinstein was facing the television cameras, announcing to San Francisco that their mayor and a celebrated civil rights icon were dead. She took over the mayorship from Mr Moscone, who had once defeated her for the seat.

Though the assassination launched her political career, "I still have a hard time returning to it," she told the Chronicle years later.

Her steely handling of the crisis helped her build a public profile as a tough-as-nails leader. She kept a fireman's coat in the trunk of her car, and told CNN in 2017 that she "had a radio in my room, in my bedroom" to keep up to date on city emergencies.

She spent almost 10 years as mayor of San Francisco and ran unsuccessfully for governor before winning a US Senate seat in 1992.

'It's about power'

Ms Feinstein arrived in the Senate in January of 1993 with three new female colleagues in tow. One of them was Barbara Boxer, who in an electoral calendar fluke, had also been elected as a California senator that year.

The women's arrival forced the Senate and Washington at large to reckon with its male-dominated culture.

"I organized a power workshop," former Senator Barbara Mikulski, one of only two women in the Senate at the time of Feinstein's election, recalled in 2010. "The media said 'Are you having tea?' and I said 'No, it's about power.' "

Thirty years before this month's Senate dress code uproar over casual attire, Ms Feinstein's class was part of the "pantsuit rebellion", a battle led by Ms Mikulski to change the rules to allow women to wear trousers in the chamber.

Ms Feinstein was the first woman to serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and later became the first woman to chair the Senate Intelligence Committee.

She developed a reputation over the years in the Senate as a workhorse who expected the same from her employees. In her first six months in office, she lost 14 staffers in six months, the Los Angeles Times reported. Staffers told the paper that the workplace was "unpleasant" and that Ms Feinstein was a "demanding" boss.

Ms Feinstein countered that some had left due to pay or better positions, and she believed sexism played a role in their perception. "When a man is strong, it is expected. When a woman is, it is not," she said.

One of Ms Feinstein's signature battles began soon after she joined the Senate. Drawing on the tragedy of the 1978 assassination, she made gun safety a priority. She pushed for the landmark 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which expired in 2004.

When a Republican colleague challenged "the gentlelady from California" on her knowledge of guns, she famously retorted: "Senator, I know something about what firearms can do."

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 claimed the lives of 26 people, Ms Feinstein introduced a new version of the assault weapons ban in 2013 that did not successfully pass Congress.

It was a battle she and her fellow Democrats would not ultimately win. Over the course of her Senate career, Ms Feinstein would slowly watch as gun safety protections faltered in Congress or were scaled back by the US Supreme Court.

Battling the CIA

In 2003, Ms Feinstein voted in favour of the Iraq War, saying she believed at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

She later told CNN she regretted her vote and trust in the intelligence at the time.

"What's my lesson? The lesson is you take it all with a grain of salt," she said.

But she would later be at odds with America's military and intelligence apparatus.

Ms Feinstein's Senate tenure spanned six administrations, including Barack Obama's

Ms Feinstein was no anti-war crusader. After becoming chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2009, she supported the Obama administration's controversial drone strike policy and said NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was guilty of treason.

But she had serious criticisms of the US detention and interrogation programs created after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Her concerns led her to call for an investigation into the CIA's use of torture. That work culminated in a 6,700-page classified report, completed in December 2012.

A public summary, released in 2014, detailed what Ms Feinstein declared was a "un-American and brutal" system that was ineffective at gathering useful intelligence. Much of the report remains classified.

It was one of the most embarrassing moments in Barack Obama's presidency. He conceded that "we tortured some folks" and that America had "crossed a line".

The age question

When Ms Feinstein took on the Obama administration over torture, she was 81 years old, long past America's standard retirement age but showing no desire to curtail her duties.

As early as 2017, Ms Feinstein was brushing off concerns about her age.

"It's what I'm meant to do, as long as the old bean holds up," she told CNN in 2017, at age 84, as she prepared to mount another successful bid for US Senate.

But Ms Feinstein began to struggle publicly in the years afterward.

She experienced small lapses in memory in public and her adherence to a centrist path began to rankle Democrats, who were moving leftward in response to the rise of Donald Trump and the major social justice movements that followed.

Then came a disastrous moment in 2020.

The Senate Judiciary Committee was presiding over the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, Mr Trump's final nominee to the US Supreme Court.

Democrats were incensed and fearful of the nomination; her ascent to the bench would solidify a conservative majority and ultimately pave the way for the Supreme Court to revoke nationwide abortion rights.

Republicans had also reneged on an earlier stance that such nominees could not be confirmed in an election year, a tactic they had used to stop Mr Obama from filling a vacancy that arose in his final months as president.

But after the confirmation hearing concluded, Ms Feinstein congratulated her Republican counterpart, Senator Lindsey Graham, on a successful hearing, punctuated with a hug.

"This has been one of the best set of hearings that I've participated in," she said.

Liberals were furious at Ms Feinstein. They had just lost a US Supreme Court seat and one of their top leaders was congratulating a process they viewed as a sham. That Ms Feinstein had also championed abortion rights throughout her career added to the confusion.

Calls for her retirement began swiftly afterwards and never relented.

In December 2020, the New Yorker published a story about Ms Feinstein's cognitive abilities, with testimonials from staffers who witnessed her struggles up close.

For three more years, though, she refused to acknowledge her difficulties publicly. She relied heavily on her staff to manage the operations of a Senate office that served 40 million people.

A prolonged absence from Washington this year due to a serious case of shingles led her to acknowledge she would not run for re-election in 2024. A heated race soon launched to replace her, and remains under way.

Yet Democrats began calling for her early resignation anyway, as the Senate Judiciary Committee struggled to confirm judicial nominees in her absence.

"It's time for Senator Feinstein to resign," Ro Khanna, a liberal Democrat from California, tweeted in April.

Ms Feinstein ultimately returned to Washington this summer looking greatly diminished, using a wheelchair and with the help of aides to navigate Capitol Hill.

At a July hearing, Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, one of the lawmakers elected alongside Ms Feinstein in the "Year of the Woman", gently helped Ms Feinstein through a vote.

It was a melancholy moment. The images of Ms Feinstein's frail physique contrasted mightily with the confident, brash politician who had demanded America's attention in 1992 or challenged a CIA director and a president.

She became an avatar for America's growing frustration with its "gerontocracy" - a political leadership dominated by politicians in their 70s and 80s.

She and her office remained insistent on completing her work until the end.

In a statement in April, Ms Feinstein said: "I'd put my record up against anyone's."

On Thursday afternoon, clad in a plum-coloured suit, she walked onto the floor of the United States Senate and recorded her final vote.

She gave a small wave, and exited the chamber where she had spent 30 years of her life.