Dianne Feinstein is American Politics

Over the course of 52 years in elected office, she believed she could use the system for good. Despite everything, she still does.

- By Rebecca Traister

1971: The first female president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors.

ON ELECTION NIGHT IN SAN FRANCISCO in 1969, a 36-year-old woman who had run a campaign for the Board of Supervisors that featured the unconventional use of just her first name, Dianne, was waiting anxiously for results in a race she was not expected to win. The local media had barely covered her. She had earned the endorsement of only one elected official, the state assemblyman Willie Brown. She had initially run the race out of her own house and had taken a risky, forward-looking tactical approach: cultivating support from the city’s growing population of gay voters and environmental conservationists.

As the returns began to trickle in, “it soon became clear that a big local story was unfolding,” Jerry Roberts later wrote in his 1994 book, Dianne Feinstein: Never Let Them See You Cry. “Dianne was not only winning, she was topping the ticket, an unheard-of showing for a nonincumbent, let alone a woman.”

Feinstein was so reluctant to believe the early returns that she had to be persuaded to go to headquarters on Election Night. When she entered the room, she “was thronged by an emotional crowd,” Roberts wrote. One of her supporters joked about “painting City Hall pink.”