Charm Is Only Half Her Story

By Jordan Bonfante

Last September, in the dark autumn of Dianne Feinstein's discontent, her campaign for the governorship of California seemed dead in the water. She had been laid up half the summer recovering from a hysterectomy. Her San Francisco-based political consultant had ditched her, complaining that she lacked sufficient "fire in the belly" to respond to the opposition's scoffing attacks about her low profile. As she fell twelve points behind in the polls, many politicians guessed she might have to drop out of the race.

Just as she was dejectedly weighing her waning options, Feinstein met privately with the president of the Fund for the Feminist Majority, Eleanor Smeal, and three prominent members of the organization's Los Angeles leadership. The four took Feinstein to dinner in West Hollywood, and through an evening of intense, plainspoken woman talk, they strove to shore up her resolve.

They stressed the higher purpose of her "historical" candidacy: the political advancement of women all over the country. The attacks against her were sexist, they said. The four implored her not to abandon hope, for she would bounce back; they were sure she would . . . Besides, Ellie Smeal recounted sympathetically, she too had undergone a hysterectomy not long before and so she understood full well why Feinstein did not then have fire in her belly -- because it was actually "burning" for all-too-real, physical reasons. At that, Feinstein had to laugh. "We left that dinner thinking 'She's really gutsy,' " Smeal recalls. " 'She's determined to carry on.' "

Female solidarity -- "the woman thing" as one of her aides calls it -- is not incidental to Dianne Feinstein's political fortunes. A woman's vote, on the order of nearly 6 to 4, is believed to have helped propel her to victory over her rival, attorney general John Van de Kamp, in the state Democratic primary last week. It is bound to be Republican candidate Pete Wilson's most devilish problem in the fall campaign. And if Feinstein beats Wilson to win the governorship of the biggest state, she will become the most powerful elected woman politician in the country. If there is such a thing as the woman's vote -- and she thinks there is -- Feinstein does not mind playing to it. "This state could use a little mothering," she tells her female audiences. "I'm dedicated to destroying the old-boy concept of government in California."

The voters of California sensed, as her feminist dinner companions knew, that starchy appearances can be deceiving. Feinstein does not look like someone given to discussing hysterectomies and high-stakes political battle at the dinner table. She looks like a casting director's idea of a Bryn Mawr president who must be bodily restrained from adding gloves -- or perhaps even a pillbox hat -- to her already ultra-conservative banker-blue suits and fitted red blazers and pearls. One San Francisco columnist refers to her "vulcanized hairdo," worthy of Margaret Thatcher. Other traits, however -- her stature (5 ft. 10 in. in the half heels she favors) and a steady green- eyed gaze -- bespeak a sense of authority and a sociability that enabled her to be mayor of rambunctious San Francisco for nine turbulent years, from 1978 to the end of 1987. "People sometimes misjudge me. I am very much a street person," Feinstein claims. "I know, I don't look like it. And this is where I've been underestimated. People think I'm in some kind of shell. But I'm not."

The country-club appearance hardly does justice to a complex personality that is supremely confident, emotional and keenly attentive to the importance of politics as theater. Opinions vary along political lines. To her admirers she is bold and indefatigable. To her detractors, she can be over-bearing and righteous. She is sometimes compared not with Maggie Thatcher -- which would be too simple, and mistaken -- but with Ronald Reagan and Bobby Kennedy.

The Reagan comparison applies to Feinstein's daunting skill as a speechmaker, especially on TV, which dominates electoral politics in California. Van de Kamp himself grudgingly acknowledges that "she is telegenic, speaks extremely well and conveys warmth." Feinstein learned much of her technique -- especially cadence and syncopation -- from a number of preachers in the black churches she often visits. Concludes state assembly speaker Willie Brown, who has known her for 30 years: "Dianne is as good a communicator as Ronald Reagan -- without the Chamber of Commerce jokes." To Feinstein, in fact, public performance is not a sideshow but something that cuts close to the heart of politics. "Ninety percent of leadership is the ability to communicate something that people want."

The Bobby Kennedy comparison applies to her political credo. Recalls Feinstein, who served as R.F.K.'s Northern California women's chair in 1968: "I did feel he was strong when you have to be strong and compassionate when you have to be compassionate. I was much attracted to him for that. Problems don't fit into near ideological test bags. Some problems require 'right' solutions. Some require 'left' solutions. Some require common-sense solutions." Says Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, an ardent backer: "In San Francisco, she was more moderate than her city. But that will help in the Governor's race, because that's where the state is."

Other role models she has met and admired in the course of her travels include Corazon Aquino, Indira Gandhi and Thatcher. "It's been an interest for me to see how women handle power, authority, people, decisions. We are different in how we approach things. A man can sit around a bar and shake liar's dice and discuss problems. The woman doesn't do that. Decision making, I think, is a bit more formal for us."

Nowhere is Feinstein less likely to be challenged in such ways than at home in her big English-style thatch-roof house on Pacific Heights. Her husband, investment banker Richard Blum, beams with pleasure as he sings her praises. "Dianne is in a lot of ways the ultimate Jewish mother," he says. "She wears her heart on her sleeve. She is very emotional. If you are her adversary, forget it; she's as tough as they come. But if you need help, you won't find anybody more sympathetic." Banker Blum is sufficiently wealthy and sufficiently devoted to his wife's political career to have loaned her campaign fund $3 million just for the primary.

On the one hand, the couple leads a fast-lane social life with a wide circle of rich and famous friends, like Jimmy Carter, say, or the King of Nepal, whom Blum, a serious mountaineer, knows from repeated expeditions into the Himalayas. On the other hand, they also regularly visit a group of poor teenagers whom they befriended years ago in the black ghetto of Hunters Point. Feinstein, 56, has lived in San Francisco all her life. Her father, son of Polish Jewish immigrants, was a distinguished surgeon -- and a conservative Republican. Her mother was a beautiful Russian emigre whose family had fled St. Petersburg during the Revolution and whose chronic brain ailment inflicted a tormented childhood on Dianne and her two younger sisters.

After Stanford, a post-graduate fellowship, a short-lived marriage to an attorney -- and the birth of her daughter, Katherine, now a successful 32- year-old labor lawyer -- she was named by Governor Pat Brown to the women's parole board. That experience, she tells voters, is what convinced her of the necessity of the death penalty. Soon after, Feinstein twice won election to the board of supervisors. Two attempts to run for mayor, however, failed. By then she was married a second time, to prominent neurosurgeon Bertram Feinstein, whose name she still uses, for she was crushed when he died of cancer in 1978.

Blum, her third husband, points out that he and Dianne both have a fierce sense of competitiveness combined with a fatalistic streak. His comes from reading about Eastern philosophies. Hers derives from what every San Franciscan knows as the "fateful day" in November 1978 that shook the city $ to the depths of its collective psyche and catapulted Feinstein into leadership. On that day, a disaffected former supervisor named Dan White stormed into City Hall and assassinated both Mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk.

Then supervisor Feinstein saw Dan White run into Milk's office and close the door. She heard shots. At first she thought White might have killed himself -- until she realized there had been too many shots for that. "I remember going in. I saw Harvey lying on his stomach. I tried to get a pulse, but instead my finger went into a bullet hole in his wrist." After the police chief informed her that Moscone too had been killed, she went before the cameras and, in an emotional but firm voice, publicly announced what had happened. As president of the board of supervisors, she had automatically become acting mayor. Later she said, "It's very important that this not be a rudderless city, and it will not be . . . This city is going to continue." In her primary campaign this spring, her first and most effective TV spot made much of that moment of command.

In her two terms as mayor that followed, she was given high marks overall for having developed an envied transit system, a strong police force that reduced certain categories of crime and, later on, an elaborate anti-AIDs program. Again and again, she showed a talent for bringing warring factions together. At the time, however, she was almost constantly beset by controversy. Liberals assailed her for allowing an overblown "Manhattanization" of the downtown business district and for overemphasizing tough law enforcement. Conservatives criticized her for leaving the current administration of Art Agnos with a "shortfall" of $140 million in the 1988-89 budget and for catering to minorities, especially the increasingly powerful gay community. "As a supervisor, all she could think of was tax, tax, tax," snaps retired realtor John Barbagelata, who had been her longtime Republican archenemy on the board of supervisors. "And as mayor, she was ambitious, selfish, expedient and hypocritical."

On the job, Mayor Feinstein prided herself on being a hands-on administrator, often to the distress of other officials. When a foul-up occurred, she was apt to respond with a blistering dressing down or at times even a bout of temper behind closed doors. Once she summoned police chief Cornelius Murphy to her office posthaste.

"Chief," she demanded, "there've been all these 2-11s ((armed robberies)) lately. What can we do about that?"

"Well," Chief Murphy sighed, "we can start by turning off your police radio."

"For a lark" back in 1975, Feinstein recalls, she and two women friends forced their way into the off-limits gentlemen's dining room of an exclusive club. Nevertheless, today feminists outside San Francisco tend to blow hot and cold about Feinstein. Some find her standoffish. Assemblywoman DeLaine Eastin of Fremont, among others, complains that as mayor, Feinstein appointed many more men than women, gave short shrift to women's issues and failed to support a number of other women candidates. "Let's face it," says Eastin, "she has not been a team builder for women."

National feminist leaders, however, argue that what's important is the symbolic value of Feinstein's candidacy and that she has evolved with the times, like many women. "I've lived a feminist life," Feinstein says in her own defense. "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."

In the end, when all else fails, there is always her abiding ability to disarm friend and foe alike. On the evening of Agnos' inauguration as current mayor, Barbagelata and his wife Angela were having dinner with a group of friends at Trader Vic's, off Taylor Street, when they saw the tall figures of Feinstein and her husband saunter into the restaurant. Feinstein immediately came over, threw out her arms and said, grinning, "C'mon, John, you ole curmudgeon, give me a kiss!" Barbagelata complied. "What could I do?" he says ruefully. "She's a charmer."