TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061890/0618520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.5 KB | 248 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 24

Charm Is Only Half Her Story


California gubernatorial candidate DIANNE FEINSTEIN has been
called bold, bright -- and overbearing -- but never a shrinking
violet

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."