DIANNE FEINSTEIN, R.I.P.: Remembering A Time When American Politics Worked
By
Allan C. Brownfeld
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The
death of Sen. Dianne Feinstein has taken from us a political leader
whose career reminds us that there was a time when American politics
worked, when Republicans and Democrats did not view one another as
“enemies” but as common participants in the enterprise of democracy. I
remember that time and worked in the U.S. Senate and House of
Representatives for a number of years. At one time, I was assistant to
the research director of the House Republican Conference. Members of
that committee included two future presidents, George H.W. Bush and
Gerald Ford. Rather than viewing Democrats as “enemies,” they worked
tirelessly to convince them to support legislation they were developing.
Jerry Roberts, former
managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and the author of “Dianne
Feinstein: Never Let Them See You Cry,” notes that, “In political time,
her demise seems far more than the end of a mere era—-more like the
passing of an eon. As politician, policymaker and uncommonly private
public figure, Feinstein for six decades modeled attitudes, behavior and
values that have become increasingly rare. Reliably favoring civility
over churlishness, she preferred independent judgment to ideology,
pragmatism to partisanship, problem-solving to power-seeking.”
The
Washington Post points out that, “Mrs. Feinstein spent much of her
career fielding criticism from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
She disappointed liberals with her law-and-order approach toward
governance and her long-standing support for the death penalty, even as
she frustrated conservatives with her support for gun control and
same-sex marriage. While some women celebrated Mrs. Feinstein as a
trailblazer, others resented what they considered her insufficient
attention to women’s issues.”
Dianne
Feinstein’s centrism goes back to the earliest days of her political
career. Her elevation to the office of mayor of San Francisco came in
the midst of increasing tension and radicalism in San Francisco. Many
of those involved in the mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana on the part
of cult leader Jim Jones,were from San Francisco. During this time, the
New World Liberation Front terrorist group placed a bomb outside the
bedroom window of Feinstein’s daughter. For a time, Feinstein owned a
handgun.
Her biographer
Jerry Roberts says that, The lesson Dianne took from this craziness was
that she had been right—-that all this polarization and bitterness that
was extant in the town had now led to these murders,”referring to the
assassinations of San Francisco Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey
Milk. “That’s when she started talking about how the center is so
important.” She became mayor of San Francisco in the wake of these
assassinations.
Sen.Feinstein
pursued a deal to prevent Iran from building nuclear arms “more
intently than any other colleagues,” writes Connie Bruck in the New
Yorker. “After Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a
joint session of CongressIn hopes of averting a
possible agreement, Feinstein appeared on Meet the Press and said, ‘What
Prime Minister Netanyahu did here was something no ally of the United
States would have done.’ When I saw her the next day, she told me, ‘For
Netanyahu to come here with a clear view of preventing an agreement was
really inappropriate, particularly because this president’s
administration has provided more than $25 billion to Israel, far more
than to any other country.”
When
she chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee, her support for the
intelligence community made especially explosive the investigation she
led into the “enhanced interrogation techniques” employed by the CIA
against terrorism suspects after the Sept.11, 2001 attacks. She was
deeply disturbed by testimony to the committee about secret CIA prisons
known as “black sites. The committee’s 6,700 page report alleged that
CIA interrogation techniques had been far more brutal, more widespread
and less effective than the agency previously claimed.
Then-CIA
Director John Brennan insisted that the interrogation techniques “did
produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture
terrorists, and save lives.” Sen. Feinstein gave a dramatic speech on
the Senate floor in which she accused the CIA of improperly searching
computers used by her staff members and seeking to intimidate them with
calls for a Justice Department review of their conduct. An internal CIA
investigation later supported those claims and Brennan apologized.
When
her committee’s torture report was issued, Sen Feinstein declared that,
“History will judge us by our commitment to a just society governed by
law, and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say ‘never again.’”
Sen.
Feinstein served on the Appropriations Committee and chaired the Rules
Committee. Among her accomplishments was the California Desert
Protection Act, the 1994 law that created Death Valley and Joshua Tree
national parks and the Mojave National Preserve. The vote that she most
regretted, she said, was her support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Sen
Feinstein was so popular across. Party lines that former Secretary of
State George Shultz, a Republican, raised money for Feinstein’s
campaigns from Republican friends in California. He said that, “Dianne
Feinstein is not really bipartisan so much as nonpartisan.”
Sen.
Feinstein often reflected on the fact that her course had been set by
the assassinations of San Francisco Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey
Milk. She once told the New York Times that for years she could not
bring herself to sit in the chair where Moscone had been shot, but
neither could she remove it from the mayor’s office. Reflecting on her
life, Feinstein once said that, “I think that one of the most positive
qualities any individual can have is what I call the Phoenix syndrome,
the mystical bird that became the symbol of rising from your own ashes.
That’s the challenge of life. You’ve got to recover from your own
ashes , many, many times.”
Our
political life in recent years was difficult for people like Dianne
Feinstein. Upon her death, she was hailed as a good friend by both
Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. That’s the kind
of U.S.Senate I remember. That’s the kind of America which won World War
ll and the Cold War. That’s the kind of America which ended
segregation and advanced civil rights. That’s the kind of America in
which Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill could be friends. Let us hope that
kind of America re-emerges. Our future depends upon it.
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