"Toughness doesn 't have to come in a pinstripe suit
The fire is a five-alarmer, one of the most spectacular in San Francisco since World War II. Two giant wooden piers on the city's downtown waterfront are burning out of control, hurling giant orange flames against a nighttime Pacific sky. As scores of fire fighters scramble to uncoil hose lines and position aerial platforms, a slight figure tightly wrapped in a flame-resistant fire fighter's coat steps carefully through the debris in open-toed shoes. Above the roar of high-pressure pumps, she quizzes battalion commanders and cranes her neck to assess the fire fighters' progress. Finally satisfied that the damage will be contained, Mayor Dianne Feinstein heads back to her car.
Carrying a fire coat in the trunk of her automobile is just one sign of Feinstein's highly involved, hands-on governing style. She also has a police call number (1-M-600) and keeps a navy blue, civil defense jumpsuit in her car in case she ever needs to assume command after a major earthquake. In the day-to-day affairs of San Francisco, which she has run with increasing sureness for the past five years, virtually no detail is too minor to claim her attention. For her efforts, she can point to some impressive results: San Francisco ended its past fiscal year with a budget surplus of $122.6 million, and major crime rates fell by about 10% in both 1982 and 1983. Last year she not only survived a recall vote engineered by a radical fringe group, but gained such momentum from it that six months later she won reelection to a second four-year term with the astonishing plurality of 81.2%.
Her local success has thrust Feinstein (pronounced Fine-stine) onto the national stage as an articulate representative of women and a forceful advocate of cities. She is preparing to serve as host of the Democrats' 1984 presidential convention in July, amid flattering speculation that the party nominee just might turn to her when the time comes to pick a running mate. "I would never ask for that job, and I would never run for that job," she insists. But if the nominee telephones to offer her a spot on the ticket, she adds coyly, "I wouldn't turn down the call."
Feinstein, 50, came to prominence under the most harrowing circumstances. On the morning of Nov. 27, 1978, while working in her city hall office as president of the board of supervisors, she heard a commotion down the hall and discovered the body of Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first avowed homosexual elected to a city-wide office in San Francisco. He had been gunned down by an ex-colleague and political enemy on the board, Dan White. Moments later she heard the news that White had also shot and killed Mayor George Moscone in another part of the building. That automatically propelled her into the mayoralty. Feinstein led stunned San Franciscans through a cathartic week of memorials and candlelight vigils, projecting just the right mixture of grief and hope. "This lovely jewel of a city seems a dark and saddened place," she said at a memorial service. "We need to be together and bring out what is good in each of our hearts."