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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.