At age 51 Feinstein, then mayor of San Francisco, speaks about her mother’s hostility, her husband’s death, and being the person who gets blamed for everything.
Here is part of what made Dianne Feinstein what she is:
“Oh, yes, it was,” Feinstein says. There is no audible emotion in her voice, and her gaze is close and direct."If you’re not dealing with a whole brain, a lot of things happen. Alcohol was one of them. I approached it in two ways. I’d empty bottles and fill them half with water — there’s a fine balance you can get to before it’s known. And continual attempts at suicide was another problem, and having to handle that. I mean, that’s the tough part.
The day he was shot to death, in a corner of his own office, it was Dianne Feinstein who found the body. The mayor squints sideways, as though peering at these hostile constituents. “And I said, ‘Do me a favor — just tell me why,’” she says. “One said, ‘Because I can’t find a parking space anywhere in this town, and I’m angry.’ The second was, ‘I waited and waited 45 minutes for the city bus, and it didn’t come.’ And the third, um — it had something to do with the sidewalk . . . You’re the person who gets blamed for everything.
Her friends uniformly say the recall nearly took her apart, and she agrees. “It was like a knife was going in,” Feinstein says. “I felt a deep sense of personal humiliation that after, what was it, 14 years in public life, finally getting to be mayor in my own right — I don’t think anybody has ever said I don’t work hard; I work very hard — people wanted to throw me out of office. That’s what it meant . . . They were saying, like in a ballpark, ‘You’re a bum, and we want you out.’ And it hurt.
The young Dianne went to Sunday temple school, and when the two secular Pacific Heights private schools denied her admission -- because she was Jewish, she believes — Dianne Goldman became the only Jewish student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart high school. She went to Stanford University, abandoned the idea of becoming a doctor like her father, ran successfully for student body vice president and graduated to work in criminal justice. Then-governor Edmund G.
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