The Pride of San Francisco

By William R.Doerner

"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."

The mayor's principal challenge was to refill a municipal till that had been seriously depleted by the restrictions imposed by California's tax-cutting Proposition 13. Feinstein formed a fiscal advisory committee, composed of executives from many of the city's major corporations, and directed it to apply the efficiencies of private industry to city government. One example: instead of letting each of the city's 52 departments handle its own insurance needs, a single centralized unit was formed to negotiate policies for all.

One of her proudest accomplishments was the introduction four years ago of corporate-style "management by objective." Twice a year, Feinstein and her department heads set largely numerical goals for everything from water-department revenues to police response times. These are subjected to rigorous reviews, with failures duly noted and usually rectified. Another priority has been the rebuilding of San Francisco's cable-car system, a $58.2 million project due to be completed by late June, three weeks before Democratic conventiongoers start pouring in. She wheedled 80% of the funds from Washington and cajoled private citizens to donate the rest. Says Harold Geissenheimer, general manager of the city's transit system: "This is a businesswoman running this city. She's there seven days a week."

Feinstein's critics charge that her ties with Big Business, and particularly real estate developers, are unsettlingly close. Under her administration, claim the critics, rampant high-rise construction has destroyed the character of the city's downtown, darkening its streets and driving out small business. Says Bruce Brugmann, publisher of the Bay Guardian, a local newsweekly: "With Feinstein it's been allegro furioso all the way. She's helping wreck the city she was born in." The mayor counters that her 1983 plan for downtown proposes "the most restrictive zoning of any high-rise business center in the nation."

Other detractors regard Feinstein's attention to detail as bordering on the obsessive and claim that the city would benefit if she delegated more authority. A close aide to Feinstein grouses that she edits correspondence written over her name so closely that "you could write a novel in the time it takes to write a letter for her."

Feinstein has established a dress code for her senior staff that includes neckties for men and dresses or skirts for women; the police and fire chiefs must be in full uniform when they come to her office. The mayor asks a lot of her staff in other ways. Recalls former Press Secretary Mel Wax: "If a story the least bit critical of her appeared in the newspaper, she'd say, 'You should have done this, or you should have done that.' There's a lot of the schoolteacher about her. She's difficult. She's demanding. It drives you crazy."

Some of Feinstein's former employees accuse her of requiring absolute loyalty while giving little in return. "She doesn't remember what people have done for her," says ex-Transportation Chief Richard Sklar. "When something goes wrong, she is anxious to find someone to blame." Away from politics, she can be surpassingly generous and compassionate. Feinstein once spotted a wino collapsing in the seedy Tenderloin district and rushed to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. For much of the past year, she has seen to the care of the nine-year-old son of a former housekeeper, who was trapped by immigration problems in her native Guatemala. Says Sklar: "She can be a warm Jewish mother. She would like to do good every day of her life."

The eldest of three daughters of a prominent San Francisco surgeon, Feinstein was raised in comfortable but hardly happy circumstances. Only in the past few months, since her mother's death at 72, has she spoken publicly of a painful childhood filled with irrational punishments doled out by her mother, who was suffering from an undiagnosed case of encephalitis. Feinstein's mother was a Catholic from Russia, and enrolled her daughter in the Convent of the Sacred Heart for her high school education. But Dianne never joined the church and eventually adopted her father's Jewish faith. She attends temple on major holidays.

Entering Stanford University in 1951, Feinstein majored in history and political science, and was elected vice president of her senior class--the highest office to which a Stanford coed could then aspire. After graduating, she worked briefly for a criminal-justice foundation before marrying Attorney Jack Berman and bearing her only child, Katherine, now 26. The marriage ended after four years in a bitter divorce; Berman, a superior court judge, says that Feinstein still refuses to speak to him, although nearly 25 years have passed. Her second marriage, to Neurosurgeon Bertram Feinstein, lasted 16 years, until his death in 1978.

By then, Feinstein, though lacking a law degree, had parlayed her early interest in criminal justice to an appointment to the California women's parole board and the mayor's commission on crime in San Francisco. In 1969, bucking the Establishment, she became the only woman to win a seat on the eleven-member board of supervisors without having first served out an unfilled term by appointment. As supervisor, Feinstein won a reputation for being responsive to her constituents' wishes, but her political career listed badly when she failed in two attempts at winning the mayor's job. At the time of Moscone's assassination, she now recalls, "I thought I was not electable as mayor."

Just 14 months after becoming mayor, she married Investment Banker Richard Blum. For a time, he assumed such a visible role in helping to run city hall that Columnist Herb Caen took to calling the mayor "Feinblum." These days Blum stays closer to the couple's investments, which besides his banking firm include the 165-room Carlton residential hotel in downtown San Francisco. They maintain houses in the Pacific Heights section of San Francisco, in woodsy Marin County, and on the beach near Carmel.

On a national ticket, Feinstein's primary appeal, aside from her gender, would be a thorough grounding in urban issues, which in some Administrations have been a vice-presidential responsibility. Her firm leadership in San Francisco should be enough to dispel questions about her backbone. "Toughness," she likes to say, "doesn't have to come in a pinstripe suit." Feinstein is admittedly weak on foreign policy and military matters. What of the fact that the nation has never elected any Jew to the presidency or vice presidency? Says Feinstein, perhaps overoptimistically: "I think most people look beyond those things."

An early Mondale supporter, Feinstein says she has not spoken to the candidate about being on the ticket. Privately, she doubts that Mondale would even seriously consider a female running mate. "He has come into power and position via traditional channels," she says. "Most women have not." Whether or not lightning strikes, Feinstein faces a political future that seemed all but unimaginable a few years ago. Her lease on city hall is secure for 31/2 years, and her growing national prominence could lead to a try for higher office or a Cabinet appointment. For the moment, though, she is content to bask in the glow of vice-presidential speculation. "If nothing else comes of it, it is the apex of my career," Feinstein says. "It makes a lot of tough times worthwhile." --By William R.Doerner. Reported by Michael Moritz/San Francisco

With reporting by Michael Moritz