Feinstein, 43, had a lot on her mind, namely the rising crime in the city, her political future after two unsuccessful mayoral campaigns and her husband’s battle with colon cancer. Yet the sound at her Pacific Heights home was neither a backfiring car nor a gunshot.
The New World Liberation Front, a left-wing anti-capitalist group known for carrying out bombings in California throughout the 1970s, had placed the bomb on the windowsill in front of a flower box at her home on Lyon Street. While authorities said the bomb was powerful enough to “blow off the front of the building,” the device misfired. The dud bomb did not even shatter the window.
“I’m very grateful,” Feinstein told United Press International after the close call. “The detonation device detonated, but apparently there was some fluke. It broke open the container, but did not explode the plastic.
“If there had been an explosion, there would have been very serious damage.”
The assassination attempt forever changed Feinstein, who went on to become mayor of San Francisco and a centrist Democratic stalwart of the U.S. Senate. Her three decades in the chamber made her the longest-serving female U.S. senator.
Feinstein died Thursday at her home in Washington, her office said in a Friday statement. She was 90. A cause of death was not given.
Feinstein, who was the subject of increasing scrutiny over her fitness to serve, was hospitalized in February with shingles, an illness later reported to have been complicated by encephalitis. She returned to the Senate in May after a nearly three-month absence.
In 1976, assassination attempts were in the San Francisco air. Bombs were mailed to the homes of two colleagues of Feinstein’s on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, including its president. Suspicious of the contents, the officials alerted police; they were unharmed.
Feinstein was in a tough place in her life, professionally and personally. The supervisor ran for mayor twice in 1971 and 1975, and she was rebuffed both times, criticized as too proper in San Francisco at a time when the counterculture was dominating the city’s identity. In 1976, her second husband, Bert Feinstein, was diagnosed with colon cancer. (He died in 1978.)
“My husband was sick,” Dianne Feinstein recalled to Mother Jones in 2017.
When authorities responded to Feinstein’s home on the morning of Dec. 14, 1976, they weren’t initially sure what happened. That changed after a maid opened the window and found the bomb in a brown paper bag.
A plastic cube that was about an inch in diameter was found a foot from the bomb, and police said it appeared to contain marijuana. A pocket watch used as a timer ignited a detonator, which was later found a few feet from the curb of Feinstein’s home, authorities said at the time. A gelatinous material that bomb experts later identified as a commercial explosive was also found splattered on the sidewalk. The bomb had been in place less than 12 hours, before the maid found it, police said, and the FBI took it.
Authorities said that the bomb left at Feinstein’s home was “lethal” and that it was assembled with the deftness of a mechanic. The house, which was being painted at the time, was surrounded by scaffolding, meaning it could have exploded in flames if the bomb was successful.
“The experts say the bomb was of sufficient strength to blow off the front of the building,” San Francisco Deputy Police Chief Mortimer McInerny told the Associated Press in December 1976. “For some reason, even though the primer exploded, it didn’t set off the major explosion.”
Cooler temperatures might have caused the explosive to freeze and the detonator to pop off the device, Mother Jones reported.
It didn’t take long for the New World Liberation Front to take responsibility for the “action,” saying it was done as part of its demands to improve medical care at city and county jails. The terrorist group referenced Feinstein and threatened to send more bombs.
“Your ruling-class house with crystal chandeliers, your fine cloth, your elitist air — none of these conceal the blood of old people that stain your hands,” the group wrote in a release after the assassination attempt, according to the San Francisco Examiner. “You’ve pulled the purse strings that condemn poor people to nightmare lives …”
Feinstein wasn’t having it, and she said she would not be intimidated by an attempt on her life.
“The time has come when the fear and intimidation that everyone feels has got to stop,” she said, according to the Examiner. “I don’t think going around and putting bombs on people’s homes accomplishes anything.”
After the New World Liberation Front gave Feinstein and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors 48 hours to meet their demands or “be subject to further attacks by the people’s forces,” guards were assigned to protect the officials from potential bombs. Supervisor Alfred Nelder, an ally who shared Feinstein’s concern about crime in the city, said the assassination attempt against his colleague was unsettling.
“There isn’t a more conscientious person in public life than Dianne Feinstein,” Nelder said at the time. “If the person that set that bomb were to come to City Hall with his problem, she would be the first to listen to him. It saddens me to think that she could be the target of this kind of thing.”
The attackers were never caught — and the New World Liberation Front continued to target Feinstein. The group took responsibility for later shooting out the windows of her beach house in Pajaro Dunes, Calif., on Monterey Bay.
“It was a terrible, terrible time,” she recounted to author David Talbot in the 2012 book “Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love.”
The attempt on Feinstein’s life was unsuccessful, but two of her colleagues would not be as lucky.
She was forced to tell the world less than two years later on Nov. 27, 1978, that San Francisco Mayor George Moscone (D) and Supervisor Harvey Milk (D), one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, were assassinated by a former disgruntled supervisor. Feinstein later recalled how she had rushed to Milk after he had been shot, only to find that she put her finger through a bullet hole as she tried to find a pulse.
“It was the first person I had ever seen shot to death,” she told CNN in 2017. Decades after she and her family survived the bomb that could have blown up her home, Feinstein added, “I became mayor as a product of assassination.”
