Historic Moment: Dianne Feinstein Announces Deaths of Harvey Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone
In 1978, the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein was the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. On the morning of November 27 that year, she had plans to speak with ex-supervisor Dan White, who had quit then asked for his seat back. San Francisco Mayor George Moscone intended to replace White with someone else. Knowing what Moscone’s plans were, White went to City Hall that morning and assassinated Moscone before turning his gun on activist Harvey Milk, who also served on the Board of Supervisors.
Feinstein was appointed the acting mayor of San Francisco, and the responsibility of announcing the murders of her colleagues and friends fell on her. In the video above from the archive of KPIX/CBS News Bay Area, a shaken Feinstein delivers the following announcement:
As president of the Board of Supervisors, it’s my duty to make this announcement: Both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed. The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.
In 1979, Feinstein ran for and was elected to the position of Mayor of San Francisco, becoming the city’s first woman to serve as mayor.
Feinstein sat for an interview with SF Gate in 2008, when the Academy Award-winning biopic Milk was released. She was known to avoid the subject of the murders, but opened up and recounted the moment she found Milk dead in his City Hall office.
I saw [Dan White] come in. I said, ‘Dan, can I talk to you?’ And he went by, and I heard the door close, and I heard the shots and smelled the cordite, and I came out of my office. Dan went right by me. Nobody was around, every door was closed.
I went down the hall. I opened the wrong door. I opened [Milk’s] door. I found Harvey on his stomach. I tried to get a pulse and put my finger through a bullet hole. He was clearly dead.
I remember it, actually, as if it was yesterday. And it was one of the hardest moments, if not the hardest moment, of my life. It was a devastating moment. For San Francisco, it was a day of infamy.
She also said she often wondered if she could have prevented the tragedy if she had not been traveling abroad in the weeks leading up to White’s breaking point: “I still believe that if I could have been there for that three weeks, I could have stopped it. Now, who knows? Who knows?”
Before becoming the acting mayor, Feinstein had announced that she wouldn’t be seeking re-election to the San Francisco board.
Feinstein died on Thursday night at the age of 90 as the longest-serving woman in the U.S. Senate.
