On a cool fall morning 45 years ago, Dianne Feinstein was the first to find the body.

It was November 1978, and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk had just been shot dead in his office at City Hall.

I could smell the gunpowder. Harvey was on his stomach, Feinstein told The Times in a 2018 interview. I tried to find a heartbeat; I stuck my finger in a bullet hole.

The assassination forever changed the course of Feinstein’s political career and shaped her views on gun control into a defining legacy for the U.S. senator, who died Friday at age 90.

A few hours after finding Milk’s body, Feinstein broke the news that embittered former Supervisor Dan White had murdered Milk, one of the nation’s first openly gay elected officials, and Mayor George Moscone.

“As chairman of the Board of Supervisors, it is my duty to make this announcement: both Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk have been shot and killed,” Feinstein said at a news conference, drawing gasps and shouts from the crowd on a balcony on the other side of the street. City Hall. After a few seconds, she continued, “The suspect is Supervisor Dan White.”

From then on, news of the killings shocked the country.

Earlier that morning, Feinstein had told reporters she was leaving politics after two failed attempts to become mayor. But as acting mayor, she was elected to serve out the remainder of Moscone’s term and would win two mayoral elections.

I became mayor as the product of an assassination, Feinstein said in the 2018 Times interview.

The shocking assassinations in San Francisco that defined Feinstein’s political path

For a time, she was licensed to carry a gun in her purse after an anti-capitalist terrorist group planted a bomb outside her daughter’s bedroom window and shot out the windows of her vacation home, years before Milk’s murder.

I decided that if anyone tried to take me out, I would take him/her with me, Feinstein told the Associated Press.

But she stopped carrying the gun after wondering how quickly she could arm herself in an emergency. I thought: hmm. This isn’t going to do me much good, she said.

In 1982 she was

had

signed a local ordinance banning most San Francisco residents from owning handguns and turned in her .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, the same model White used to kill Moscone and Milk to be melted down by police. The ordinance was later declared invalid by the court.

On Capitol Hill, summer tribute to Dianne Feinstein, the fighter

As her star rose despite a failed bid for California governor, Feinstein set her sights on the U.S. Senate.

Just months after winning office in a 1992 special election, Feinstein authored a landmark federal ban on assault weapons, following a mass shooting in which

had

left eight people dead at a San Francisco law firm.

The powerful National Rifle Assn. launched an attack on Feinstein’s efforts, joined by elected Republicans.

The lady from California needs to become more familiar with firearms, Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) said on the Senate floor.

Feinstein looked at Craig and recounted the morning she rushed to Milk’s office after hearing gunshots and finding his bloodied body on the floor.

Senator, she said, I know something about what guns can do.

Photos: Dianne Feinstein | 1933 2023

Ten years after President Clinton signed the assault weapons ban into law in 1994, the landmark legislation expired and was never renewed.

But the murders of Moscone and Milk stayed with her throughout her political career and “helped shape who I am and what I believe,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in a story on the 30th anniversary of the murders.

Mass shootings have been a staple of American life in recent decades, and with each successive horror, Feinstein renewed her call for stricter gun control.

In a 2013 Senate argument with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), as Feinstein pushed for a new federal ban on assault weapons, she linked more recent tragedies to her 1978 experiences.

“I walked in and saw people being shot. I looked at bodies that were shot with these guns,” she said. “I’ve seen the bullets implode. In Sandy Hook, young people were torn apart.”

Newsom faces a difficult task and rare opportunities in filling Feinstein’s seat

After shootings that killed a combined 31 people last year in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas, Feinstein asked the Senate: “What will it take for us to hear the wake-up call and pass stricter gun legislation?”

The Senate’s failure to act, she said, was all but guaranteed after inaction followed numerous mass shootings, including massacres at Sandy Hook Elementary School and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, which had drawn angry pleas from Feinstein.

“And make no mistake, it will cost lives,” she said.

This year started in January with three major mass shootings in California: six deaths in Goshen; 11 killed at a Monterey Park dance studio; seven deaths on neighboring farms in Half Moon Bay.

Feinstein would not live long if the Senate were to take action again on gun control. But as they praised her Friday, colleagues remembered her tenacity in trying.

“We were not only colleagues, but also neighbors and friends,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said in a statement, calling the now-expired federal ban on assault weapons an “essential template for ending gun violence.”

Rep. Katie Porter (D-Irvine), who is running for Feinstein’s seat in 2024, posted on social media that “Feinstein was a trailblazer for women in California politics, and her leadership on gun violence prevention and anti-torture efforts made our nation more just.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who this week signed several bills furthering California’s efforts to tighten gun laws, called Feinstein “an early voice for gun control.”

“Every race she won, she made history, but her story wasn’t just about being the first woman in political office, it was what she did for California and for America, with that power as soon as she earned it ” says Newsom. said inside a statement on social media. “That’s why she needs to be remembered.”

Times writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.