Feinstein rebuffed calls to step down as her health declined. Will it damage her legacy?

Over more than a half-century of public life, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s accomplishments rivaled those of anyone in the national arena: The 1994 assault weapons ban. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of torture. Her trailblazing example as a woman in an overwhelmingly male-dominated political landscape.

But in the last two years of her life, the senator, who died last week at 90, spent much of her time confronted with a single question: Why didn’t she retire before her health gave way?

Assailed by old age and grieving the death of her husband in 2022, Ms. Feinstein’s deterioration in office was a heartbreaking spectacle for those who had long been accustomed to her formal and detail-oriented approach to her duties.

She forgot things. She repeated herself in Senate hearings. For months last year, her absence from Washington because of complications from shingles stalled efforts by her fellow Democrats to advance nominees for federal judgeships.

When she returned, aides shuttled her around the Capitol in a wheelchair, avoiding encounters in which she might misspeak or appear senile. Critics called for her resignation, while defenders noted that no such complaints had been made about men in her position. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, for example, could barely speak or hear by the time he retired at the age of 100.

“People don’t always understand when age has gotten the better of them,” said Scott Tillman, national field director for U.S. Term Limits, a Florida-based organization that supports caps on the tenure of officeholders. “For months, she was unable to serve her constituents. Her legacy will be tainted by that.”

Or perhaps not. In the week since her death, the focus — particularly in her home state of California — has appeared to shift largely back to her long career and list of achievements, rather than on how it ended.

“It’s a bit of a negative, but I don’t think it’s a big deal,” said Christian Grose, a political scientist at the University of Southern California and the director of the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy. “Her ill health at the end is a coda on a long career.”

Mr. Grose said that Ms. Feinstein also left a legacy of civility, service, hard work and fairness. “She worked across the aisle to get things done,” he said. “There aren’t many people like that left in Congress.”

In California, she is a historic figure, said Jerry Roberts, who wrote a 1994 biography tracing Ms. Feinstein’s leadership of San Francisco through the turmoil of the 1970s and the AIDs epidemic.

“In the short term, people will talk,” Mr. Roberts said of the senator’s decline, “but it won’t be a significant factor in her record in the Senate or as mayor. She had a 60-year career, and when people look back in a couple of decades, that’s what they’ll see. Not what happened in the last couple of years.”