Richard Blum, husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, dies at 86

Earlier than Richard Blum confronted Mt. Everest, befriended the Dalai Lama and married then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein, he purchased and offered the circus — actually.

As a younger accomplice on the San Francisco brokerage Sutro & Co., Blum in 1968 spearheaded the corporate’s $8-million buy of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. 4 years later, Blum and his companions offered the circus to Mattel Inc. for $40 million.

The deal solidified Blum’s popularity as an investor and businessman — and signaled the sort of extraordinary expertise that will form his life as a philanthropist, UC regent and husband to Feinstein, now a U.S. senator.

Blum died Sunday on the household dwelling in San Francisco after an extended battle with most cancers, Feinstein’s workplace mentioned Monday. He was 86.

“My coronary heart is damaged at this time,” Feinstein mentioned in an announcement. “My husband was my accomplice and finest pal for greater than 40 years. He was by my aspect for the nice occasions and for the challenges. I’m going to overlook him terribly.”

Blum’s storied profession took many varieties. He was chairman of fairness funding administration agency Blum Capital Companions. He additionally devoted a lot of his life to the individuals of the Himalayas, founding the American Himalayan Basis in 1981 — one thing Feinstein described as “considered one of his proudest achievements.”

“As a task mannequin, Dick was second to none, and I feel his compassion and devotion to the individuals of the Himalayan area might show to be his most enduring legacy,” she mentioned.

Feinstein has represented California within the U.S. Senate since 1992. She and Blum married in 1980.

“Dick was extremely dedicated to his household, significantly his daughters and his grandchildren, and my coronary heart is with them and everybody who Dick encountered,” Feinstein mentioned. “He was the kind of man who actually changed his divot in life, who left issues higher than he discovered them.”

A longtime pal of the Dalai Lama, Blum was an honorary consul of Nepal. He additionally served as co-chairman of the World Convention on Faith and Peace and was a founding member of Nationwide Geographic’s Worldwide Council of Advisors.

For practically 20 years, Blum served as a member of the College of California Board of Regents and was chairman emeritus of the board, and he based the Blum Middle for Creating Economies at UC Berkeley, which is concentrated on addressing world poverty.

On Monday, condolences poured in from each the state’s and nation’s capitals and past.

“Richard Blum lived a rare life, and he left this world higher than he discovered it — lifting up our communities and serving to join individuals from throughout the globe,” Gov. Gavin Newsom mentioned in an announcement.

Home Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) mentioned she and her husband, Paul, have been “heartbroken.”

“A lifelong San Franciscan, Richard was a robust power for good in our metropolis,” Pelosi mentioned in an announcement. “Constructing a profitable profession in enterprise, he continuously gave again to our metropolis: whether or not as a patron of our arts, a donor to our meals banks or a benefactor to our efforts to finish homelessness.”

Blum was a longtime donor to Democratic candidates and liberal causes. In 2020, he contributed $1 million to Unite the Nation, an excellent PAC backing Biden’s presidential bid.

“I had the distinctive pleasure of watching Joe and Dianne deal with the hardest points within the Senate, and we all know Joe’s integrity and management can be a beacon to steer us ahead and restore the soul of our nation,” he wrote in an electronic mail invitation to a digital fundraiser for Biden in October 2020.

On Monday, President Biden described Blum as “a profitable businessman and proud son of California who devoted a lot of his public life to combating poverty across the globe.”

“Above and past his {many professional} and philanthropic accomplishments, Dick was a person of non-public decency and generosity — a champion of human rights, pushed by real care and compassion to make a distinction on the earth,” Biden mentioned in an announcement.

A 1990 profile of Blum revealed within the lead-up to Feinstein’s unsuccessful gubernatorial run painted him as a well-connected man of many passions and pursuits.

He was “a self-made millionaire, investor, cash supervisor, mountain climber, distance runner, philanthropist, human-rights activist and pal of the well-known,” the profile mentioned.

Mates and associates on the time described him as an “aggressive straight shooter with boundless drive and a disarming ‘Lt. Columbo type’ that may appear to frame on the bumbling however is definitely fairly efficient.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, who launched her political profession in San Francisco and served within the Senate with Feinstein, mentioned she had lengthy admired Blum’s “compassion and boundless power.”

“Dick Blum believed we might construct a world that revered the rights and important dignity of all individuals,” Harris mentioned Monday. “As a businessman, a Regent of the College of California, a philanthropist, and an advocate for human rights, Dick devoted his life to furthering that imaginative and prescient. Our nation and our world are higher for his work.”

Born right into a household of clothes retailers, Blum graduated from Lowell Excessive Faculty, the place he was identified amongst his friends as assured and strong-willed.

He obtained bachelor’s and grasp’s levels in enterprise administration at UC Berkeley and joined Sutro & Co. on the age of 23, the place he labored as a $300-a-month junior analysis analyst. Six years later, he turned the agency’s youngest accomplice.

After the circus deal — which he signed, considerably theatrically, on the Colosseum in Rome — he based what would later be generally known as Blum Capital Companions in 1975 and likewise stored his hand in politics as chair of then-San Francisco Mayor George Moscone’s Fiscal Advisory Committee.

It was that place that will lead him to Feinstein. In 1977, Feinstein, then president of the Board of Supervisors, met with Blum for a briefing on an financial report. On the time, she was preoccupied with the sickness of her second husband, neurosurgeon Bertram Feinstein, who later died of colon most cancers in 1978.

After Bertram Feinstein’s demise, Dianne Feinstein once more met with Blum for an financial replace, and a romance quickly blossomed, with Feinstein even accompanying Blum on a 1978 journey to India and Nepal.

Moscone’s assassination that very same 12 months noticed Feinstein propelled into the town’s prime job, and when she and Blum married in 1980, many considered it as a “marriage of the private and non-private sectors,” The Instances reported.

Reached Monday by telephone, Jerry Roberts, former politics editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and writer of “Dianne Feinstein: By no means Let Them See You Cry,” recalled the power of the pair’s relationship.

“When Moscone received shot, that was the primary name she made, to Blum, and he came to visit to Metropolis Corridor and he was along with her,” Roberts mentioned. “Earlier than Doug Emhoff [Harris’ husband and the nation’s first gentleman], Dick was type of the mannequin of the consort, and I feel he did job. He was extraordinarily supportive of her through the years.”

Outstanding San Francisco actual property developer, philanthropist and Democratic donor Mark Buell recalled assembly Blum when he and Feinstein first began courting.

“He loved Dianne for each her magnificence and her energy. And I’ve to say, watching them through the years, that they have been superb to one another,” Buell mentioned. “He at all times gave Dianne good counsel.”

He described Blum as a “schmoozer” who was additionally keen to offer to the suitable causes.

About 5 years in the past, when Buell was chairing an effort to carry the America’s Cup to San Francisco, Blum donated not due to an awesome attachment to crusing, Buell mentioned, however “as a result of it was civic, and I feel that’s reflection of who he was.”

Blum’s huge enterprise ties and inventory holdings would sometimes canine Feinstein. Within the 1984 presidential election, Democratic nominee Walter Mondale interviewed Feinstein to be his operating mate however ended up deciding on Geraldine Ferraro. Mondale’s co-national chairman later mentioned that Mondale didn’t decide Feinstein due to Blum’s enterprise dealings. Blum vigorously denied this declare.

His dealings in San Francisco and abroad proved nettlesome throughout her unsuccessful 1990 run for governor and her 2000 senate reelection marketing campaign. A 2020 state audit of UC’s admissions course of accused him of writing an “inappropriate letter of assist” to assist a pupil get into UC Berkeley.

But tributes to Blum on Monday crossed get together strains.

“For 30 years, Elaine and I’ve been privileged to cross paths with Dianne and Dick in quite a few methods, each skilled and private. It was at all times an awesome pleasure to interrupt bread collectively, evaluate notes and catch up,” Senate Republican Chief Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) mentioned on the Senate ground Monday. “Our colleague’s very loving husband was, merely put, a captivating individual. He was extremely profitable, adventuresome, courageous and curious.”

Blum was remembered most on Monday for his generosity of spirit and deep devotion to household, together with his three daughters from his first marriage — Annette, Heidi and Eileen — his stepdaughter, Katherine, and plenty of grandchildren.

“Now we have a gap in our hearts that may by no means be stuffed,” Feinstein mentioned. “Dick, we love you, we’ll miss you and we’ll proceed to have fun the whole lot you completed throughout an incredible life.”

Chatting with The Instances in 1990, Blum mentioned he believed in “pushing no matter occurs to be my agenda to the max.”

“Even if I’ve spent a number of time with Tibetans [discussing reincarnation] … nobody has satisfied me we come this far more than as soon as,” he mentioned.

Instances workers writers Jennifer Haberkorn and Nolan McCaskill contributed to this report.