Doing a Job He Loves : Cranston: A Liberal Alive, Well in the Reagan Era

There are people who come up to Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston all the time as he travels around California in quest of a fourth term.

They thank him.

“I cracked up a plane in Sicily in World War II,” says a veteran waiting for Cranston to arrive at a community meeting in Los Angeles. “My benefits were cut off a couple of times, and the senator always got them reinstated. I just wanted to say thanks.”

They hand him things.

A woman in Nevada City gives Cranston a letter praising his crusade against the nuclear arms race.

“You are the American Gandhi,” she gushes.

The father of a 14-year-old boy shoves his son’s poem into the senator’s big, bony hands:

The blue sky, the trees

My dog, a fresh breeze

All of these are things I’d miss

If a fireball destroyed this .

Cranston accepts the veteran’s gratitude with a clap on the back and his trademark shout--”Great!” Then he quickly moves on. No chitchat from this cerebral workaholic.

The letters and poems he saves until he is buckled into his campaign plane. As he reads, the pages fall like petals into the enormous black briefcase at his feet.

Sometimes, it seems, the thoughts expressed in those letters are almost too much for Cranston. Maybe they get too close. He pulls from the briefcase batches of newspaper clippings that have been shipped out by his Washington office.

No politics in these clips. They are articles about the 1986 professional football season. Alan Cranston, advocate of a nuclear freeze, critic of the Pentagon, loves the warlike game of football almost as much as he loves campaigning.

With a recent Los Angeles Times Poll showing him leading Republican challenger Ed Zschau by 15 points, Cranston would appear to be the liberal alive and well in the age of Ronald Reagan.

The Gramm-Rudman automatic spending cuts? Cranston voted against them because he said they would cause chaos.

Appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court? Cranston blasted conservative Justice William H. Rehnquist, President Reagan’s choice for chief justice, and voted against him.

The death penalty? Cranston opposes it even though polls show that about 70% of Californians support it.

“I think the best decision Alan made when we started this campaign was to not run away from his image and his record,” says Cranston campaign spokesman Kam Kuwata.

Cranston is the old-style Democrat, defying those in his own party who said after Walter Mondale’s presidential debacle in 1984 that appealing to constituent groups no longer worked.

He holds community forums for working mothers on the subject of day care. He tells veterans that he will block the sale of vacant land beside their hospital complex in West Los Angeles.

To Jews he notes his support for Israel and opposition to arms sales to Arab countries.

He tells environmentalists that he is lending his name--and $25,000--to the campaign for Proposition 65, the anti-toxics initiative.

Cranston argued over dinner one evening that, far from being a weakness, his appeal to constituent groups is the secret to his success.

“There are all sorts of constituencies in California, and it requires not just reaching them with television ads but (also) developing relationships with their leaders and making plain that you understand their concerns and that you’re trying to do something to help them,” Cranston said as he gnawed on a lamb chop.

Vigorous, Even Youthful

His lower front teeth are ground off like those of an old horse. Still, up close, the 72-year-old senator is vigorous, even youthful.

The arms are muscular. The mind is quick as he dismisses a reporter’s theory or talks about a book he is reading or marvels at an idea he got from an aide who is half his age.

Tapping his glass of wine for emphasis, Cranston continued: “I do think one of my advantages in this campaign--and one of Ed Zschau’s problems--is that I have been all over this state for so many years I have longstanding ties in every community.

“There are minority groups and women who feel I understand their needs and issues. There are native Americans and a lot of smaller groups--there is a Tamil group I’ve tried to help, there are Sikhs I’ve tried to help.

“My ties to Japanese-Americans go back to World War II when I tried to fend off their relocation. Blacks know of my fight for civil rights.”

Commonality, Conflicts

And, indeed, as the 46-year-old Zschau struggles in his first statewide campaign, Cranston shows a grasp of California that his Senate press secretary, Murray S. Flander, describes as “understanding not just the commonality of interests in California but the conflicts.”

“Alan can see a degree of validity to both sides of an argument and he is always trying for balance,” Flander says. “He tries to give the losing side something.”

The classic example, Flander says, involves Mt. Baldy in Southern California.

Cranston wanted to designate the mountain as a wilderness area, but a group of skiers voiced their objections. So he decided that one side of the mountain should be wilderness and that another side should accommodate skiing.

In fact, Rep. Zschau could protest that Cranston has some nerve calling him a “flip-flopper” who takes both sides of some issues.

‘Star Wars’ Votes

Cranston, for example, often criticizes President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or “Star Wars.” But he voted in favor of research and development for the idea.

When liberal senators introduced a nuclear freeze resolution several years ago, Cranston signed up. Then, when other senators offered a more conservative freeze proposal, Cranston joined them, too, puzzling freeze activists.

Those activists have also never understood how the senator could campaign against the nuclear arms race everywhere he goes and yet support the B-1 bomber. Los Angeles-based Rockwell International is chief contractor on that project.

In 1981, Cranston warned against the Reagan tax cuts and worked behind the scenes to block them. But when the cuts came up for a final vote, Cranston was a supporter.

In case after case over the past 18 years, Cranston has proved to be much more of a pragmatist, much more willing to cut deals in the Senate corridors, than some of his impassioned liberal rhetoric would indicate.

He constantly tries to balance his support for liberal causes--fighting cuts in legal aid, opposing an immigration law that barred homosexuals--with favors for California’s business community.

‘We Will Always Listen’

Over the years he has carried legislation and sought tax code changes for bankers, savings and loan companies, developers, movie producers, wine makers, citrus growers and steamship owners, among others.

“They know we will always listen,” boasts Roy Greenaway, Cranston’s administrative assistant.

Take the case of California’s high-tech billionaire, David Packard. This time he’s going with Zschau, who comes out of the same Silicon Valley milieu. But in the 1980 election, Packard openly supported Cranston.

Jon Fleming, Cranston’s chief aide on tax matters, remembered when Cranston took him along for a lunch with Packard on Capitol Hill in the 1970s.

“Packard wanted a tax law change affecting the depreciation of capital items,” Fleming recalled. “Alan listened and then turned to me and said, ‘See what we can do.’ ”

Lower Tax Role

And although Zschau likes to tell businessmen how he lobbied successfully to reduce capital gains taxes in 1978, even he acknowledges that it was Cranston who played the key role in the Senate in lowering those taxes.

That--and a tendency of businessmen to hedge their bets in political races--is why Cranston once again is pulling in contributions from the business community in spite of Zschau’s demonstrated appeal to this sector.

“Alan is formidable,” says investor Armand Deutsch of Los Angeles, a strong Zschau supporter. “Anybody who underestimates him is making a big mistake.”

One Zschau adviser, who requested anonymity, said: “Behind Alan Cranston’s bald head and smiling face is a very tough--you could say mean--politician.”

Zschau found out just how tough recently when Cranston ran a television ad that tried to link Zschau with Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and the Rev. Jerry Falwell, both supporters of the South African government.

Response From Zschau

Zschau cried foul, noting that he has criticized Helms and Falwell as too right-wing and that, unlike them, he supports sanctions against the South African government.

At a news conference, Zschau charged that Cranston was up to old tricks with the TV ad. He held up a 1983 article from the San Jose Mercury News that quoted Tom Braden, former editor of the Oceanside Blade-Tribune, as saying that in 1964 Cranston showed Braden a picture of a potential Cranston primary-election rival in a Mexican motel with a woman who was not his wife.

Braden said in a recent interview that Cranston hoped that the picture would scare his competitor out of the Democratic U.S. Senate primary, a race Cranston ultimately lost.

Cranston denies showing such a picture to Braden, although he says he heard in 1964 that it existed.

“I believe Tom’s memory played tricks with him,” Cranston said. “Nobody in my campaign could have shown him the picture because my campaign never had possession of such a picture. . . .

Fierce Attacks

“All that could have occurred is that someone in my campaign could have said to Braden, ‘If there is such a photograph of this person and he gets the nomination, the Republicans will use it and the Democrats will lose the Senate race.’ ”

In this campaign, Cranston has fiercely attacked Zschau and his House voting record. And although some of the charges have been solid, Cranston has also falsely implied that Zschau is anti-choice on abortion and misleadingly charged that Zschau, a former educator, did not favor upgrading math and science education programs in 1984.

The senator makes no apologies, however. And he argues that the real reason he is leading in the polls has less to do with the success of his attacks and more to do with the fact that Californians know he hasn’t gone off to Washington and forgotten them.

Even Cranston’s Republican critics say his staff’s handling of constituent problems has been excellent over the past 18 years.

Jim Wisely, a consultant to Cranston’s staff, said: “These guys don’t mess around. If you go in to brief Alan on something, you had better be prepared or he’ll look right at you and say, ‘Why don’t you know that?’ ”

Few Trips Abroad

Most senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Cranston has served since 1980, travel abroad every year--often several times a year. Cranston has been out of the country only three times in six years, and none of those trips lasted longer than five days.

By contrast, he is rarely away from California for more than three weeks. A major exception was in 1983 and early ‘84, when he spent much of his time in Iowa and New Hampshire running for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But the day he dropped out of that race he was on the phone to California, lining up endorsements from Democratic officials for his 1986 Senate campaign.

These days, of course, Cranston is in California every week, and his young campaign aides wonder how many more of the seven-day weeks and 15-hour days they can take.

Wife Norma, 66, who has Parkinson’s disease, has finally stopped trying to keep up with her husband and spends most of her time in their Washington town house.

Legendary for the hours he spends on the telephone raising money, Cranston has recently pushed his staff to get him out on the campaign trail more often.

“It really pumps him up,” Kuwata says.

More Exercise

In 1969, facing that first bewildering year in the Senate, Cranston took a speed-reading course to cope with the blizzard of paper. This year, facing the toughest race of his Senate career against a much younger foe, he added Nautilus exercises to his morning wind sprints.

Why does he do it? Why does this man--whose three terms represent a long tenure by modern Senate standards--want so much to hang onto his job? Why is he already talking about running in 1992 and 1998?

As much as Alan MacGregor Cranston likes California, where his Scottish ancestors settled in the 19th Century, the answer to that question is found somewhere else.

It is in Washington, in his spacious office beneath the Capitol Rotunda, with its inspiring view of the Mall and the Washington Monument.

Cranston got the office because he is the “whip,” or second in charge of the Senate Democrats, a job that requires him to do a lot of horse-trading and vote counting.

Fire on the Hearth

On the walls are paintings of California’s spectacular scenery. There are comfortable sofas and chairs, worn shiny in spots by the breeches of many a senator and lobbyist. Sometimes a fire crackles on the hearth.

Inviting in Democrats and Republicans, zealots and pragmatists, Cranston likes to close the door and hold court. Anything--arms reductions, human rights, Soviet politics, the new Philippine government, tax reform, offshore oil drilling--is likely to come up.

“I like to bring people into this office, people who have common purposes or who may be at cross-purposes, and see what we can work out on the issues of the day,” he said recently.

“I thrive on it. It is why I am excited every day I come to work in the Capitol.”