Cranston Entreats Audience to Give His Black Eye Another Look

U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston, himself a former news reporter, asked California’s newspaper publishers on Friday to think how they would have handled the Charles Keating savings and loan affair--a scandal that has dogged the senator for months.

“Just as I’ve been in your shoes, let me ask you to wear mine for a minute,” Cranston said. “Pretend you are a United States senator from California.”

As the beleaguered four-term senator framed it, his intervening on behalf of Keating’s now-defunct Lincoln Savings & Loan was unrelated to political contributions. It was not a matter of favoritism that led Cranston and other senators to sit down with federal regulators handling the case, he said. None of it was even out of the ordinary, he added.

“What would you do if a businessman heading a very large operation in California came to you and said that his business, with 740 California employees and more than 120,000 depositors, was being harassed and given the runaround by the federal bureaucracy?” he asked.

Cranston, a foreign correspondent for the International News Service in the 1930s and 1940s,added: “I know how little good it does to argue with a reporter, or an editor or a publisher.”

Still, Cranston devoted nearly half of his speech to the annual convention of the California Newspaper Publishers Assn. to the Keating affair--and the political black eye it has given him.

Rather boldly, Cranston suggested that if he could convince publishers they would have acted as he did, “perhaps your papers will begin to reflect that.”

Cranston’s problem stems from the fact that he and four other senators intervened with federal regulators at the time they were investigating Keating’s Lincoln Savings. All of the senators were recipients of political contributions from Keating and associates--with Cranston receiving the most, $47,000 in campaign contributions and $850,000 for voter registration drives.

Lincoln has since gone into receivership. And about 22,000 of its depositors face the loss of their savings because they purchased bonds at Lincoln branches, apparently unaware the bonds were uninsured and risky. And Cranston’s standing in public opinion polls has plummeted, with 69% of those answering the recent California Poll saying they would not vote to reelect him to a fifth term in 1992.

Cranston said he recognized “that the $850,000 I raised from Keating for registration is a huge amount of money. Some people think it was too much to have raised from one man.”

But, he added, “Not a penny of any of Mr. Keating’s money went into my pocket.”

Cranston’s address marked the 33rd straight year he has spoken to the publishers’ convention. He noted, though, it was the first time he had been asked to deliver the keynote address.

If it takes the kind of controversy he is knotted up in to get such an invitation, he joked, “I will gladly give up the honor. . . . Frankly, I wish I’d never met Charles Keating. I wish I’d never raised a dime from him.”