COLUMN ONE : A Fallen Giant Ends His Reign : For all the garlands bestowed upon Alan Cranston as he prepares to leave the Senate after 24 years, he fades into history with an asterisk by his name--forever disgraced by the Keating affair.

Along the rose-upholstered walls, under the deep swags of fringed draperies, they waited to press his gaunt hand and to thank him--”great statesman that you are,” one man burbled--before relinquishing him to the next admirer.

In this chandeliered office where Lyndon B. Johnson bullied and sweet-talked the United States Senate, in this room where Bill Clinton had met with the kings of Congress just a few hours before, retiring Sen. Alan Cranston was coming closer to taking leave of power, among men and women anxious to attest to how splendidly he had wielded it.

Again and again, the leaders of human rights groups stepped forward and spoke, sometimes in choked cadences, of Cranston’s vigilance and devotion in Guatemala . . . in China . . . Indonesia.

If anyone had looked straight up--and who would bother to look up when Ted Kennedy was standing not 10 feet away, when there was good California wine at the bar and guacamole on the buffet table?--if anyone had looked up, there above Cranston’s head was one of those Victorian murals, all symbolism and morality: the figure of History, an aged man contemplating the emptying hourglass in his hand.

In this most political year, when the word liberal has faded from the national political glossary, so too does Alan Cranston, the consummate pragmatic liberal, who put a premium on the scut work of politics and not its flash and rhetoric.

He has been the Gentleman from California for 24 years, a four-term senator from a fickle state that has taken up and discarded senators as if they were Kleenex. George Murphy, John Tunney, S.I. Hayakawa, Pete Wilson and John Seymour came and went in those years; Cranston endured, a shrewd balancing act, his own ironies well suited to a state built on paradox.

He is the peacenik who watched over his state’s rich defense industry, the environmentalist from a state that had prospered by building up and paving over, the grass-roots idealist who became the adroit Senate tactician, a Cassandra who warned long ago that big money could corrupt politics and yet gathered it in with both arms.

For all the garlands bestowed upon him, Cranston goes out of the Senate on Sunday and into history with an asterisk by his name, like a baseball player with a “yes, but” footnote in the record book.

A year ago, Cranston, alone among the “Keating Five” senators, was reprimanded for “an impermissible pattern of conduct” with savings and loan chief Charles H. Keating Jr., who gave large checks to Cranston causes even as the senator interceded with regulators on Keating’s behalf.

The fund-raising Midas who first made a U.S. Senate race a million-dollar proposition had been undone by his own golden touch.

“I’m sure he feels this more than anyone,” said Mickey Kantor, who ran his 1974 campaign. “If this had not happened, there’d be dinners in his honor and proclamations and columnists and writers talking about how much we’ll miss his leadership. . . . It’s a shame, at least in the short run. I think in the long run he’ll be viewed not only favorably but as one of the giants in the U.S. Senate.”

Prostate cancer, Cranston said, kept him from running for a fifth term. The Keating business, the polls suggested, would have kept him from winning. He believes he has beaten the cancer, and at 78, still as lean and sinewy as a strip of beef jerky, Cranston plans to take up mountain biking.

The Keating matter may be harder to beat. Arizona Sen. John McCain, reelected after his own scorching in the scandal, lamented that Keating would be chiseled on his tombstone. How then will Cranston figure? Will his limbs be nailed symbolically over the Senate doors, a warning that--as some of his colleagues murmured to him--”there but for the grace of God go I”?

It is not a topic Cranston cares to dwell on. When it is raised, he skips over it with iron brevity. “I don’t want to rehash all that . . . I just accept it, it’s life, it’s done, it’s over and I go about my business.”

Others do speak of it, puzzling for explanations.

Josiah Beeman, for years California’s Washington lobbyist, uses the words pernicious and money in the same breath: “If somebody with the kind of personal integrity of Alan Cranston, who’s always been scrupulous in avoiding any hint of personal financial benefit from the legislation he’s pursued, can fall victim to the system--then no one is safe.”

William A. Turnage, Cranston’s friend from Turnage’s days at the Wilderness Society: “There’s a Greek tragedy here” in Cranston’s mastery of an ultimately flawed system. Others cast Cranston’s Greek tragedy as hubris, a fall brought on by pride.

Lu Haas was in politics from the era of the first Gov. Brown into the 1980s, and was Cranston’s California representative for his first two Senate terms. “With respect to fund raising, he went his own way, he had supreme confidence in himself that he wouldn’t do the wrong thing. I don’t think he feels to this day he did anything wrong because he thinks that he’s pure at heart.”

Cranston himself is inclined to agree with a metaphor that almost any Californian would grasp: He was like the driver hurrying down the Harbor Freeway who gets pulled over by the Highway Patrol. Why me? the driver asks plaintively. Everybody else is speeding too.

*

When the Senate is not in session, Dusty the golden retriever, the favored pet of a Cranston staffer, is welcome in this congenial warren of offices in the Hart Building.

The Senate has not been in session since Oct. 8, when distinguished gentlemen from New Jersey, from Connecticut, from Ohio, Virginia and Utah stood up one after the other and spoke feelingly of their departing colleague as “a true leader . . . a man of compassion and commitment . . . the conscience of the Senate.”

So Dusty the dog roamed the hallways, sniffing at the new packing boxes, stacked three and four high along the corridors, containing the legislative history of Alan Cranston, all destined for Bancroft, the great library of California history at UC Berkeley.

An archivist has been on the payroll for months to see that the files are coherently organized: “Wildlife/Animal Issues 1991 . . . Environ. & Agric. Legislation . . . AC for President,” from his awkward 1984 run at the White House--everything, back to wire recordings of interviews from the days before audio tape. A spokesman says they will be selectively opened 10 years from Cranston’s retirement or five years after his death.

Coming and going through this cardboard fortress of his career, Cranston says he is “upbeat.”

“He’s always upbeat,” says Haas, who later worked with Jerry Brown, Tom Hayden and John Van de Kamp. “He is the world’s most upbeat person. Nothing will get him down. He may live in a state of total denial for all I know--he certainly lived in a state of denial when he was dealing with the Keating issue.”

Retiring Chief of Staff Roy Greenaway used to say he and another senior staffer could tell when Cranston got angry “because he sighed very deeply . . . it’s hard to tell; he’s up and down.”

Haas suspects the transition is harder than Cranston admits. “He had no life at all, and very few interests outside, except being a senator. . . . This is why it must have been a terrible, terrible thing.” He loved “being somebody trying to do good in the world--it’s almost laughable to express a simplistic view like that, but it’s true,” Haas said.

In Cranston’s corner office, the honors and gimcracks that public figures accumulate like dust balls were being packed up. Personal things would go last. A painting Cranston executed of the Washington skyline, with tulips. His parents’ photographs, in derby and picture hat. The picture of Grenville Clark, an aide to the secretary of war, the hero of Cranston’s young manhood and role model of his career, who spent the years after World War II trying to prevent World War III.

Trophies glimmered on a windowsill in winter sunlight. Cranston is a ferocious athlete, a track star at Stanford who for a time held the world’s record for 55-year-olds in the 100-yard dash: 12.6 seconds. Guidebooks printed up for California tourists show him in his jogging suit in front of the Capitol.

Transportation, veterans’ issues--those he recounts with satisfaction. But mention sports--that bicycle race when he beat Sen. Joe Biden, a man nearly 30 years his junior--and the dour senator becomes gleeful.

He knew farewell interviews would be expected, and he greeted reporters with two lists. The first is his 1991 accomplishments, compiled by his staff. The second is his own handwritten list of areas “where I think I’ve accomplished the most while I’ve been in the Senate,” its items brief but sweeping: peace, environment, civil rights--voting rights, equal rights, freedom of choice act--human rights, freedom and democracy worldwide. . . .

But on Capitol Hill, Cranston learned well that right did not equal might. “The problem with President Carter,” he once said of the only Democratic President he worked with, “is that he thinks the issues win on their merits.”

So he made his reputation as a workhorse, a cobbler of compromise, a detail man who wooed and counted votes assiduously. That, and his awesome ability to raise millions, won him the party’s No. 2 Senate job, the whip.

Turnage has seen him sprinting down the hall to grab a senator for a committee quorum. One of Cranston’s proudest moments came in his first term, during a roll call on a Lockheed bailout. He collared a Montana senator in the cloakroom off the Senate floor and persuaded him to cast the deciding “yes” vote just in time.

“I wish you were on our side more often,” a Nixon legislative aide once said admiringly.

Republicans certainly helped give Cranston his long political shelf life. “Alan was never really as liberal as the press wanted to think of him,” said Greenaway. “He always had much more appeal to moderate and conservative Democrats and even moderate Republicans.”

California’s junior senator, though often a Republican, was usually new, with little clout. So growers, aerospace, S&Ls; and banks sought a hearing from the senior senator, son of a real estate investor, and their contributions often boosted his campaign coffers.

Howard Allen, retired chairman of Southern California Edison, a conservative and a Cranston friend, said, “If the (other) Republicans didn’t like him, they should have worked harder to get him out. They ran a bunch of jerks.”

Indeed, Cranston’s political life at times seemed charmed.

He co-founded the California Democratic Council, reinvigorating the state party. Elected state controller twice, he lost a Senate primary in 1964 but won in 1968 against the first of Allen’s “bunch of jerks”: conservative schools chief Max Rafferty. He beat conservative state Sen. H.L. Richardson in 1974, and had no problem in 1980 with political novice Paul Gann, pulling more California votes than even Ronald Reagan.

The 1986 race was much tougher. His ill-advised 1984 presidential bid, rooted in his anxiety over nuclear disarmament and Reagan’s saber rattling, left him looking out of touch and vulnerable.

First he erased a $2-million presidential debt, then he raised $13 million for his Senate race, working the state hard and pulling out a squeaker against moderate Republican Ed Zschau.

Cranston often was helped by strong support in the Jewish community, which grew in part from his unique distinction of being sued for copyright violation by Hitler, after Cranston published an unexpurgated “ Mein Kampf “ to counter the sanitized edition being sold in the United States in the 1930s.

His two years as a reporter in Europe before the war determined the earliest and the last themes of Cranston’s public life--peace. Some 40 years ago, Cranston was national president of the United World Federalists, a worldwide peace group that Reagan once belonged to. In 1993 he will return to first principles as a board member of the richly funded Gorbachev Foundation U.S. in San Francisco, dedicated to peace and disarmament issues.

Cranston knows Gorbachev and admires him vastly. Cranston said he would like to see him join up with Carter as a sort of Red Adair international crisis mediation team.

He will also keep his hand in California politics. His PAC, Committee for a Democratic Consensus, handed out $150,000 to House and Senate candidates last year.

Cranston will not brook any hint that his fabled efficiency has been impaired in his lame-duck years. “As a matter of fact, some people, out of sympathy and regard, want to help you do things.”

But here, where power follows incumbency as flowers track the sun, some were quick to speak--or think--of him in the past tense. “As soon as those guys perceive a guy’s lost it, he’s dead, they move in like sharks,” Turnage said. “The last two years have been enormously painful and frustrating.”

Cranston obstinately fought for and lost a coin redesign bill, to mutterings even from allies that he was pushing it as much for its promoter, his social companion, as for the revenue it could bring.

Much worse was the failure, again, of the desert protection bill. “He worked on that for 10 years like a goddamn Trojan,” said Turnage. Cranston said he believes it will pass with two California Democratic senators and a Democratic president. “It’s going to happen,” Turnage agrees, “but Alan Cranston, who put it together and worked on it, won’t be there.”

*

The late Jesse M. Unruh, Assembly Speaker, state treasurer, the cynical sage of Sacramento, said that money is the mother’s milk of politics. He also said you have to be able to take the fat cats’ money, drink their liquor, woo their women and vote against their bills.

Unruh, it is alleged, didn’t think much of Cranston’s high-mindedness, such as his releasing his income tax returns voluntarily, or championing campaign finance reform. But Cranston raised more money, millions more, than Unruh ever dreamed of.

Reform was one of the first Senate measures Cranston ever proposed. And one of the last mentions of his name on the Senate floor was Sen. Christopher Dodd, who praised him as “a relentless champion for campaign finance reform.”

But Cranston was not about to commit political suicide by holding himself unilaterally to limits; he had to campaign in the nation’s most populous state.

Besides, he was good at raising money, the one political duty most politicians loathe. “I love it,” he remarked once. Haas remembers watching Cranston work the phones with his “famous yellow pad” and coded file cards marked with K’s for potential donors. Big sums, collected early, “scare off my opponents.”

So good was he on the phone that a joke went around in the 1980s that a plane full of Democratic donors crashes. They all go to heaven, and as they settle down for a nap, the phone in every room rings, and a voice says, “Please hold for Alan Cranston.”

“It’s a sense of empowerment to be able to get on the phone and get a commitment from somebody for $2,000 or $5,000 or $100,000 or whatever it is,” Haas said. “It becomes some kind of a psychic drug, is my guess.”

The ironies are richer than a campaign war chest. Interior Secretary-designate Bruce Babbitt, who is profoundly grateful for Cranston’s environmental work, notes that part of Cranston’s success on issues that mattered to him “was predicated on being a good fund-raiser. He wouldn’t have been able to have been the leader he was if he was not.”

But it also showed that being good at raising money sometimes can be riskier than being bad at raising money. In June, 1989, Cranston paid a $50,000 fine to the Federal Election Commission, after his 1984 presidential campaign took $54,000 in illegal contributions from a Beverly Hills commodities broker. From Keating sources came $850,000 for Cranston’s chosen voter registration groups, an additional $39,000 for his 1986 campaign, and $85,000 for the state Democratic Party. Near the end of the 1986 campaign, a Keating aide flew into town with a large line of credit that was never used.

Five senators were scrutinized for their dealings with the politically conservative Keating. Their intervention with regulators allegedly created a costly delay of a federal takeover of Lincoln Savings. Cranston was singled out in part because, the special counsel charged, Cranston alone “affirmatively asked” Keating for contributions.

Most of the Keating money--$250,000 of it delivered to Cranston’s office by a lobbyist who was still in the room when Cranston phoned Keating and agreed to contact a bank regulator on Keating’s behalf--went to three Cranston-backed voter registration groups that were nominally nonpartisan, but which reportedly registered mostly Democrats.

Cranston is an ascetic man who has been known to show up in the same suit three days running--and even in the same shirt; he would not have dreamed of taking Keating money for personal use. “You know that I pocketed no money,” Cranston told members of the Ethics Committee.

But Kim Alexander of Common Cause, who says S&L; contributions also flowed freely to lawmakers here, says, “Some people might think that’s not as bad as using the money to pay for junkets to foreign countries, but the problem is he was still indebted to Keating.’

Although he admitted his involvement with Keating was “politically stupid and unwise,” Cranston also insists he was singled out for being “the No. 1 fund-raiser for Democrats in the Senate.”

A year ago, when Cranston was preparing to respond to his chastisement on the Senate floor, Haas said he was invited to submit a speech. His draft, touching on confession and contrition, was rejected.

Cranston instead delivered remarks that made his colleagues squirm, a frank glimpse of the cruder truths of politics: “How many of you could stand up and declare you’ve never, ever decided to see or take a call from someone whose name you recognize, be it a friend, a prominent leader in your state or in the nation, a volunteer in your campaign or a contributor. . . . I doubt that any of you could do so.”

Living these two years with cancer and opprobrium, something very close to relief creeps into Cranston’s tone when he talks of what he will not miss, such as the “ridiculous” habit that visiting Californians “representing some corporation or some entity have to see you even though they have nothing to say, so they can report ‘I saw the senator’ and justify their trip or their expense account. I’ve had some of the most aimless conversations in my life with such people.”

As vastly documented as his record is, Cranston leaves the Senate in some ways as much an enigma as he entered it. Don Edwards, California’s ranking member of Congress, knew Cranston from childhood. They went to Stanford together, their fathers worked together, their sisters were in the same sorority. Edwards testified for Cranston in the Keating matter. His career adds up to “90% good, 10% bad luck and bad judgment.”

And Edwards speaks of California’s “love and affection” for the man over the years.

Love is not a word of Haas’ choosing. “He was always a mystery to everybody,” Haas said. “We marveled at him, we respected him and so on, but you never loved him, because he would not allow that.”