Cranston’s Crusade Continues

Alan Cranston’s large bony hand picks up a stainless steel fork and holds it upright on the table. “Here’s the missile,” he says. “And here’s the nuclear warhead,” he adds, balancing a salt shaker on top of the fork.

He pulls the tower apart and sets the pieces down. “We have to separate them so it takes 24 hours to put them together,” he explains. “That will give us time to talk and resolve any conflict peacefully.”

Much as he has been for the last 50 years, the former Democratic senator from California is consumed with taming nuclear weapons. And now he has teamed up with former Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to pursue this most lofty and elusive of goals.

Cranston is chairman of the Gorbachev Foundation USA, a San Francisco-based think tank that promotes peace, harmony and nuclear disarmament.

Modeled after the Jimmy Carter Center in Atlanta, the Gorbachev Foundation hopes to do more than draft well-intentioned white papers that turn yellow on dusty shelves. It has ambitious plans to take advantage of this period of relaxed superpower tensions to nudge world leaders to further reduce or even abolish nuclear weapons.

And just as the Atlanta center has resurrected Carter’s image by giving him a platform to champion human rights, the Gorbachev Foundation may offer the same for Cranston: political redemption four years after he left Washington embroiled in the scandal over now-imprisoned savings and loan chief Charles H. Keating Jr.

“Politicians who leave under a cloud can rehabilitate themselves in this country,” said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at Claremont Graduate School. “A time comes when history becomes more kind to them. I suspect that will happen with Cranston too.”

Cranston had been one of California’s most enduring senators, elected four times as an unabashed liberal and rising to a commanding position in the Senate leadership.

For a time, he seemed undefeatable--until Cranston, a virtual Midas of fund-raising, solicited fat checks from Keating, who was under investigation by bank regulators in the late 1980s. During the controversy, Cranston decided not to seek reelection.

But if the Keating affair sullied his otherwise illustrious career, Cranston does not seem to care.

“I don’t feel any need for redemption,” Cranston said recently, sitting in the library of his home in the Bay Area suburb of Los Altos. “I’m satisfied with what I did in the Senate. I don’t look back, I look forward.”

Indeed, Cranston, now 82, has thrown himself into his new work, trotting all over the globe to deliver speeches and otherwise advancing the cause of abolishing nuclear weapons.

He acknowledges missing his 80-member Senate staff, but otherwise feels liberated from the constraints of public office. He vastly enjoys the freedom to set his own agenda.

In an era when most Democratic politicians feel compelled to portray themselves as moderates, Cranston remains an unbowed liberal, one who candidly expresses his views.

He gushes about his friend Gorbachev, whom he first got to know as the world’s top Communist in the mid-1980s. He now elevates him to the pantheon of 20th-century leaders. “There are just a few others who have had as much impact: Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi and Albert Einstein,” Cranston said.

The admiration apparently is mutual.

“Alan Cranston is, without doubt, a remarkable individual, a great American,” Gorbachev said in a statement faxed from Moscow. “Over the past few years we have worked together quite closely, and I have been struck by his indefatigable, strong spirit, his optimism and idealism.”

His arms pumping like pistons, Cranston hotfoots it down the straightaway during a 40-yard dash. His eyes focus straight ahead, deep in concentration, and a dollop of sunscreen glistens on his bald head.

Several times a week, Cranston strides into the Stanford University stadium to run the track where he was a star sprinter 60 years ago.

His tall and sinewy frame moves more slowly now, but he still races the clock, timing each sprint with a stopwatch. He tackles the bleachers too, carefully bounding up 65 rows that grow steeper with each step.

“I usually do more, but I don’t want to today,” Cranston says one recent afternoon, hunched over the 65th row to catch his breath. “I had a hard workout yesterday. And I lifted weights.”

Cranston was an Olympic-class sprinter in college, and says he could have been a contender in the 1936 Games in Berlin had other interests not distracted him.

That disappointment, he says, taught him an early lesson about focus and discipline--two virtues that have marked his career.

Now Cranston says the workouts help keep his energy level up for his political pursuits. His son however, sees it another way: His father’s devotion to his work keeps him going.

“I wish I had his energy level,” said Kim Cranston, 44. “I hope some portion of it is genetic.”

Since retiring from the Senate, Cranston has returned to his hometown in the hills above Stanford, living modestly on his Senate pension and investments in a family compound. His is a one-bedroom cottage down the hill from his sister’s house and across a breezeway from the home of his son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. His roof is red-tiled and his door is guarded by a papier-mache donkey.

Cranston has beaten prostate cancer, the disease he says is the reason he did not seek a fifth Senate term even though polls at the time showed he would have been beaten badly. Divorced for 10 years, he lives alone and only goes out on an occasional date. He loves being close to his family and dotes on his granddaughter, Evan, who will turn 3 in September.

Much of Cranston’s time is spent in a room he loves best, an elaborate library with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a wraparound mahogany desk.

Equipped with four bulging Rolodexes, a phone that rings frequently and a fax machine that hums late into the evening, the library is where he does most of his work.

“This is stuff I have to do,” Cranston says, pointing to a messy eight-inch stack of papers. “This is the stuff I have to write,” he says, motioning to a second stack. Then pointing to a third pile, he concludes: “This is what I’m supposed to do, but don’t want to do.”

Cranston maintains that he is as busy as he was during his Washington years, but more focused now on what is important.

“If I’m going to work, I’d rather work on the issue that threatens every other issue,” he says. “If we did manage to get into an all-out nuclear war, other issues aren’t going to matter.”

Volunteering as chairman of the Gorbachev Foundation USA, Cranston has brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars to help bankroll the institution and its various spin-off projects, such as its annual symposium--the State of the World Forum.

For the first forum, held last year, he helped bring together 500 dignitaries and other deep-thinkers. Its highlight was a group discussion on “the world beyond the Cold War,” which featured Gorbachev, former President George Bush and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Scheduled for October in San Francisco, the second annual forum will offer another impressive array of speakers, including Gorbachev, former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and former Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. Some were invited as part of Cranston’s personal campaign to persuade influential people to join the chorus for nuclear reform.

He recruited retired Air Force Gen. George L. “Lee” Butler to talk about arms controls. Butler, as the former head of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, would have been the officer to carry out the president’s orders for a nuclear strike.

Now, Cranston says, the retired general is “concerned that sooner or later weapons will be used by accident, if not on purpose.”

Cranston’s crusade for peace carries him all over the world. His friends and family say he always seems to be jetting off to Washington or Russia or some exotic location.

“He travels a great, great deal,” said Eleanor Cameron, Cranston’s sister. “He’s as happy as he has ever been.”

Last week, Cranston was in Boston delivering a speech to physicians concerned about nuclear war, then in Washington to lobby for the cause.

Last month, he spent a week in Moscow scoping out the anti-nuclear sentiments of Russian military leaders and solicited signatures from civilian leaders and retired Russian generals for a joint statement calling for the abolition of the deadly weapons.

In keeping with the foundation’s goal to strengthen emerging democracies, Cranston also has adopted the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. He regularly visits the Central Asian country, and has been lining up U.S. investors to bolster its economy.

Cranston has met repeatedly with Arias, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to develop a minimal code of ethics for the international sales of conventional weapons. The idea is to prevent the arming of countries at war or those with a pattern of human rights abuses.

For three years, the effort closest to his heart has been the Global Security Project, a collaboration with the Moscow arm of the Gorbachev Foundation and the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation in India.

At meetings in Washington, Moscow and New Delhi, Cranston has been co-chairman of a group of four dozen diplomats, scholars and arms experts who crafted “an agenda for action” for the five nuclear powers to cut their atomic arsenals and unite in a campaign to curtail nuclear proliferation.

The basic game plan: persuade the United States and Russia to further reduce their stockpiles and then pressure China, England and France to follow suit until all the weaponry is eliminated.

In the interim, the action plan calls for separating nuclear warheads from their missiles so they cannot be fired in a surprise attack or because of miscommunication.

“The short-term objective,” Cranston said, “is to end this hair-trigger situation.”

Cranston’s roots as an international peace advocate date back to the anti-nuclear and world government movements that sprang up shortly after World War II.

As an Army private in 1945, he wrote “Killing of the Peace,” an acclaimed book about the American isolationists who doomed the League of Nations. He wrote the book to make sure the same tactics did not undermine the United Nations.

The book brought him considerable notice and Cranston soon was drafted to become president of the United World Federalists, an ill-fated crusade for peace in the 1940s and ‘50s.

For three years, he crisscrossed the nation preaching that an uncontrollable nuclear arms race and holocaust could only be averted by organizing a world governing body with an international army and world court to enforce the peace.

Later in the 1950s, Cranston became founding president of the California Democratic Council, a leading liberal political force that revitalized the state Democratic Party.

Using the council as a base, he was elected state controller in 1958 and again in 1962. In 1968, Cranston, who by then had mastered the art of fund-raising and run statewide campaigns, was elected to the U.S. Senate, then was reelected three times.

It was one of the longest political careers in a state that often prefers to send new blood to the U.S. Senate rather than retain seniority.

Inside the Capitol, Cranston made his reputation as a quiet cobbler of compromise and a shrewd tactician. His colleagues rewarded him for being a workhorse amid a field of Senate show horses by elevating him to Democratic whip, the party’s No. 2 Senate job, for a record 14 years.

Cranston pushed to protect the environment, expand civil rights, and, of course, cut back nuclear weapons.

And unlike many of his peers, he loved the challenge of raising money and managed to finance his own expensive campaigns as well as assist other candidates and political causes.

But it was fund-raising that ultimately led to disgrace. Cranston solicited about $1 million from Lincoln Savings & Loan operator Keating, even as he joined other senators in interceding with regulators on Keating’s behalf.

Keating later became the archetypal villain in the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, as he stood accused of looting Irvine-based Lincoln Savings and of swindling elderly investors. He was convicted of fraud and racketeering in 1993 and was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison.

Even though the donations went to voter registration drives and other campaigns, the Senate Ethics Committee reprimanded Cranston for improper conduct in 1991.

“I guess I made a mistake,” Cranston said recently, reflecting on what happened. “I was too good at raising money. It eventually got me into this trouble.”

Gorbachev Foundation USA President James Garrison said he initially caught a lot of criticism for bringing in Cranston as chairman of the foundation’s board of directors in 1992.

Some backers feared that the newly retired senator would carry baggage from the Keating scandal.

“I suffered flak, but I stood by him and nothing has caused me to regret that decision,” said Garrison, who describes Cranston as one of his political idols. “Everyone wants Alan involved because they know his immense capacity to get things done.”

Democratic politicians, who once avoided public appearances with him, now are beginning to welcome him back into the fold.

“I would hope that people remember long-range public policy initiatives as the ultimate worth of someone’s public career,” California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said of Cranston. “If they do, they will remember that Alan has had a tremendously worthwhile and productive career.”

When President Clinton visited San Francisco last month, he mentioned Cranston twice in his speech, fondly recalling how they used to jog together around the Capitol.

At the same event, Feinstein praised Cranston’s achievements and asked the retired senator to stand and be recognized. He received warm applause from the crowd of about 200 people.

Garrison was there to witness the moment.

“I said to myself, ‘Yes, finally, the rehabilitation of Alan Cranston.’ ”

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Cranston: A Profile

* Born: June 19, 1914, Palo Alto, Calif.

* Residence: Los Altos, Santa Clara County

* Education: Pomona College; University of Mexico, Mexico City; bachelor of arts, Stanford University.

* Career highlights: Foreign correspondent, International News Service, 1936-38; Common Council for American Unity, 1939; sergeant, U.S. Army, World War II; family real estate business, 1947-67; president, United World Federalists, 1949-52; California state controller, 1959-67; U.S. senator, 1969-1993. Currently, chairman, U.S.-Kyrgyzstan Business Council; senior international advisor, Schooner Capital Corp., Boston; chairman, Gorbachev Foundation USA.