Cranston at Peace With His Past, Focused on Future

When he’s not traveling, Alan Cranston sits these days behind a U-shaped mahogany desk, surrounded by memories stacked in huge, handsome bookshelves.

He looks there for guidance, but never stops generating and adding new material. He’s proud of his past--mostly--but doesn’t dwell on it. He’s still an activist trying to influence the future.

Indeed, Cranston surely is California’s longest-running public policy and political activist of the century. He started out harassing Adolf Hitler back in the 1930s and now is aligned with Mikhail Gorbachev trying to ban nuclear weapons.

He won six statewide elections--two for controller and four for the U.S. Senate--before being chased from Congress by an influence-peddling scandal. Today, his No. 2 issue--behind banning nukes--is campaign finance reform.

“I’m an abolitionist on two fronts,” he says. “I favor a total ban on contributions.”

At 85, Cranston is sharp and fit. He writes and speaks out on his causes, traveling widely in this country and abroad. He runs sprints, lifts weights and hikes up hills, living with his son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter 30 miles south of San Francisco.

*

I decided to look up Cranston after his name recently resurfaced in the news. According to a former Soviet KGB official, Cranston inadvertently stumbled into a spy caper back in 1976.

An unnamed Democratic activist, so the story goes, was a Russian spy who told the KGB he had spent three hours discussing political strategy with Sen. Cranston, Gov. Jerry Brown and presidential nominee Jimmy Carter. “I can’t figure out who the hell it would have been,” Cranston says. “I’m pretty well convinced no such meeting ever occurred. I would remember it. I don’t.”

He thinks some guy was just blowing smoke about his political access to impress the KGB.

Access normally requires big campaign bucks, Cranston points out. That’s why he’d take all private money out of politics and replace it with public financing, coupled with free TV ads. “Private interests pay for campaigns now,” he says. “That screws it up.”

An elected official “can’t ignore” major contributors, Cranston continues. “You can’t see everybody, so you see people whose names you recognize [and/or] have contributed to you. . . . That’s unfair. And it leads to the impression of corruption.”

A cynical public’s impression often is justified.

Concedes Cranston: “Access affects decision-making in issue after issue. The odds are if you can go either way, you’ll go their [donors’] way. . . . If they have a case, you go with it.”

Playing that game ultimately cost Cranston his beloved Senate seat. He decided not to run for reelection in 1992 after his popularity plummeted because of scandal.

The powerful Senate Democratic whip had taken nearly $1 million for political activities from savings and loan operator Charles H. Keating Jr. Cranston returned the favor by intervening with bank regulators for Keating, who was trying to delay government seizure of his Lincoln S&L.; “I figured he had a valid case,” Cranston recalls. But the Senate reprimanded him.

His blunder was taking so much money from somebody that controversial, Cranston says. “Actually I don’t kick myself. It was a mistake and I regret it. But I had enough time--24 years in the Senate. I loved it while I was there, but it turns out I’m loving freedom.”

*

Freedom, for example, to advise Warren Beatty and attend his recent speech when the liberal actor denounced Clinton centrism.

Freedom to work almost full time in the anti-nuke movement. He is board chairman of the State of the World Forum, which has evolved from the Gorbachev Foundation. Nuclear arsenals are incredibly expensive--$34 billion annually for the U.S.--and have questionable military value, Cranston contends.

Time to browse the tall, mahogany book stacks. He pulls down one old publication, his tabloid-size English translation of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

In the ‘30s, Cranston covered Nazism as a wire service reporter. Returning to the U.S., he noticed that Hitler’s new American edition of “Mein Kampf” omitted the most offensive parts. So he produced an uncensored version with parenthetical asides--like: “This represents a complete distortion . . .”--and sold 500,000 copies for a dime each at newsstands until Hitler won a copyright suit.

Cranston opens the leather-bound tabloid and smiles contentedly, pointing to favorite sections--Nazi propaganda maps . . . Hitler’s 10 year plan. Bedeviling the Fuehrer is a chapter from the past that still fills Cranston with pride.

His comfortable library looks out on eucalyptus trees, just off the “adobe colonial” house in bucolic rolling hills.

It’s not the Senate. But life is good.