He helped extricate the United States from Vietnam, ratify the Panama Canal treaty and protect 7 million acres of California desert. But what Alan MacGregor Cranston most proudly displayed on his résumé was that he had been successfully sued in 1939 for copyright violation--by Adolf Hitler. Just three years out of college, Cranston came across a sanitized English translation of Mein Kampf, so he took it upon himself to create an unvarnished version, complete with anti-Nazi commentary. A Connecticut judge ruled that Cranston and his publisher had infringed Hitler's copyright, "which we had done," Cranston admitted in an interview last April. "But we did wake up a lot of Americans to the Nazi threat."
That international perspective was typical of Cranston, '36, who served as a U.S. senator for 24 years and died December 31 at 86 after collapsing at his Los Altos Hills home. He supported a broad peacekeeping role for the United Nations and crusaded against nuclear weapons during the height of the Cold War. But although Cranston's vision was global, his work was often local. "There is a catalog of thousands of bills and amendments he personally authored affecting virtually every aspect of national life," wrote Daniel Perry, a longtime staffer.
Cranston first put his legendary persistence to work in athletics. In 1935, he was a member of the Stanford mile-relay team that set a national record. As an undergraduate, he ran the 100-yard dash in 9.9 seconds (and in 1969 would set the world record for 55-year-olds, running it in 12.6 seconds). But although he often remarked that he "majored in track," the political and social turmoil outside Stanford's bubble beckoned him.
"When I was at Stanford, I watched the League of Nations fail to cope with the invasion of Ethiopia by Benito Mussolini's fascist troops," he said, "and I became very concerned about the fact that we didn't have an effective world organization to deal with such people." He became a foreign correspondent for the Hearst wire service, reporting from Europe and Ethiopia. After two years, however, he concluded that he "didn't want to spend my life writing about such evil people and their terrible deeds; I'd rather be involved in the action."
But Cranston wasn't quite finished with the pen. Afraid the United States might not join the United Nations, he wrote The Killing of the Peace, analyzing isolationists' successful campaign to keep the country out of the League of Nations. The New York Times called it one of the 10 best books of 1945. Cranston then forayed into business and finance, heading his father's Los Altos real estate firm and serving two terms as California state controller. In 1968, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. A shrewd politician with a remarkable ability to predict the outcome of a floor vote, he was the Democratic whip for 14 years. He is remembered for his zeal--and success--on a wide range of issues, from affordable housing to wilderness protection. (A longtime environmentalist, he wrote an open letter during last year's debate over Stanford's land-use plan urging the University to preserve the Foothills in perpetuity.)But the cause Cranston championed most strenuously was nuclear disarmament. At a 1946 conference on U.N. peacekeeping authority, he met Albert Einstein. Einstein warned Cranston that the nuclear bomb was fully developed and could extinguish all life on Earth. "That caught my attention," Cranston said last year, "and ever since, I have been working in one way or another to try to prevent a nuclear war." He led the Senate fights for arms control treaties and, after leaving the Hill, chaired two think tanks--the Gorbachev Foundation USA and the Global Security Institute--dedicated to disarmament and world peace.
Cranston's combination of social liberalism and protection of business interests came to define the modern California Democrat. But he was not the nationally prominent figure one might expect in a senior senator from the country's most populous state. Though he made a presidential run in 1984, he finished seventh in the New Hampshire primary. His most public moment on the national stage may well have been the scandal that drove him from office.
Five senators, including Cranston, John McCain and John Glenn, attempted to intervene with federal banking regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, the Lincoln Savings & Loan president who was later convicted of securities fraud. Keating had contributed $1.5 million to the senators' pet political organizations. In 1990, Cranston, the only one of the so-called Keating Five to receive a formal reprimand from the Senate Ethics Committee, announced he would not run for re-election, citing ill health (he was suffering from prostate cancer).
Despite the sour note on which his Senate career ended, colleagues and observers remember Cranston with admiration. "He was very tolerant," recalls Wolfgang Panofsky, director emeritus of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, who often worked with Cranston on arms control. "We had a very different approach to nuclear disarmament; I was a conservative technician, looking at the next possible step in the process, and he was the visionary about goals," Panofsky says. "But he was in no way critical in his approach, even though we differed greatly."
At Cranston's January 16 memorial service in San Francisco, speakers praised him as a world leader and an idealist. California Gov. Gray Davis, '64, called him "the patron saint of every candidate for office afflicted with a charisma deficit&emdash;myself included." Cranston's son, Kim, read a quotation from Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu that Cranston always carried in his pocket: "A leader is best when people barely know that he exists."
