"MEIN KAMPF" by ALAN CRANSTON--by Bob Kholos

    ALAN CRANSTON
    “Mein Kampf,” by Alan Cranston.
    As a young reporter for a wire service in pre-war Germany, Cranston was fluent in German, and read the infamous book written by Adolph Hitler. When he came back home to America, Cranston was so worried about the content of the book; he had it published in English.
Hitler sued him for copyright infringement and won, and the book was taken off the shelves.  Alan Cranston became the first person to be sued by Hitler, but his awareness and political commitment became stronger.
To say he was loved by the California political Jewish community would be an understatement.
    His wife, Geneva was one of the funniest people I had ever known.  She wrote comedy for old radio shows, but more importantly she was a political activist and fought Congressional mandates against the Chinese during the 1930’s.  She was a lot brighter than Alan, and I believe if the women’s movement started a few years earlier she would be holding elected office. 
    At one fundraiser in the backyard of a beautiful house on an unusually warm summer night in Bel Air, Geneva let loose after a few drinks.  I was sitting at the table with her and was getting slowly plastered. The eight other people sitting there were also enjoying the bottles of wine. It was 1969; Cranston had taken office a few months earlier, and everyone was relaxed and having a great political time.
Although the story that Geneva told is somewhat blurry 33 years later, and telling it now may give you the wrong impression that she was mean, the opposite is true. I will never forget her humor and intelligence. While she had complete command of a very powerful table of guests, and not because she was the Senator’s wife, she described a situation in Washington D.C., at a similar dinner party.  I realized towards the end of her story she was “psyching” everyone out. People were laughing about the Pig the fancy guests in the nation’s capitol were eating.  The problem was that no one was sure if she were calling her husband a pig, or the guests at the party a pig.  At the end people were doubled over with laughter.   Finally, a nervous aide, realizing someone was having too much fun, distracted the table and this stand up comedian, who happened to be the new Senator’s wife, had to excuse herself.
    Unfortunately, she became very ill, not too long after that.  Another aide and I were asked by Cranston to scope out a couple of nursing facilities for her.  Eventually, the Senator divorced Geneva, because she was incoherent.  Another tragedy hit home when his older son, Rob, who was into “Small is Beautiful” and other environmental issues, died in a traffic accident.
    I met Alan Cranston while I was covering the California Democratic Party retreat in Arrowhead, as a reporter for Radio News West, which was a division of City News Service.  Tom Quinn who was my boss at the news organization, later became the architect of Jerry Brown’s successful run for Governor of California.  Also employed at the organization was Dana Rhorbacker, who is now a United States Congressman and prominent member of the conservative wing of the Republican Party.
    It was 1968, and I had been home from Vietnam less than a year, when, thanks to Scott Shurian, a reporter for KMPC radio, introduced me to Quinn, and I got the job.  Problem was, I had to get up at four in the morning in order to get to downtown LA, and edit the morning news feed.
When Lou Haas approached me at the retreat I was covering, and asked me if I would be interested in doing press for Cranston’s campaign, I jumped at the chance.
    Lou was the crusty ol’ man of the Cranston campaign for Senate.  He had plenty of statewide experience under Governor Pat Brown and was an old time liberal, with a twist.  He was practical and had his feet firmly placed on the ground.  He was also an old newspaperman.  Without Haas, I don’t think Cranston would have made it.
When Cranston was thinking about voting for busing, years later, Haas said, “Senator, if you want to be a United States Senator again, you’ll vote against busing.”
    He was so tough that many times he would push male and female staff members to tears.
    1968 was a transition time for political operatives.  They knew that newspapers were not as influential in campaigns as they had been, but how do you take advantage of the electronic press?
    I filled that void in the Cranston for Senate campaign somewhat.  With my expertise in radio news, I immediately set up a “beeper” operation.  Instead of just having canned statements of the candidate ready when a radio station called in, I became pro-active and used newsworthy clips of Cranston and had them sent around to the hundreds of radio stations in California.  I did something else.  One of the problems at that time was getting good quality interviews with a candidate or officeholder on the road.  Often the quality was very poor, both in live interviews and taped “actualities” of the person’s voice.
    I would take my little Sony tape recorder with me on the road, and when I thought Cranston said something newsworthy, I would take a 20 second excerpt, go to a phone booth and take apart the phone while I patched in with my alligator clips right into the system.  Newsrooms were amazed at the quality and as long as what I had to offer was legitimate, they would use it.
    Often, when a new poll came out, or a phony charge was made against Cranston, I would tape his reaction on the road, and play it for newspaper, wire services, radio stations, and on occasion television reporters.  This would create invaluable news saturation.
    On occasion, I would suggest a newsworthy statement, or in one case run around the track with my tape recorder, doing a short interview to accent his running abilities.  He had set various world track records in the Senior Olympics.   Although I was in horrible shape, I managed to run a quarter mile with the guy in an out of breadth interview, which was played on many stations in California.
    I had to pressure the campaign to do radio news interviews.  Finally, in exasperation, I showed them the statistics on radio listenership in California.  When I proved that one interview on a moderately sized station in Los Angeles, would reach more people than he would speak to personally during the entire campaign, they finally let me fill the campaign trail with radio interviews.
    Cranston, who was temporarily out of power as State Comptroller, was on the board of directors of a homebuilder.  He started the California Democratic Council and was very popular with rank and file democrats.
    He was running against the California Superintendent of Public Instruction, Max Rafferty for the open Senate seat.
Max was a conservative, uptight Republican.  There were many distinctions between the two men.
    Rafferty was against Caesar Chavez and the Grape Boycott.  Cranston was for it.
Rafferty was for the war in Vietnam.  Cranston was opposed to it.
Neither served the military in World War Two.  I don’t know the reason Cranston didn’t serve, but Max said he had an injury that kept him out of service.
    We thought Cranston would win, but it would be close.  Rafferty was a good campaigner and knew where and when to throw the mud at his opposition.
    In what we thought was a blow to our side, the Republican candidate said Cranston wanted a one-world government.  As evidence, he offered proof of Cranston’s long time membership in the World Federation, a group that wanted a one-world government.    Now that sounds sinister and almost un-American, especially in the Cold War years of the 1960’s.
    However, when Cranston offered documentation that conservative Republican, President Richard M. Nixon belonged to the same group, Rafferty was astonished, and almost laughed out of the campaign.
Cranston and Rafferty where both strong supporters of Israel.  But, when Max made a speech saying that Israel was the last bastion in the defense of democracy on the sands of the Sahara, it boomeranged against him.
His geographical error hit home when Cranston said, “If Israel is the last bastion of democracy on the sands of the Sahara, then their holding Bar Mitzvah’s in Cairo.”  This reaction, written by former newspaperman Murray Flanders, made Rafferty look like a joke.
    Polling still predicted a close election in November.
    Then a young reporter for the Long Beach Independent Press Telegram, David Shaw decided to visit the hometown of Max Rafferty and do a story on his background.
    There is an old Yiddish proverb that says, “If a man says he is a prophet, ask his wife.”
    David interviewed his ex-wife.  She said that Max would carry around a walking cane during the war.  But, when the war ended he threw his cane away and didn’t have a limp.
    That story put a lie to his claims of being a super patriot.  The well-known Cranston held a strong democratic base and as a result of the story pulled in many liberal and moderate northern California republicans.
    Cranston and his top advisor, Attorney Alan Krebs, also made one other key decision.
    Most candidates for statewide office would attend the 1968 convention in Chicago.  Realizing the possible disruption and not wanting to be associated with the ramifications, he announced that his time would be better spent contacting voters in California.  This made him look better to moderate republicans, and of course the riots and fist fights that developed in Mayor Richard Daley’s city during the convention, proved the Cranston campaign right.
Cranston became Senator elect on election night, handily beating Max Rafferty.
    The next morning he held his post election news conference.  He pulled me to the side and said, “Well, they say my reelection campaign starts today.”
    He asked me to work for him, and I accepted without hesitation.
    Nixon was pissed that he lost the California Senate seat.  When Cranston moved his Senate field office into the new West Los Angeles Federal Building, near the UCLA campus, the President made sure they put us on the 13th floor as a hopeful sign of bad luck.
    Without taking any time out, from the time I was drafted and subsequently served with the Fourth Infantry Division in the Central Highlands of Vietnam, through my final tour at Fort Polk, LA., then working for Radio News West, and finally the Cranston for Senate Campaign, at 25 years of age, I was starting to burn out and didn’t know it.
    Between Cranston taking office and his election, I was hired by Charles Manatt to help him run his campaign for School Board.  I told him that, “I had no experience in his type campaign,” but he wanted me just because I worked for Cranston. It was a waste of time.  His law partner, Don Rothenberg, wanted me to sneak around the LA Sports Arena and check out their attendance figures. I was paid to do politics not be a snoop for his law firm.  Manatt lost that campaign. He didn’t like me much after that, because I supported George Brown for California Democratic chairman against him, although I didn’t know he was going to be a candidate for that position.
    To this day I never publicly mentioned seeing him at a private anti-Semitic country club in Los Angeles.   I had been invited by my second wife to have lunch with her grandmother at the club. She was automatically a member because she was an amateur golf champion many years previously.  I didn’t know they didn’t allow Jews to join, until Kathy mentioned it the day of the lunch.   I figured what the hell, I would be able to invade the club and eat lunch with my toes, but I also didn’t want to embarrass my new wife. She was a producer for Chuck Barris and the “Gong Show.” The marriage lasted a little longer than lunch.
    So, I went and saw how the other half lived.  Some guy from a distance came over to our table.  It was Chuck Manatt, who would later become Chairman of the Democratic National Committee.  He nervously said, “I won’t tell anyone you were here, if you don’t tell anyone I was here.”  I actually didn’t care if anyone had known I broke the “bigot barrier” at the club, and although I didn’t care for Manatt because he was part of the Tunney group, I knew he wasn’t a bigot, and in fact he was a pretty good guy, just trying to get ahead in the normal American fashion, and I wasn’t into smearing anyone. Before I had a chance to respond, he jumped like a jackrabbit to the exit.
    January of 1969 came around, and I was hired by Cranston to put together his radio “beeper” operation.  It just meant reaching him in Washington and asking him to comment on something I thought was newsworthy at the time, and edit it, put it on our automatic tape system.   I was also hired in his Los Angeles office to help Lou Haas with the California press operation.
    The first day I walked proudly into the office, I was confronted by a young “know-it-all” female aide, who thought she was something special because she had dated a national columnist.  For many years I never talked to anyone about my involvement in the war.  I got the message that people were uncomfortable with me when they found out.  This included my parents and relatives, who were either highly judgmental of me, or overly influenced by the heavy-handed television reporting from Vietnam.
    Can you imagine a young son or daughter coming home from Afghanistan after a year and not asking them one question about it? Only saying, “so, what are you going to do for work?”
Many of my Vietnam vet buddies, even one guy with two Purple Hearts, was never asked by his parent’s anything about his involvement in the war when he came home.
    So, I was amazed at this young aide’s hostility when I walked into the new office.
    She said to me, “I hate you because you were a soldier in Vietnam.”  Of course it was painful, since I didn’t know her and didn’t know how she knew I was a soldier serving about a mile from the Cambodian Border near an NVA supply line.
    After a few moments I asked, “Did you pay your taxes?”  She acknowledged with a yes, by nodding her head.  “If you paid your taxes, you sent me there,” I said.  Her mouth dropped open and just stared at me.
    I still don’t think all of the middle age people I meet now, who are still so sacrosanct about being, “against that war,” ever considered they were to blame also.  In a dictatorship the people can blame a war on their leadership, but in a representative democracy we can only blame ourselves.  The only true anti-war activists were those who fled to Canada, or spent five years in Federal Prison for not paying, “War taxes.”   All the rest are self-righteous phonies.
    Now, we run into the other jerk’s, who either lied when they say they served in Vietnam, or the others who were too scared to join or be drafted in their 20’s, and now can safely say, “I wished I served in Vietnam.”
    I would walk pass the female aide every morning, into the office, take a few hours and put the radio operation together and then go home.  I had no idea I had to stay there all day.  What a waste of time, I thought.   It wasn’t until Lou Haas said to me, “You can’t just stay for a few hours and leave.”  The handwriting was on the wall.  It was just a matter of a few months before I got involved in the Unruh campaign for Governor, and Brown for US Senate.
    I stayed long enough in the Cranston office to do some damage.
An unhealthy woman walked into my office to complain about the treatment the Papago Indians of Arizona were receiving at the hands of the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.  She was stressed about it, and me being an idealist, thought I would investigate the problem. Since she was so extreme in her nature, I was probably the only person that would have listened to her.
    The Indians living in Arizona were forced to raise cattle in the southwest, in order to survive.  Since they were more basket weavers than cattle ranchers, and since Arizona and the Fed’s had moved them many times from their rich land to the arid part of Arizona, closer to the Mexican border, they were having a difficult time surviving.
    Add to these problems, Senator Fanning of Arizona was not compassionate to their needs and the Bureau of Indian Affairs having, at that time, a reputation of disliking Indians, plus the normal prejudice surrounding the Reservation, we had a crisis situation.
    Not only that, but their had been a horrible drought, and the cattle were dying.
The late Senator Robert Kennedy once said that if the government dismantled the Bureau of Indian Affairs, we could give every Indian about $10,000 dollars a person for the rest of their lives.
    The BIA had never had a Native American as head, and the bureaucracy at the time, was enough to turn anyone into a republican.
I decided that I would get a camera crew down to the Reservation and direct a little documentary on the problem.
    Bob Grey, Cranston’s top assistant in Washington, gives me the green light to do a written report on the situation.  This took a lot of guts on his behalf.  It was rare that one US Senate staff would go into another state and do a private expose on a situation under the nose of another Senator.
    At the Papago main house, I met with the Chief, Tom Segundo.  He took the crew and me around the site.  I was amazed to see dead cattle stuck in the mud.  They would search for water on the large reservation and would get stuck and die in the mud.
    The housing for the inhabitants looked like an oversized shantytown, or the poor housing rural Black’s had when I lived in Louisiana in 1967.
    Then I filmed the most important part.  The BIA was selling water to the poor residents for a dollar a barrel.  A single mom would have to get someone to drive a mile or so to the main Bureau compound, made up of middle class federal single-family dwellings for the Federal workers, and purchase an oil drum of water.
    The most amazing part, and the most devastating blow to the BIA came, when I filmed them callously watering their green lawns with automatic sprinklers!  All of this time the Indians were begging for water.
I still have that segment on videotape now.  But, it takes a lot more to get the story out and have people interested.
    When I went back, after an overnight stay on the Reservation, I asked Cranston aide, Larry White to write up a piece about what I had on film, so we could get it around to the press.
    Larry, whose father worked for the Eisenhower Administration, told me that First Lady, Mimi used to get drunk and lean out the window of the President’s bedroom and waive to White House visitors outside to, “Come on in.”
    Larry had a connection to national columnist Jack Anderson.  So, he suggested we send the findings to him.
    Meanwhile, Bob Dornan had a daytime show on KHJ TV in Los Angeles and was gracious enough to show my little film.  It created quite a stir.
    Then all hell broke loose when Jack Anderson did an entire column on the problem.
    The Bureau of Indian Affairs, who had all along said there wasn’t much they could do, immediately started giving the water away to the local residents.
    Republican Senator Fanning was furious.  He called Cranston to say that he could send in people to find problems in California.   Bob Grey told his staff to take a flying leap.
    Cranston’s staff was reigned in after that.  It takes a lot of people to solve a problem, but it is important for the staff’s of powerful politicians to take a chance once in awhile.  The worst that happens is you lose a job.
    Senator Cranston was very successful, but like a lot of democrats in his time, much of his fundraising was tied to the building industry and the Savings and Loan establishment.   Middle and lower income housing was key to the democratic philosophy, and it made sense from a political fundraising philosophy to tap the same monied sources for reelection. This is how Charles Manatt became Chairman of the National Democratic Party.  He was an Attorney for the Savings and Loan industry and also a friend of many Congressmen.  He got money for the election campaigns of his buddies in Congress and was also able to lobby them on the interests of the S&L industry.  It was legal.  Once that watershed was broken open, the arms race of fundraising, special interest favors began.  Up until then it was always the Republicans with the huge war chest. Their natural constituency was money.
    The Democrats were happy and Cranston, who was an honest guy, but played the game to the extreme, got caught handing out special congressional favors to the Savings and Loan industry.  When that industry hit the crisis of the 1980’s, Senator Cranston was one of the needed scapegoats, and he left the US Senate in a political limp.

Comments

[Tony Barash]

Bob - Your story of running with Cranston brought to mind the race I advanced between Cranston and radio KGIL DJ/comic Sweet Dick Whittington. Cranston ran on Valley streets in the neighborhood of the radio station, I drove, and Sweet Dick sat in the car with a microphone stuck in Cranston's face for the interview. AC didn't take a deep breath the whole way. Best, Tony

[Bee Canterbury Lavery]

Great Story!
Great Writing!
I printed it!