Alan Cranston stands as the first really grown-up senator from California . . . the first about whom you didn't brace yourself for the inevitable jokes when his name came up.
California had Sen. S.I. Hayakawa, the semanticist with the golf-links headgear, an English professor who had leaped onto a sound truck to rip away the speaker wires at a student demonstration, and by doing so leaped into the Senate job.
. . . Sen. George Murphy, the actor and song-and-dance man who sang and danced opposite Shirley Temple, who ran for Congress herself and settled for an ambassadorship.
. . . Sen. Pierre Salinger, JFK's press secretary, period.
. . . Sen. John Tunney, the supposed role model for Robert Redford in "The Candidate," a man known for an incredibly impressive set of choppers and whose father was a famous boxer.
. . . Sen. William Knowland, the Republican leader of whom even mild-mannered President Eisenhower wondered to his journal, "How stupid can you get?"
. . . Back to Sen. George Hearst, William Randolph's dad, who was the first to admit that he couldn't even spell "cat."
California's men in the U.S. Senate seemed a piece with the voters who sent them there: good entertainment value, and not much else.
Then came Cranston, elected in 1968 over Max Rafferty, Mad Max, the scarily archconservative educator.
Rafferty's nickname was Supermouth; Cranston's was Colorless Cranston. When a Stanford professor volunteered an image make-over, Cranston only smiled and said, "I'm afraid it's too late."
Even Cranston's encounter with the most notorious and flamboyantly evil figure of the century, Adolf Hitler, was legalistic: a copyright violation suit brought by the Fuehrer against Cranston for publishing an unauthorized, unexpurgated "Mein Kampf" to counter the tidied-up edition being sold in the U.S.
Maybe he was better on paper. His sister cited a letter from Groucho Marx congratulating him on his election and asking, as "one who believed in your integrity--perhaps even your manhood," that he please return Groucho's $25 campaign contribution. Cranston wrote back that he had cashed the check: "So much for my integrity, my manhood and your twenty-five bucks."
But Cranston came across as a grown-up.
He had the absorbed focus of the dedicated runner that he was. He'd sometimes wear the same suit for three days. In a Senate that fancied itself as grand as the College of Cardinals, almost everyone called Cranston "Alan."
