Alan Cranston's Big Lies

...He really sees South Africa as like Germany in the early '30s, what he had seen as a young man, and [he believes] that the Reagan attitude is the same as that of the United States and the western allies in the early '30s—an attitude of tolerance...

...Karr was a free-lance writer for the Communist Daily Worker and Cranston brought him to OWI...

...ne such incident involved a wellknown liberal and potential rival for the 1964 Senate race whose service to the party dated from the New Deal...

...I n 1944, Cranston left the OWI...

...He told reporters, "I covered Hitler and Mussolini in the dark days of conquest and appeasement that preceded the Second World War...

...Although Cranston now claims to have had "an unchallenged and unblemished record of integrity during my more than twenty years in the Senate," he again is engaging in some dissembling...

...Old habits die hard...

...In the decade following the war, Cranston was known mainly as national head of the United World Federalists...

...Like a California Ceausescu, Alan Cranston intends to remain defiant to the end...

...Buck Long is the pen name of a writer for a California daily...

...Herbert Romerstein and Stanislav Levchenko, authors of The KGB Against the "Main Enemy," a reference volume on Soviet secret police activity in the U.S., cautiously declare, "It is hard to tell whether this was overzealous patriotism [on behalf of a U.S...

...He promptly landed INS in a libel suit when in the London Evening Standard he reported as fact an atrocity story concocted by the Italians to discredit Haile Selassie, the Ethiopian ruler deposed by Mussolini's forces...

...Buck Long and Lawrence V. Cott ALAN CRANSTON'S BIG LIES They started long before the senator's involvement in the Keating scandal and perhaps explain why the California Democrat is not going down gracefully...

...Three years later, the "biographical sketch" distributed by his press office provided more information on how he "covered" Hitler and Mussolini...

...Cranston is finding it more difficult to evade the charges raised in the Lincoln case...

...but at the same time, few in their ranks wanted to see such a victory turn into a victory for Stalin...

...His trip to Germany took place in 1934, during his summer vacation after his sophomore year in college, and the only reporting he did from there was for his hometown weekly in Mountain View, California...

...as unfit for confirmation as a U.S...

...However, in 'the early 1950s, he returned to governmental politics as a founder of the California Democratic Council, an organization rather similar to the Reform Democratic clubs then favored by "progressive" Democrats in New York...

...When the story of Katyn emerged in April 1943, Poles could not bring themselves to lie about the character of the Soviet Union and Soviet designs on Poland, notwithstanding their desire for an Allied victory in the war...

...Cranston refused to respond to the revelation other than to allow an aide to release only a select number of relevant documents...

...One radio station manager subsequently confirmed in congressional testimony in 1952 that Cranston had attempted to "try to convince station WJBK . . . not to permit those comments which would indicate Russian guilt...

...According to Cranston, his main achievement at OWI was to coordinate the renaming of a Chicago suburb in honor of Lidice, the Czech village wiped out by Nazi troops in 1942...

...Cranston acted quickly to muzzle the latter speaker...

...Today, the Soviet press admits Soviet responsibility for the massacre...

...Cranston has denied showing the photograph to Braden, but acknowledged that "somebody on my staff" may have done so...

...Nobody had more to gain from a victory over Hitler than the Poles and Jews...

...This recalled a report Cranston filed with the Office of Strategic Services in 1944, in which he asserted that the Polish Communist forces in the USSR not only were not Communist, but were more popular than the London exile government...

...O ut of this maelstrom comes the figure of Alan Cranston...

...In fact, Vukasin hadnever before been nominated to the federal bench and he was confirmed with the support of black and female attorneys in his home county...

...He and Zschau disagreed on a deep philosophical level," Johnston wrote...

...Alan Cranston, Democrat from California, in announcing his candidacy for the presidency, immediately fell back on an old habit of embellishing his personal history...

...W hat about his contribution to the real war against fascism, in which he supposedly turned down a deferment and enlisted in the Army...

...The time he says he spent in "the infantry" actually amounted to six weeks of basic training and living off-base with his wife...

...W ith polls in mid-February showing Cranston with a 69 percent disapproval rating among California voters, political journalists in his state now regard Cranston as the politician most damaged by the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal...

...As the official responsible for feeding war news to the ethnic press, Cranston responded to Katyn by trying to suppress the topic...

...in fact, most of the time he spent in England was unremunerated...

...Cranston claimed the broadcaster in question was not fired...

...Cranston said, "He had a strong social conscience that made him an intense promoter of détente...

...One month before the Katyn story broke, the Soviets had baldly announced the execution in the USSR of Henryk Alter and Viktor Ehrlich, two well-known leaders of the Bund, the Jewish labor organization active for decades in Poland and, naturally, suppressed in the USSR...

...The war came in 1941...

...In truth, his "staff' position with INS was intermittent...

...At a meeting of broadcast executives shortly thereafter in New York, Cranston defended his decision and used the presence of a representative from the Federal Communications Commission to hint that conflicts over broadcasting content could lead to cancellation of licenses (even though the FCC has never had jurisdiction over content...

...Although his work did not involve him in the debates over Ehrlich and Alter, he was quick to interject himself into the Katyn controversy...

...at a time when American liberals and social democrats were expressing doubts of their own about Stalin's USSR...

...Cranston himself testified in 1952 that he had only been trying to support the war effort, and had merely asked the offending broadcaster to limit himself to dispatches from "reputable American wire services"—meaning those approved by the Soviet government and the OWI...

...News of Katyn arrived in the U.S...

...had been carefully edited to delete sections that would arouse Americans to the Nazi threat...

...However, Cranston's critics have long asserted that his work at OWI essentially centered on suppressing any news seen as unflattering to Stalin's USSR...

...In 1943 his work at OWI also embroiled him in a controversy over the assassination of an Italian-American anti-Communist labor leader, Carlo Tresca...

...At first he was unpaid...

...The disappearance of the IPP and rise of the CDC had something in common with the demise of the old American Labor party (ALP) in New York, a local body under Communist control...

...He was elected state controller in 1958 (the first Democrat in that post in seventy-two years) and re-elected in 1962...

...In fact, Cranston was sued for copyright infringement by the old-line firm of Houghton Mifflin, which had already published a translation of Mein Kampf replete with footnotes warning American readers of Hitler's aggressive intentions...

...Yet as late as April 1986, an article in California magazine described Cranston as "the only U.S...

...So much for Cranston the journalistic opponent of fascism...

...Polish plot against Moscow...

...Senate, Cranston has yet to explain why, at least in the case of Ethiopia, he evidently sided with fascist aggressors rather than their victims...

...The emperor sued INS in a London court and won $80,000, a huge sum for the time...

...at the side of a particularly nasty Soviet agent named Albert E. Kahn...

...As pointed out most recently by Stephen Schwartz in Commentary (October 1988), much suspicion about Tresca's murder (which remains unresolved) devolved on the Communists...

...Turned out in the 1966 Reagan sweep, he quickly regrouped and in 1968 won election to the U.S...

...Indeed, the London-based Polish government in exile rejected the Soviet explanation of the Alter-Ehrlich crime the very weekend that news of the Katyn massacre broke...

...By 1952 it was clear that the Progressives' day had passed, and hundreds of California Communists and Communist sympathizers made their way into the Democratic ranks...

...Following his death in 1979, Fortune magazine commented, "Whispers of a KGB connection followed Karr everywhere...

...One element in the founding of the CDC was the collapse of the Independent Progressive party (IPP), the California wing of Henry Wallace'sparty...

...In some ways, he was an ideal choice...

...During confirmation hearings that year on Kenneth Adelman's nomination to head the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, he charged Adelman with believing that "it would be helpful to the United States . . . if South Africa were to use nuclear weapons against their own blacks or against neighboring blacks...

...More important, in 1938 he went to Ethiopia—having "officially resigned" from the INS but staying on as an unpaid stringer—as a guest of the Italian government, two years after the halo-Ethiopian war had effectively ended...

...S]ued in a Connecticut court for copyright infringement, [he and a partner] ceased publication...

...But as San Francisco Chronicle reporter Mark Z. Barabak reminded readers in January, more than $900,000 of those funds was solicited by Cranston...

...Cranston did not reject deferment and enlist until 1944...

...his contract, however, was not renewed...

...There is no evidence he supported the pro-Soviet campaign of Henry Wallace, the 1948 Progressive party presidential candidate...

...Braden, who has "reluctantly" confirmed the truth of the story, added that he did not choose to go public with it for fear of harming the person in the photograph...

...Cranston emerged in the 1950s as a standard-bearer of this new-style "progressivism...

...During his brief presidential campaign Cranston visited Braden's home and begged him to keep silent about the matter...

...Then there was Cranston's friendship with David Karr, with whom he had fallen in in the late 1930s...

...Although Romerstein and Levchenko say "there is no evidence [Cranston] understood he was being used by Karr," Karr was no innocent...

...If I wrote about it, I would be the same as [Cranston...

...In April 1983 he addressed a letter to every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee denouncing California Republican jurist John P. Vukasin, Jr...

...government to the position that Katyn could only be a Nazi crime...

...In the meantime he held a job at the Office of War Information, where his tenure as chief of OWI's Foreign Languages Division was marred by controversies that remain unresolved but bear unmistakable signs of whattoday is called a hidden agenda...

...Calling all wartime warnings about Stalin's plans for Eastern Europe "divisive," Cranston impugned the patriotism of a principal writer for the largest Polish-language paper published in the U.S...

...Thus, it was no accident that the CDC early on adopted a position in favor of Red China, or that a later leader, Simon Casady, wound up a leading New Left figure in the sixties...

...At OWI Cranston was responsible for distributing OWI press releases to foreign language newspapers and radio stations in the United States...

...The ghastly effrontery of this charge was greeted with protest by liberals and labor 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 leaders in the U.S., none of whom could be considered pro-Hitler, headed by such men as New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, AFL president William Green, and Republican leader Wendell Willkie...

...Writing in the San Jose Mercury News in 1983, Carl M. Cannon described the senator as one who "since his early days in California . . . has shown carelessness in his comments about opponents...

...As his chances for re-election to the Senate in 1992 all but vanish, Cranston has fallen back on an old method of damage control and lashed out at the Keating Five's nemesis, former Federal Home Loan Bank Board chairman Edwin Gray, calling him an expert in "the Hitlerian technique of the Big Lie...

...Cranston's contribution to the case was to attempt to steer attention away from the Communists with the outlandish claim that Tresca had come to favor collaboration with them...

...Cranston reportedly obtained a photograph of the individual in a sexually compromising position...

...He offered the photo to Tom Braden, the television commentator who was then editor of the Oceanside Blade-Tribune, a local daily...

...At WJBK, a Detroit-area radio station, two Polish-language commentators clashed bitterly: one repeated the "official" line of the OWI, while the other read accounts from the Polish representatives in London...

...The problem is that Cranston's ingenuousness over Katyn was not an isolated incident...

...When in April 1943 the mass grave at Katyn, near Smolensk, was pointed out to Nazi authorities then controlling the area, they were quick to identify the Soviet secret police as the murderers...

...To die-hard fellow travelers he could speak of peace and disarmament, and of his storied career as an anti-fascist...

...Backed by OWI director Elmer Davis, Cranston committed the U.S...

...Senator to have been sued by Hitler (for an unauthorized translation of Mein Kampf calling attention to the Ftihrer's anti-Semitism)," adding: "He also tried to help Jews fleeing Nazi Germany" (presumably during his brief summer visit...

...In 1983 he called Reagan a "tyrant...

...I considered it slime," commented Braden...

...David Johnston, a political reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, saw links here to the old Cranston...

...The report did not mention Katyn except to suggest that the "missing" officers were not missing at all...

...The Soviets and their American Communist pawns denounced Alter and Ehrlich as agents in a U.S...

...wartime ally], but it served a Soviet purpose in covering up a Soviet atrocity...

...It seems he had "joined the staff" of the old International News Service (INS) and "served as a foreign correspondent in England, Germany, Italy, and Ethiopia from 1936-38...

...By contrast, the California left had its labor and ethnic allies, but it also enjoyed much greater support among the new intelligentsia and other elements of the Golden State's burgeoning middle class...

...He described the Polish exile government in London as a "terrible government which I thought probably was a Nazi power...

...n February 2, 1983, Sen...

...Ostensibly, the case amounts to nothing more than political corruption, which saw five U.S...

...W hat was Cranston up to in defending the Soviet version of Katyn...

...The individual in the photo has declined all comment...

...He had been involved in NKVD activities in the U.S...

...After World War II, Karr became a major player in U.S.-Soviet commercial activities...

...I considered it amusingly evil," Braden said...

...The 1952 congressional hearings turned up other examples of Cranston's mendacity...

...The New York ALP and the state's relatively large Communist organization were based mainly in the remnants of Communist controlled or influenced labor and ethnic groups, with slight representation among teachers, government employees, and other white collars...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990 17 SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB, CHANNEL 3 CHATT/4N000A TEN' ESHE KTVN, CHANNEL 2, TENC NEVADA WTTS, 92,3 FM, BLOOMINGTON, .,,DiAr WGCL, 1370 AM BLCOMII\ STO' ,A WAJI, 95.1 PM FOOT WA, JD CENTRAL OFFICE, B0 2 LOC' '‘.17;TON, is0O14:.z, – Sri CY TELEP>( kE- 7;25" Providing the Best Rodin and 7-64eoslon Service where he still sits, as of this writing...

...He has been willing to attack them on grounds that have nothing to do with substantive issues—grounds, in fact, that are sometimes untrue...

...I declined deferment and enlisted in the Army...

...When challenged, Cranston claimed Vukasin had previously been rejected when nominated by Richard Nixon and that he was "prejudiced against women and minorities...

...To the rest of the state's voters he would come to stress his local roots, his labor and civil rights alliances, and, eventually, his age and physical fitness...

...The most famous such case involved the Soviet massacre of Polish military officers in the Katyn forest...

...Braden added that he found it impossible to trust Cranston after this incident...

...Cranston has yet to explain why, at least in this case, he evidently sided with fascist aggressors rather than their victims...

...In 1966 he issued a document labeling gubernatorial candidate Ronald Reagan a "front man" for the John Birch Society...

...From the beginning of his second career in government, Cranston showed a curious addiction to the political methods he displayed during his tenure at OWI...

...For this he was denounced by no less a figure than Norman Thomas, America's most respected radical elder, as well as by Max Eastman and other anti-Communist intellectuals, and by Italian-American labor leaders...

...Soon enough he was reassigned to an information and education unit that produced lecture materials on Allied war aims...

...In 1983 the New Republic identified Cranston as controller of the largest secret slush fund in the Senate, which saw him transfer $66,000 in campaign monies to a private account that went to cover travel and lodging for his wife as well as the services of speech-writers, a voice coach, and other personnel for his presidential run...

...Cranston wrote an abridged but accurate tabloid version, interspersed with anti-Nazi explanatory notes...

...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1990...

...There was a marked difference, however, in the success each had in infiltrating the Democratic party of their respective states...

...In earlier versions of his biography, he described his opponents in the suit as "Hitler's agents...

...District Court judge...

...Lawrence V Cott is a free-lance writer in San Francisca Cranston has instead preferred to draw attention to another outgrowth of his journalistic career: his oft-repeated claim that he was sued by Adolf Hitler for publishing a pulp edition of Mein Kampf His 1986 press biography describes the incident as follows: "In 1939, Cranston, who had read Mein Kampf in the original when he was in Germany, discovered that a version being distributed in the U.S...

...senators—the fabled Keating Five—putting possibly undue pressure on federal bank regulators on behalf of Lincoln head Charles Keating in return for the more than $1.3 million he'd contributed to their campaigns and political causes...

...One of his lastventures involved him in the sale of Soviet gold commemorative coins, with the profits split with Armand Hammer's Occidental Petroleum...

...Cranston has employed similar tactics against Republican opponents...

...The victims had not been seen since 1940, when they were still in Soviet hands as prisoners of war following the 1939 destruction of Poland by the then cooperating Nazi and Stalinist regimes...

...The war came...

...Cranston again used South Africa to sling mud at Republican opponent Ed Zschau in the 1986 Senate race...

...It 1 was then that he turned down—or lost, according to at least one source—his latest deferment and enlisted...