Alan Cranston may not have been the only retired congressman who wanted to save the world. But he was the only one I ever met who spent his last years trying to do it. Born at the beginning of World War I, he died on the literal eve of the new millennium for which, he said when I last saw him, he had considerable hopes and greater fears. Particularly when it came to the administration‘s missile-defense proposals and rogue-nation proliferation.”In some ways, we’re in even more danger now than we were during the Cold War,“ Cranston said. ”We still have to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us.“Angular and pale in the dark-red sweats in which he still regularly ran, with wide, protuberant ears that still missed nothing you said, Cranston was more involved than ever in the life-or-death idealism of international peace studies in the year of his death. He was frequently absent in the cause of peace from his large but modest family home on its unmown acres, just a mile or so south of the far-famed Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. On one of these ventures of his, Cranston managed to persuade more than 60 top military leaders to call for the abolition of nuclear weapons. He still knew how to lobby.
Source: The World Senator | L.A. Weekly