As a brilliant young man in the 1930s and 1940s, and a political heavyweight in the US Senate who was eventually brought down by scandal, Alan Cranston, who died on December 31st aged 86, symbolised the deterioration of American politics in the second half of the 20th century.
He served in the senate for California from 1968 to 1992 as a worker for arms control and world peace, and was a power in liberal Democratic politics. Yet only a bout with prostate cancer saved him from a censure vote in the senate for taking thousands of dollars from savings-and-loan banker and convicted fraudster Charles Keating, who went to prison for milking elderly couples out of their life-savings.
As a younger man Alan Cranston had spotted the global menace of Hitler while a foreign correspondent in Europe, written a book praised as one of the best foreign affairs analyses of 1945, and made a reputation in the world government movement before entering state politics in 1959. Yet, in his final years, he was not resting on his reputation, but working for rehabilitation.
He was born into a rich family near San Francisco, his father a property investor and a conservative. He attended university in Mexico City and Stanford, where he graduated in journalism in 1936 and pursued his study of foreign languages. He then headed for Europe as a correspondent for William Randolph Hearst's news agency, International News Service.
Returning to America just before the second World War, Alan Cranston used his knowledge of German and the Nazis to pull off a publishing coup that brought a copyright lawsuit from Hitler. Mein Kampf, Hitler's personal manifesto, was enjoying commercial success in America in a bowdlerised version. Alan Cranston, who had read the original, dictated a condensed edition in eight days that included its wildest statements and was quickly published at 10 cents a copy. Hitler's lawyers won an injunction, and Alan Cranston's version was withdrawn, but not before it had sold half-a-million copies.
After wartime service in US intelligence, Alan Cranston wrote another best-seller, The Killing Of The Peace, about the failure of the pre-war League of Nations - from which the senate had blocked US entry - and the lessons it offered the new United Nations. Back in California, he used his reputation to become prominent in the one-world movement, and for three years headed the United World Federalists group.
He transferred to the California Democratic Council, which, in five years, he turned into a powerful liberal force that lasted into the 1960s. He first served as an elected official in state government and was California's state controller from 1959 to 1967. He won a senate seat at his second try, in 1968. His bald, gaunt figure, and his passion for jogging long before the health craze, became part of the state's political landscape, and his pre-eminence lasted for a quarter century.
But, behind the scenes, he was increasingly preoccupied with campaign funds and raising money, something which, as a poor speaker, he discovered he excelled at. The public was mostly unaware of suspicions of unethical finances when he launched a presidential bid in 1983.
Alan Cranston cut a ludicrous figure, having dyed his fringe of white hair orange, while constantly boasting of his fitness at the age of 69. His campaign flopped, voters being unconvinced by his commercials: "The Cranston presidency will have two clear purposes - ending the arms race and full employment - because that's how you beat Ronald Reagan even if you're bald."
As the New York Times put it: "He was lionised by liberals for calling for a nuclear freeze, while satisfying military contractors as a champion of the B1-bomber, and a hero to good government groups for pushing campaign reform, while boasting of his reputation as the congress's most hardball fundraiser."
In 1986, Alan Cranston set a new low in attack politics in his $20 million senate re-election campaign, with ads of such venom that afterwards his manager quit politics. Then the Keating money-for-influence scandal struck, and in 1992 he announced his resignation.
He retired to the family compound in Los Altos and founded the Global Security Institute. Twice divorced, Alan Cranston had two sons, one of whom predeceased him in a car crash.
Alan MacGregor Cranston: born 1914; died, December 2000.