Alan Cranston was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1914, graduated from Stanford in 1936 and became a foreign correspondent for the International News Service. Alarmed that the English edition of Mein Kampf sold in America was abridged and sanitized, he published his own annotated translation in cheap tabloid form and sold about half a million copies before Hitler’s publisher won a copyright case against him in a Connecticut court in 1939. After work at the Office of War Information he enlisted as a private in 1944, asked for combat, and was instead assigned to edit Army Talk magazine, finishing as a sergeant. The atomic bomb made nuclear war his lifelong cause, and he led the United World Federalists from 1949 to 1952.

In 1952 he cofounded the California Democratic Council, and in 1958 he won the state controller’s office, ending a Republican hold dating to 1891. After losing the 1964 Senate primary to Pierre Salinger, he beat Max Rafferty in 1968 and served four terms, including as Democratic whip from 1977 to 1991. His 1984 presidential run on a nuclear freeze collapsed with a seventh place finish in New Hampshire and a $2 million debt, and the savings and loan crisis later pulled him into the Keating Five affair. In 1991 the Senate Ethics Committee reprimanded him and judged his conduct the most egregious of the five; he did not seek a fifth term, citing a prostate cancer diagnosis.

• Charles Keating of Lincoln Savings steered about $850,000 to voter registration groups aligned with Cranston.
• In 1981 he declared on the Senate floor that India and Pakistan were preparing nuclear tests, and the Reagan administration later conceded the intelligence was accurate.
• A competitive masters sprinter, he ran wind sprints down hotel hallways while traveling.
• An onstage fight between Glenn Frey and Don Felder at his 1980 benefit concert broke up the Eagles for 14 years.
• He chaired the Gorbachev Foundation USA from 1996, founded the Global Security Institute in 1999, and died at Los Altos Hills on the last day of 2000 at 86.