The World Senator

Before long, though, Cranston, along with some of his progressive fellow veterans, began expressing their disappointment in the new U.N. Charter’s myriad, sovereignty-inspired weaknesses. ”My guiding light became Grenville Clark, the thinker who wrote World Peace Through World Law,“ Cranston said. Clark‘s huge tome, in its 1958 edition, consists in large part of hundreds of pages of new agreements that would, if enacted, empower the U.N. as a supreme world authority. You could almost call it a legal plug-in for limited world government.

Cranston was initially a little reluctant to open up regarding his early ideal, which has acquired over the years a somewhat eccentric reputation. ”But I guess that if Ronald Reagan found it okay to join the World Federalist Association, there’s no reason for me to deny it.“ Actually, Cranston became WFA president around the time Dutch signed on. Albert Einstein was another member. Dwight Eisenhower supported WFA until it sank from general view with the advent of the Korean War and McCarthy era. Cranston said he still supported the ideal of uniform world law, and could cite off the top of his head a laundry list of U.N. improvements he‘d like to see, including a better system of proportional representation for members, an independent, full-time peacekeeping force and an international criminal court. By pleasing coincidence, the Clinton administration officially accepted the last proposal just before Cranston’s passing.

But to the end of his life, Cranston was apparently obsessed by the obdurate conundrum of nuclear disarmament in the post--Cold War world. ”It begins with the U.S. being overwhelmingly the biggest nuclear power,“ he said. ”If we don‘t set a major example, who will? Even among those who agree [that we must start disarming], the how-to of it is not discussed.“

As one might expect, the former senator was particularly irked by recurring bipartisan proposals for a megabillion-dollar new star-wars defense program aimed at the presumed missile capacities of a handful of impoverished rogue states.

”Why should South Korea build missiles to send bombs to Washington when it can do that via Federal Express?“ Cranston asked. ”And then no one would ever know against whom to retaliate.“