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- <text id=91TT2667>
- <title>
- Dec. 02, 1991: American Notes:The Senate
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Dec. 02, 1991 Pearl Harbor:Day of Infamy
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- NATION, Page 29
- American Notes
- THE SENATE
- The Keating None
- </hdr><body>
- <p> After 22 months of shilly-shallying, partisan bickering and
- overblown rhetoric, the Senate Select Committee on Ethics
- finally punished the last of the Keating Five. Last week the
- committee reprimanded California Democrat Alan Cranston, who
- accepted $850,000 in contributions from financier Charles
- Keating while interceding on his behalf with bank regulators who
- were trying to seize Keating's failing savings and loan.
- </p>
- <p> The committee found that Cranston's conduct had been
- "improper and repugnant," but those were mild words to describe
- his dealings with Keating. In one instance, a Keating aide gave
- Cranston $250,000 at the same meeting during which he agreed to
- plead Keating's case. Cranston insisted that what he had done
- for Keating was not unusual for a Senator. How many lawmakers,
- he demanded, "could rise and declare you've never, ever helped--or agreed to help--a contributor?" To which Republican
- Warren Rudman snapped, "Everybody doesn't do it." Perhaps not.
- But the leniency extended to Cranston suggests that those who do
- will go scot-free.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-