I have wondered about Cranston's OWI background myself. I voiced some thoughts on that in this thread, replying to another poster's comments on Cranston [links embedded in original thread]:
Bob Kerrey and Max Cleland Call for Karl Rove's Resignation
[Quoting Deb:] Anyone who even passed Cranston in the hall was a Commie.
[My reply:] ROFL! Yep, Cranston was one of the "usual suspects". Incidentally he got his start in government in the Office of War Information, which was riddled with Soviet agents (The Secret World of American Communism, by Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov: "The party managed to penetrate both the Office of Secret Services (OSS) and the Office of War Information (OWI), where, according to party leader Eugene Dennis, it played a key role in shaping policy..."), under Archibald MacLeish, whose name shows up a lot in this context (Archibald MacLeish: "MacLeish's FBI file eventually ran to six hundred pages, longer than any other writer in the United States. . .In October 1952 Joseph McCarthy claimed that MacLeish had belonged to more Communist front organizations than any man he had investigated."):
Alan Cranston Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
[Interviewer's question to Cranston:] During the war you worked for the government under Archibald McLeish?
[Cranston:] Yes, I did.
[Interviewer:] Tell us about that. It was bringing groups into an understanding of the American story, is that right?
[Cranston:] I had worked for a little while before the war began, after I came back to America, for an organization called Common Council for American Unity that was trying to help immigrants adjust to American life, and America to adjust to having immigrants among us. So I was working with German Americans, Italian Americans, Polish Americans, everything you could think of. When the war began, President Roosevelt appointed Archibald McLeish to head the Office of Facts and Figures, which was soon replaced by something headed by a famous commentator of those days, Elmer Davis, called the Office of War Information. I was given the responsibility of running the foreign language division which had the task of explaining how price control worked, how the draft worked and so forth, in foreign languages via press or radio to foreign language speaking groups.
Very interesting information on Hayden--I had not even heard such hearings were scheduled, though I recall Ambassador Graham Martin expressing sentiments along those lines about Hayden, Don Luce, et al, which is a subject I know you're very familiar with. I look forward to the article on attempts to influence Kennedy--please let me know when that posts. I share the concern on Conyers.
The reason that you did not hear about any hearing on Hayden/Fonda was that it was an in-house secret. It involved the late David Martin of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, and myself, as possibly the first witness I attended an Oct. 1973 meeting with Hayden/Fonda who had just come back from Paris and the VC/PRG/NVN. The communists gave Hayden his marching orders and he told the Germantown, Ohio "Hanoi Lobby" meeting what the reds wanted him to do in the US, esp. thru his lobbying out of Ron Dellums's arranged House office building room.
There is more to this than I can talk about right now because a crucial piece of evidence is possibly missing from government files. It might be found if the right person is put on locating it.
The late far-right writer Frank Capell wrote one of his newsletters about Cranston and the communists. Its facts were right but anything that Capell wrote had to be used with extreme care because he was very reckless with facts mixed in with suppositions and undocumented opinions.
If the Elmer Davis of the OWI is the same one I think it is, then he has a red-front/affiliations records that stretched for decades. I'm sure that he was listed in Appendix IX which went back as far as the 1920/30s.