Lawyer helped limit tobacco advertising
Presidential debates on TV part of legacy
Henry Geller, a communications lawyer and U. S. government official who played pivotal roles in the elimination of cigarette advertising from radio and television and the televising of political campaign debates between major presidential candidates, died April 7 at his home in Washington. He was 96.
The cause was bladder cancer, said his wife, Judy Geller.
Geller was general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission from 1964 to 1970 and assistant secretary of commerce for communications and information from 1978 to 1980. In the second role, under President Jimmy Carter, he was the first administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, where his work included developing a legal basis for the regulation of cable TV.
At the FCC in the 1960s, Geller persuaded the commission to rule that TV stations had to broadcast public service announcements warning of the health hazards of smoking to offset cigarette advertisements. The FCC ruling was upheld in court appeals.
After leaving the FCC in 1973 as special assistant to the chairman, Geller became a communications fellow at the Aspen Institute, a non- profit organization that conducts seminars and policy programs. In 1975, he petitioned his former agency to allow the resumption of televised debates between presidential candidates.
The first such debate was in 1960 between Sen. John F. Kennedy and Vice-president Richard Nixon. In his petition, Geller argued that debates between major presidential candidates qualified as on- the- spot coverage of legitimate news events and thus were exempt from the equal-time rule. The petition was upheld on appeal and since 1976 there have been televised debates in every presidential election.
Henry Geller was born in Springfield, Mass., on Feb. 14, 1924. He grew up in Detroit, and graduated in 1943 from the University of Michigan at 19, on an accelerated wartime schedule, then served in the Pacific during the Second World War.
In 1949, he graduated second in his class from
Northwestern University law school. “I thought Henry was the smartest guy in law school,” law school contemporary and future FCC chairman Newton Minow told Broadcast magazine in 1979. “He was a movie nut. He’d go to three movies a day and never hit the books until a week before exams.”
As a practicing lawyer, Geller was similarly unorthodox. His dress was often called “rumpled.” He was asked on more than one occasion if he owned a comb. He usually wore sneakers; leather shoes were for court appearances.
He was a fitness enthusiast. He skied. He snorkelled. He played golf at dawn in Washington’s Rock Creek Park, which was uncrowded at that hour. He played tennis, often with Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice known for his conservative ideology. The two were sports companions but not ideological soulmates.
Even as an assistant secretary of commerce, Geller conducted meetings with his legal staff while simultaneously leading them on brisk walking tours of the hallways of the Commerce Department.
In the 1950s, Geller worked for the FCC and the National Labor Relations Board in Washington and was a clerk to a judge on the Illinois Supreme Court. He returned to the FCC as a deputy general counsel in 1961.
After leaving government service, he spent a quarter century doing communications research and practicing public interest law with foundations, including as director of the Washington Center for Public Policy Research.
In 1990, he was instrumental in the drafting and enactment of the Children’s Television Act, which limited the amount of time each hour allotted to advertising on children’s television programs.
Survivors include his wife of 64 years, Judy Foelak Geller, two children and a grandson.
To occupy his mind in his retirement, Geller taught himself quantum physics.
He was a connoisseur of eclectic foods, with a particular fondness for chocolate and garlic. When a colleague asked him for recommendations of sites to visit on a trip to Paris, his suggestions included a 250-year-old chocolate shop. He would schedule airplane layovers in cities where the airports were near good pizza shops.
He had one cautionary gustatory warning, literally and metaphorically: “Don’t eat pastry that looks better than it tastes.”
BEARD’S IMAGES, USUALLY BLACK-AND-WHITE, STRIKINGLY EVOKED THE MAJESTY OF AFRICA, ALBEIT ARGUABLY USING CONVENTIONAL TROPES AND, INDEED, IN THOSE THAT HAD MODELS POSING WITH TUSKS OR ANIMALS, CHAUVINIST ONES.