Griffin Bell, attorney general in Carter administration

President Jimmy Carter congratulated his friend Griffin B. Bell after Judge Bell took the oath of office as attorney general. (Associated Press/File 1977)

WASHINGTON - Griffin B. Bell, 90, a corporate lawyer and federal appeals court judge who became the first US attorney general of his longtime friend and fellow Georgian, President Jimmy Carter, died yesterday at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta.

He had complications from pancreatic cancer, said a spokesman for the venerable Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding, where Judge Bell had worked as a young man and after leaving the Carter administration in 1979.

In his post-government career, Judge Bell enjoyed a reputation as a courtly troubleshooter for major corporations. He was named to many blue-ribbon government commissions and specialized in conducting internal investigations of alleged mismanagement at white-collar firms.

A fast-rising young lawyer in Atlanta, Judge Bell had also been a prodigious fund-raiser for Democrats and helped engineer an overwhelming victory in Georgia for presidential nominee John F. Kennedy in 1960 as co-manager of the campaign in the state.

In return, Kennedy appointed him in 1961 to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit with jurisdiction over much of the Southeast.

During his 15-year tenure, Judge Bell saw himself as a figure of moderation, particularly on subjects as explosive as civil rights. He ruled in favor of voting rights for blacks and judicial efforts to place more blacks on juries. He came out against mandatory busing as a means to desegregate schools.

In a widely publicized 1966 case, Judge Bell agreed that the Georgia Legislature was within its rights to refuse a seat to elected representative Julian Bond, then a black activist who had purportedly made statements against the Vietnam War.

The US Supreme Court unanimously reversed the ruling against Bond, now chairman of the NAACP, and he was among Judge Bell's outspoken foes for the attorney general job.

Although his nomination was never seriously in doubt, Judge Bell's appointment was contentious in part because of his unpaid work in 1959 and 1960 as chief of staff to Governor S. Ernest Vandiver of Georgia, who had been elected by declaring that "no, not one" black child would be seated in a white classroom in the state.

With Judge Bell as a pivotal backstage figure, Vandiver persuaded hard-core segregationists in the state Legislature to repeal a statute and close schoolhouse doors rather than move forward with desegregation.

Judge Bell worked with black leaders to foster an atmosphere of compromise and helped start a commission that held public hearings on school integration. The commission recommended that voters in each district have the right to decide their own approach to desegregation.

This was a controversial decision widely seen as an effort to delay federal court rulings that mandated racial integration of public institutions. However, Judge Bell said the schools remained open in the face of great opposition, and Georgia was spared much of the violence associated with other Southern states during this period.

His nomination for US attorney general revisited much of his work that touched on race. He was publicly defended by Carter as well as Andrew Young, the civil rights activist and former US representative who was Carter's UN ambassador-designate.

"Frankly," Young said at the time, "I prefer a Southerner who has been struggling with the problem of civil rights actively for several years over a Northern intellectual liberal."

Confirmed by the Senate in 1977, Judge Bell promoted blacks and women to higher positions in the Justice Department, supported various court-reform measures, and backed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which made it a federal crime for government officials to spy on US citizens without following strict guidelines.

Although his own nomination for attorney general was seen in some corners as a nod to Georgia cronyism, Judge Bell said he maintained his independence from the Carter White House in investigations involving the president's campaign and his top aides.

For instance, he set the groundwork for the Justice Department's investigation of Carter budget director Bert Lance on bank fraud charges. Lance was later acquitted.

When an interviewer once asked Judge Bell to rank his performance as attorney general on a scale of one to 10, he replied 11 - "That's a 10 with no false humility."

In 1943, Judge Bell married Mary Powell, who died in 2000. The next year, he wed a longtime friend, Nancy Kinnebrew. He leaves her, along with a son from his first marriage, Griffin Jr. of Atlanta; two grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.

Judge Bell rose to major in the Army Transportation Corps during World War II and graduated in 1948 from Mercer University law school in Macon, Ga., where he helped start the law review. By the late 1950s, he rose to managing partner of King & Spalding, whose clients included Cola-Cola, the Southern Railway, and the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta.

Judge Bell was a former president of the American College of Trial Lawyers. His books included "Taking Care of the Law" (1982), written with Ronald Ostrow, and he was the subject of a flattering biography, "Uncommon Sense" (1999), by former Atlanta Constitution editor Reg Murphy.

After returning to King & Spalding from Washington, Judge Bell was a frequent choice of major corporations to conduct internal investigations of potentially criminal matters. In 1985, he exonerated senior officials of the stock brokerage firm E.F. Hutton & Co. in a check-overdraft scheme. He later headed a corporate investigation into the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska and worked for Dow Corning to review the health risks of its silicone breast implants.

In the early 1990s, he also represented President George H.W. Bush in an independent counsel investigation of the Iran-Contra affair, in which US officials covertly sold arms to Iran to win the release of US hostages in the Middle East and used some of the profits to support Nicaraguan rebels known as the contras.

Working without a fee in 1986, he also helped win the release from Nicaragua of Eugene Hasenfus, a pilot who was ferrying supplies to the rebels and was captured when he was shot down. Although convicted by a Nicaraguan court, Hasenfus was pardoned and released.