Frank Keenan; supported congressional broadcasts
WASHINGTON - Frank Keenan, 85, a former congressional staff member and an early advocate of broadcasting sessions of Congress, died Saturday at Washington Hospital Center of a pulmonary embolism.
Mr. Keenan began his career on Capitol Hill in 1951 as a member of the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee. He held a number of Capitol Hill positions during the next three decades and developed an interest in making Congress work more efficiently.
He was founder and editor of a magazine for congressional staffers called Staff and pushed for congressional adoption of advanced information technology. He also helped create the Program for Newly Elected Members of Congress at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Mr. Keenan believed that broadcasting sessions of Congress would lead to greater transparency and accountability, a family member said. Before the creation of C-SPAN in 1979, which followed 30 years of debate about whether to allow cameras in Congress, he was part of a delegation that traveled to London to study how the BBC broadcast sessions of Parliament.
Francis Joyce Keenan was born in Dover, N.H., and served in the US Navy in the Pacific during World War II. He was a 1948 political science graduate of the University of Notre Dame.
He was a campaign aide to Senator Charles W. Tobey, Republican of New Hampshire, in 1950 and then joined the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee.
Later in his career, he was director of projects for the House Commission on Information and Facilities. In 1967, Washingtonian magazine named him one of “The 5 Best Men in Congress,’’ recognizing his effectiveness as a congressional staff member.
