ATLANTA — Griffin Bell, the shrewd Southern lawyer who grew up with Jimmy Carter and later became U.S. attorney general after Carter was elected president, died Monday in Atlanta of kidney failure. He was 90.
Carter said he was “deeply saddened” by Bell’s death and called him a “trusted and enduring public figure.”
“As a World War II veteran, federal appeals court judge, civil-rights advocate, and U.S. attorney general in my administration, Griffin made many lasting contributions to his native Georgia and country,” he said in a statement.
Carter’s choice of his longtime friend as attorney general was considered the most controversial of his Cabinet appointments after the 1976 election. The NAACP and other civil-rights groups complained that Bell, as a federal judge, didn’t force Southern schools to integrate quickly enough.
And they cited Bell’s tenure as chief of staff for Georgia Gov. Ernest Vandiver, who campaigned in 1958 on a segregation platform.
But Carter called Bell’s civil-rights record superb, and many black Georgians — including U.N. ambassador-designate Andrew Young — came forward to support him.
“Frankly, I prefer a Southerner who has been struggling with the problem of civil rights actively for several years over a Northern intellectual liberal,” Young said at the time.
Bell served just 2 1/2 years at the Justice Department, leaving in mid-1979 — at his own request — to return to his Atlanta law firm, King & Spalding. But he called his tenure as attorney general “the best job I ever had,” and he remained close to the action in government.
As attorney general, Bell promoted judicial reform and supported the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which limits government spying on U.S. citizens. He also investigated Koreagate, the alleged buying of congressional influence by Korean agents.
