Frank Keenan, 85, a former congressional staff member and an early advocate of broadcasting sessions of Congress, died June 27 at Washington Hospital Center of a pulmonary embolism. Keenan, a longtime D.C. resident, began his career on Capitol Hill in 1951 as a staff member for the Senate Commerce Committee. He held a number of Capitol Hill positions during the next three decades, and he developed an interest in making Congress work more efficiently. He was founder and editor of a magazine for congressional staff members called Staff and pushed for congressional adoption of advanced information technology. He also helped create the Program for Newly-Elected Members of Congress at Harvard's Institute of Politics. A son noted that Keenan believed that broadcasting sessions of Congress would lead to greater transparency and accountability. Before the creation of C-SPAN by the cable TV industry in 1979 -- which followed 30 years of debate about whether to allow cameras in Congress -- he was part of a Washington 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 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 Sen. Charles W. Tobey, R-N.H., in 1950 and then joined the Senate Commerce Committee staff. He also worked as the legislative editor for American Aviation Publications and as a speechwriter for Sen. John Sherman Cooper, R-Ky. He joined the staff of Rep. Florence P. Dwyer in 1958 and worked for the liberal Republican from New Jersey as administrative assistant until 1972. Later in his career, he was director of projects for the House Commission on Information and Facilities and minority staff director for the House Select Committee on Committees. In 1967, Washingtonian magazine named him one of 'The 5 Best Men in Congress,' recognizing his effectiveness as a congressional staff member. After his retirement in 1981, he wrote freelance articles for Congressional Quarterly and Capitol Hill magazine and pursued his interests in stamp collecting and photography. He won a photo competition at the National Arboretum in 2005 for photographs of the Capitol columns. He also volunteered with So Others Might Eat. Survivors include his wife of 53 years, Joan Swenson Keenan of the District of Columbia; two sons, Thomas W. Keenan of New York and Alan J. Keenan of London; and a granddaughter. 