John F. Banzhaf III was watching football on television with his family in the Bronx on Thanksgiving 1966 when he realized that the most strategic plays were being made off the field — in the cigarette commercials whose jingles, gags, slogans and images of virile cowboys and urbane women glamorized smoking.

Two years had elapsed since the United States surgeon general declared that smoking caused lung cancer. But while Congress had voted to require health warning labels on cigarette packaging, it had, for the time being, not required them for TV commercials.

Mr. Banzhaf, a 25-year-old recent graduate of Columbia Law School, complained in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission that while television news coverage included both sides of the tobacco debate, the cigarette commercials did not. Under the so-called fairness doctrine, which required that both sides of an issue of public concern be presented, weren’t opponents of smoking entitled to free airtime?

“When his letter came in, it struck a responsive chord, and I thought why not use it?” Henry Geller, the F.C.C. counsel at the time, recalled in an unpublished memoir.