Kenneth Barnard Keating (May 18, 1900 – May 5, 1975) was an American politician, diplomat, and judge who served as a United States Senator representing New York from 1959 until 1965.
In the senate, Keating was an advocate of desegregation, and played a key role in breaking the filibuster that enabled passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
[2] During World War I, Keating served in the Student Army Training Corps (SATC) at the University of Rochester, where he attained the rank of sergeant.
[8] He served initially as chief of the assignments branch in the international division of the Army Service Forces headquarters, and was promoted to lieutenant colonel in October, 1942.
[10] He was promoted to colonel in February 1944[9] and in July 1944 he made an assessment tour of the theater's front lines with General Albert Coady Wedemeyer, Mountbatten's chief of staff, which took him to sixteen countries, including Ceylon, Burma, Indochina, and Java.
[11] Keating later served as executive assistant to Mountbatten's U.S. deputy, Lieutenant General Raymond Albert Wheeler, and was the senior American officer at the South East Asia Command's rear headquarters in India.
[11] In November 1945, Mountbatten dispatched Keating to London to provide British Parliament information on the post-war rebuilding of India.
[6] On returning to the United States after the war, Keating ran successfully for a Rochester-area seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1946 election.
[6] Keating was regarded as a liberal Republican on many issues, but adopted conservative positions on anticommunism during the Cold War and fighting organized crime.
[4] He opposed diplomatic recognition of "Red China" after the Chinese Civil War, and supported allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to use tactics including wiretaps on organized crime figures and suspected Communist sympathizers.
[4] In 1958, Keating was the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat of the retiring Irving Ives, and defeated Democrat Frank Hogan, the New York County District Attorney.
[19][20] In 1960, Keating introduced the Twenty-Third Amendment to the United States Constitution, which allowed residents of the District of Columbia to vote in presidential elections.
"[22] He also worked with the bipartisan coalition that achieved passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after it broke the filibuster organized by segregationist Democrats.
[6] During the 1964 Republican National Convention, Keating staged a walkout of the majority of the New York delegation after conservative Barry Goldwater won the presidential nomination.
[23] Keating outperformed Goldwater on election day, but was defeated for reelection by the Democratic nominee, Robert F. Kennedy, who had established residency in New York shortly before becoming a candidate.
[6] In Flanagan v. Mount Eden General Hospital, the court overruled the common law tradition that the statute of limitations in medical malpractice actions which involved instruments left inside a patient began to run from the commission of the act.
[4] His tenure was regarded as a success for U.S.-India relations until its last few months, when the Nixon Administration tacitly supported Pakistan in the Bangladesh Liberation War.
[4] Keating's ambassadorship was high profile; he built a network of contacts and conducted one on one diplomacy by entertaining frequently at his home in the Tel Aviv suburbs.
[4] Keating suffered a heart attack on April 17, 1975, while visiting his daughter in New Jersey, and was admitted to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City.
[27] Keating belonged to the American Political Science Association, and received the organization's first Congressional Distinguished Service Award.
[6] The Kenneth Barnard Keating Papers are part of the Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation holdings at the University of Rochester.