The same year he received the Christian Herter Award from the American Foreign Service Association for "extraordinary accomplishment involving initiative, integrity, intellectual courage, and creative dissent."

From November 1990 to January 1995 Ambassador Keeley served as President of the Middle East Institute in Washington, a private, non-profit educational and cultural institution founded in 1946 to foster greater understanding in the United States of the countries of the Middle East region from Morocco to Central Asia.

He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1951, with a major in English literature under the Special Program in the Humanities.

His interests were not confined to foreign affairs, but extended to issues of domestic politics, economics, and social policy.

One chapter of the Uganda book has been published in "Embassies Under Siege: Personal Accounts by Diplomats on the Front Line" (Institute for the Study of Diplomacy, Georgetown University, Brassey's, 1995).

Governance: It's Always Been a Matter of Race and Money, issued in December 1995, and the second was a booklet with the title Annals of Investing: Steve Forbes vs. Warren Buffett, published in March 1996.

In 2000 Keeley contributed a chapter on CIA-Foreign Service relations to the book National Insecurity-U.S. Intelligence After the Cold War, a work recommending reforms of the CIA, published by Temple University Press for the Center for International Policy.

In 2010 Keeley published the book The Colonels' Coup and the American Embassy: A Diplomat's View of the Breakdown of Democracy in Cold War Greece.

[5] In 2004, Keeley was among 27 retired diplomats and military commanders who publicly said the administration of President George W. Bush did not understand the world and was unable to handle "in either style or substance" the responsibilities of global leadership.