Kenneth Keating of New York entered politics in 1946, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. As ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, he was influential in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Moving to the Senate in 1959, the liberal Republican continued to champion civil rights, working with a bipartisan coalition that broke a filibuster to ensure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Keating also promoted immigration reform and health care for the aged. In 1960 he introduced the Twenty-Third Amendment to the Constitution, allowing residents of the District of Columbia to vote in presidential elections. The New York senator is perhaps best remembered for his persistent warnings of a Russian military buildup and construction of missile sites in Cuba--a crisis that climaxed as the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962--and his criticism of the Kennedy administration’s management of that crisis. Keating ran for a second Senate term in 1964, but was defeated by Robert Kennedy.
