Nov. 2, 1964 - Robert F. Kennedy and Senator Kenneth B. Keating reached the end of their bitter, costly, melodramatic campaign for the U.S. Senate tonight after nine exhausting weeks.
Tomorrow, the state’s voters — about seven million of them, according to the estimates of most politicians — will choose between Keating, the 64‐year-old Republican incumbent, and Kennedy, the 38‐year‐old former Attorney General.
“The corn is in the silo,” one of Kennedy’s associates said yesterday. “Now all that’s left to do is to take it out and count the ears.”
Although the partisans of both candidates issued the customary election‐eve victory forecasts, some of Mr. Keating’s aides conceded that their man seemed to be trailing.
Kennedy’s private polls showed him with a commanding lead. Keating’s indicated an extremely close race with a tiny advantage for his opponent. The straw poll of The New York Daily News forecast a Kennedy landslide.
Samuel Lubell, the polltaker who had written several weeks ago that Keating had taken the lead, said in today’s New York World‐Telegram that Kennedy “should win,” but he said Keating still had “an underdog chance.”
Kennedy concluded his campaign, which began on Sept. 1 in the Fulton Fish Market, with five afternoon and early evening appearances in New York City.
Kennedy’s first stop of the day was at Fordham University, where he was booed as well as cheered. Smiling, he told a crowd of 4,000 students and faculty members that he was “grateful” for the reception.
From Fordham, he moved on to four rallies — at 187th Street and Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, at 116th Street and Lexington Avenue and at 103d Street and Lexington Avenue, both in Harlem, and at Fulton Street and Nostrand Avenue in the Bedford‐Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.
At the Bronx rally, policemen extricated his motorcade with great difficulty from another of the crowds of screaming, shouting, pushing children who have besieged him in every corner of the state.
“It makes me feel like a Beatle,” Kennedy once said after a similar incident.
Kennedy also spoke on an election‐eve telecast, in which he carefully avoided attacking Keating. He described “leadership in finding the solutions” to state and national problems as the dominant theme of the campaign.
Kennedy, who is ineligible to vote in New York, was scheduled to have breakfast tomorrow before the polls open at 6 a.m. with Democratic captains and inspectors of West Side Democratic clubs. Candidates from the area were also planning to join Kennedy at the Esquire Restaurant, 86th Street and Broadway.
He was then to return to the Carlyle Hotel and visit the Bronx Zoo about 10:30 a.m. He will hear the returns at the Carlyle and at the Democratic headquarters at the Statler‐Hilton Hotel.
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