Nov. 4, 1964 - Robert F. Kennedy was elected to the U.S. Senate from New York yesterday in his first bid for elective office, overwhelming Republican Senator Kenneth Keating.
With more than 80% of the vote counted, Kennedy held a 6-to-5 lead. Because most of the untallied vote was in heavily Democratic New York City, it appeared that the former Attorney General’s plurality might reach 650,000.
Keating conceded defeat at 11:39 p.m. with the announcement at the Roosevelt Hotel that he had sent a congratulatory telegram to Kennedy.
Governor Nelson Rockefeller, standing beside the white-haired Rochester legislator, said Keating’s defeat was “a tragedy for the state and nation.”
“Senator Keating, one of the great Senators in the history of New York, has been rolled under by a national landslide,” Rockefeller added. “He waged a magnificent campaign.”
Kennedy ran well behind President Johnson, who seemed to be headed for a record margin of 2.5 million votes or more in New York. The President won all of the state’s 62 counties.
It thus appeared that about a million New York voters had split their ticket to cast votes for Johnson and Keating — but even this wasn’t enough to make the Senate contest close.
Kennedy appeared at a victory rally in the Statler Hilton Hotel about 1:30 a.m. He said he had won “an overwhelming mandate” to continue the policies of his older brother, John F. Kennedy.
Then, as he often did during the campaign, he offered a quotation for his audience: “Come, my friends — ’tis not too late to build a better world.”
“This,” Kennedy added, is what I dedicate myself to in the next six years for the State of New York.”
Kennedy’s younger brother, Edward, was reelected in Massachusetts. They will sit together in the Senate — the second such pair in American history. Theodore Foster of Rhode Island and Dwight Foster of Massachusetts, who served together on Capitol Hill from 1800 to 1803, were the first.
The former Attorney General’s victory gave the Kennedy family another distinction. It is the first ever to send three brothers to the Senate — Robert, Edward, and John, who served before being elected President in 1960.
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