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Intense, cerebral and self-contained, Keyes shies away from the flesh pressing of campaigning. In his dark suits and monogrammed, French-cuffed shirts, he resembles the cool international diplomat he once was. At the Seattle airport, carrying his own bag over his shoulder, his head buried in a computer magazine, he is asked whether he is enjoying the campaign. "Enjoyment would be too strong a word," he says with a half-smile, half-grimace.
The fifth child of a career noncommissioned officer (and lifelong Democrat), Keyes grew up in Georgia, Italy, Virginia, Texas and Maryland, which eventually became his home. A precocious orator, he won various speaking contests as a boy. At Cornell in the 1960s, he was revolted by the counterculture and ardently supported the Vietnam War. After earning a Ph.D. in government at Harvard (his dissertation was on Alexander Hamilton), he went into the foreign service, becoming a desk officer in Bombay, where he met his wife Jocelyn, an Indian with whom he has three children. With the helping hand of Jeane Kirkpatrick, Keyes rose to become ambassador to UNESCO. On the campaign trail he is "Ambassador Keyes."
Like many on both the left and right, Keyes sees a breakdown in civic life in America. The reason, he emphasizes again and again, is that "we have embraced a concept of freedom based on whatever's good for you, that's what you do." But Keyes' remedy appears to be restoring a Norman Rockwell America that never really existed. "End welfare and turn it over to the churches that once did the job right," he says. He even seems to romanticize "the peculiar institution," telling an overwhelmingly white audience at the exclusive Rainier Club in Seattle, "Even during slavery the family structure of black America was stronger than it is today."
Keyes notes that his only campaign experiences, two losses when he ran, in 1988 and 1992, for a Maryland U.S. Senate seat, hardly provide much of a launching pad for the presidency. But campaigning for him is a way of practicing what he preaches. "The American Dream," he says urgently, "is not just about getting a nicer car or a bigger house." And the American presidential race is not just about getting votes.
--With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington