New York's Keating: FROM A POOLSIDE CHAT, A CUBA CRITIC

IT was a lazy sort of Sunday morning last August, and New York's Republican Senator Kenneth Barnard Keating sat sunning himself at the poolside of a friend's Virginia home. Among the other guests was a young man who works for an electronics firm on the West Coast. The talk turned to Cuba. The young man said that there were rumors among Government contractors that the Soviets were putting a lot of equipment, including electronic gear, into Cuba. Ken Keating, no authority on Cuba, decided to check the rumors.

The results of Keating's investigation, conducted through friends in Government agencies, have made him famous. In Senate speeches in August and October, Keating supplied facts and figures of the massive Soviet buildup in Cuba. The Kennedy Administration at first denied Keating's reports, then affirmed Keating in coming to dramatic confrontation with Russia. Ever since, Keating has been in the forefront of critics of the Ad ministration's Cuba policy.

Keating is an affable man with a snowy thatch of hair and a ruddy complexion that he cultivates relentlessly under sun and sun lamp. He was born in Lima, N.Y., in 1900, the son of a grocer. He got his bachelor's degree at the University of Rochester at 19, taught high school Latin and won a law degree at Harvard in 1923. He built a profitable practice in Rochester as a trial lawyer, and in 1946 won at his first try for public office: Congressman from New York's 40th Congressional District. As a member of the House Judiciary Committee and the Joint Congressional Committee on Immigration, Keating won a reputation for competence in both fields. Representing the strongly Republican Rochester district, it was not hard to keep getting reelected, and Keating was comfortably happy with his status. But in 1958, when Nelson Rockefeller challenged Averell Harriman for the governorship, and Republican Senator Irving Ives was retiring from office, G.O.P. leaders drafted Keating for the Senate. At first he refused, but he changed his mind when Richard Nixon called him from the White House to say that President Eisenhower wanted him to run.

As New York's junior Senator (the senior: Republican Jack Javits), Keating sticks to his old specialties--judiciary and immigration--when he is not dealing with his new specialty, Cuba. He regularly keeps his name and ideas before his constituents by broadcasting TV programs across the state. In his early Senate days, he became something of a wit. In a speech a few years ago, he observed that every time Senator Jack Kennedy appeared on a TV panel show, "thousands of viewers write in to ask which college won the debate." He further pointed out that the United Auto Workers' Walter Reuther "has announced that labor was not wedded to the Democratic Party. If that be true, we have been witnessing the world's most notorious case of living in sin."

Keating is in great demand at Washington parties, but he is no social lion, rarely drinks, and smokes only an occasional cigar. A physical fitness enthusiast, he swims a good deal, exercises on arising every morning, guzzles a mixture of apple cider vinegar and honey to ward off colds.

Since Keating entered the Cuba controversy, his mail has reached mountainous proportions. An indication of Keating's new status occurred recently at a Republican dinner on Long Island. Keating was not there, but Kentucky's Senator Thruston Morton was. "Morton was trying to warm up the audience," says a man who attended the dinner. "He tried to get a cheer out of them by praising Governor Rockefeller. They were dead. He tried again with Javits. Again they were dead. Then he started building up Keating, and the 1,000 people in that crowd just about brought the roof down."

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