By Marc Eliot Stein, World BEYOND War, July 29, 2024
Robert F. Keeler’s new book Sacred Soldier: The Dangers of Worshipping Warriors is a tough indictment of USA’s inane militarism, emphasizing recruitment horrors, rampant sexual abuse and corrupt leadership in today’s armed forces. The author is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from Newsday.
For Episode 62 of the World BEYOND War podcast, Marc Eliot Stein interviews Keeler about his Catholicism, his pacifism, his award-winning career as a journalist for Newsday, and his own life as a military veteran who refuses to pretend USA’s war system deserves respect. In this wide-ranging interview, Keeler and Stein explore many topics both personal and political, including the damages caused by Agent Orange in Vietnam, efforts by New York senator Kristin Gillebrand to address military rape, the Garmish Partenkirchen US military base in Germany, connections between Israel’s “wall” and USA’s “wall”, Netanyahu and George W. Bush’s forgotten roles in empowering Hamas, the history of Iran and Mohammed Mossadegh, the Pentagon as the world’s worst polluter, the meaning of “FUBAR”, “SNAFU” and “BOHICA”, the podcast SNAFU featuring Ed Helms, the roman orator Cicero, the prophet Isaiah, Pax Christi, the Knights of Columbus, the New York Mets and the great antiwar work done by friends of World BEYOND War such as David Vine, Mike Ferner, Ann Wright and Pat Elder.
Musical excerpt for this episode: “This Land Is Your Land” by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.
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Robert F. Keeler entered the craft of journalism in 1965 at the New York Herald Tribune, where he worked as a copy boy and an editorial assistant. Drafted in November 1965, Keeler graduated from the United States Army Artillery and Missile Officer Candidate School. He spent almost three and a half years in the army, including assignments in Maryland as an information officer and in Korea as an intelligence officer.
After he left the army in 1969, Keeler worked at the Waterbury Republican in Connecticut, covering civil rights, then at the Staten Island Advance, where he primarily wrote about transportation issues. He came to Newsday in April 1971. Keeler’s first assignment at Newsday involved covering the Town of Brookhaven. In that first year on staff, Keeler wrote a two-part series on the problems at the Suffolk State School in Melville, a facility for the developmentally disabled. That same year, he covered the bloody uprising at the state prison in Attica. His series on Suffolk State School won the 1972 distinguished community service award of the New York State Publishers Association.
From 1973 to 1978, Keeler was the lead reporter covering Suffolk County government. From 1978 to 1981, he served as Albany bureau chief. In that assignment, he wrote extensively about the state’s prison system, including a strike by prison guards and the first prison interview with David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” serial killer. During the Seventies and Eighties, he covered the case of Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret doctor convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters. Most recently, that case is the subject of an FX documentary series, A Wilderness of Error.
His experience in political coverage includes races from the town board and county legislature level to the 1974 and 1978 gubernatorial races, the 1976 and 1980 Democratic presidential conventions, and the 1976, 1980 and 1992 campaigns for United States Senate from New York.
After his tour as Albany bureau chief, Keeler served briefly as a national correspondent, then as editor of The Newsday Magazine in 1982 and 1983. In 1984, he became state editor. From 1987 to 1990, he worked on a book about the history of Newsday. The book, Newsday: A Candid History of the Respectable Tabloid, was published in 1990 by William Morrow.
Keeler’s next assignment, after the publication of the Newsday book, involved long-term projects, including an 18-month examination of the State University of New York. The SUNY series ran in 1992 and won awards from the Education Writers Association, the Society of Silurians and the Long Island Press Club, the local chapter of the journalism fraternity Sigma Delta Chi.
In June 1993, Keeler began covering the religion beat. Among the stories that he covered were papal visits to Denver in 1993 and to New York in 1995, and the first-ever Holocaust memorial concert at the Vatican in 1994. He also spent 18 months writing about daily life in a Catholic parish, St. Brigid’s in Westbury. That series won a Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting in 1996. Later, the series became the basis for a 1997 book published by The Crossroad Publishing Company, Parish! The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Story of a Vibrant Catholic Community.
In March 2000, Keeler served on a Newsday team covering the pilgrimage of Pope John Paul II to the Holy Land. He and his colleague, Paul Moses, wrote a book about that pilgrimage, Days of Intense Emotion: Praying with Pope John Paul II in the Holy Land, published by Resurrection Press in the spring of 2001.
Following his retirement from Newsday at the end of 2012, Keeler worked for five years as a consultant to the Long Island-based Hagedorn Foundation, focusing on issues such as immigration, voting rights, and pre-K education. He continues occasionally to write op-eds for Newsday. In addition, he is the author of a 2024 book about our nation’s attitudes toward the military, Sacred Soldier: The Dangers of Worshiping Warriors.
Keeler lives in Stony Brook, New York, with his wife, Judith Ann Dempsey Keeler. She spent more than four decades teaching English Language Arts in Catholic schools on Long Island. They have two adult daughters, Rebekah and Rachel, two granddaughters, Hailey and Annie, and three grandsons, Zachary, Leo and Dayton.
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