On August 22, 1964 ─ “still a wounded animal, half a zombie,” as reporter Jack Newfield later put it ─ he announced his candidacy against the liberal republican incumbent, Kenneth Keating... One Democratic activist, Ronnie Eldridge, recalled Kennedy's appearance before a group of reform Democrats on the eve of his nomination. “Almost everybody was sitting there, waiting for this ruthless, aggressive man to come in, and they were filled with resentment,” she remembered. “And the doorbell rang... And, I'll never forget, this scared little guy came in. And he really just looked so out of it all, and he looked slightly schizophrenic... I mean, he was just not with it: very shy, his eyes down on the floor all the time, and it just took everybody by such surprise because they were really there to eat him up, and there really wasn't anything, you know, to eat up. And it was very sad.”