Ships
- USS Missouri (BB-63) Captain, 1 April 1954 – 18 September 1954
Robert T. S. Keith was born Robert Taylor Scott Keith in Washington in 1905 and grew up in Warrenton, Virginia. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1928. He stayed in the Navy until 1964, when he retired as a vice admiral after commanding the First Fleet at San Diego.
His early sea duty moved from the battle line to destroyers. He served in Utah (BB-31) and Arizona (BB-39), then in the destroyers Overton (DD-239) and Aylwin (DD-355). Those ships gave him both the routine of heavy gunnery and the bridge time in smaller ships that marked his years before the war.
In December 1943 he took command of the destroyer Nicholas (DD-449) in the Pacific and remained in her until February 1945. Nicholas had already gone out to William Frederick Halsey, Jr. as one of the new destroyers in the South Pacific, and she had earned a Presidential Unit Citation for fighting in the Solomons before Keith assumed command. In January 1944, at Pearl Harbor, he received that citation with the crew when Chester William Nimitz presented it. While he was in command, Nicholas was credited with sinking three Japanese submarines, and the Navy awarded him the Legion of Merit for each of those actions.
He left Nicholas in February 1945 and that spring commissioned the destroyer Herbert J. Thomas at Bath, Maine. After the war he served in Hawaii and in Washington, and he was chief of staff to the commander of the Atlantic destroyer force.
On 1 April 1954 he became captain of Missouri (BB-63). The battleship was then in the last year of her first period in commission, and she was taken out of commission early in 1955. His own tour ran through 18 September 1954. On 17 September, during a visit to San Francisco, Fleet Admiral Nimitz came aboard and stood with him beside the plaque marking the place where the Japanese surrender had been signed in 1945. Keith's command ended the following day.
He returned to Annapolis that autumn as Commandant of Midshipmen and served in the post into 1956. It was his third tour on the Naval Academy staff, this time with charge of the midshipmen.
Flag rank took him back to sea and to large shore commands. He led a destroyer flotilla and then the naval base at Subic Bay in the Philippines. In Washington he served as Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for the Naval Reserve. He later commanded the Pacific Fleet cruiser-destroyer force and sat as the senior United States member of the Military Armistice Commission in South Korea. His final command was the First Fleet.
He married Eleanor Langhorne Hudgins, and they had shared fifty-three years by the time of his death. Their twin sons were Robert T. S. Keith Jr., who retired as a Navy captain, and Langhorne Keith. In retirement he lived in Virginia Beach and in Coronado, California. He died of congestive heart failure on 12 February 1989 in Falls Church, Virginia, at the age of eighty-three. He belonged to the Society of the Cincinnati.