Their father told them how Romanian agents had approached him in the U.S. and asked his father to spy for the Communists in exchange for Peter and Costa's safety. After a night of agonized reflection, with great trepidation his father and mother decided to call the FBI, which sent two agents to their home. They were told they had two choices: one was to play along with the offer, pretend to spy for the Communists, while American intelligence would actually be using them as double agents, feeding false information to the Romanians. Neither of his parents felt comfortable becoming involved in the dubious ethics of a game like that. The second option, the one they chose was to take their story to the press. The idea was to create a scandal of such magnitude that the Romanians and Russians would be forced to protect Peter and Costa. It was the right thing to do, the ethical thing, but far riskier than collaboration with the enemy.

With the help of a public relations expert at the FBI, the news of the story - the espionage gambit, the way the Communists were holding his loved ones hostage - reached millions of ears around the globe. Newspapers and magazines, including Time, Newsweek, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post, wrote stories, and television news, then in its infancy, covered the story as well. It provoked an outpouring of sympathy around the world.

Outraged by their plight, and Romania's craven attempt to use two innocent children as leverage for espionage, Frances Payne Bolton, a ranking Republican on the House Foreign Relations Committee, buttonholed the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Vyshinsky, in an elevator after a United Nations meeting in 1953 and demanded their release. Eisenhower asked the Romanian Prime Minister Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej to set Peter and Costa free. Still, nothing happened. Finally, secretly, the United States reportedly traded a Soviet spy in exchange for the Georgescu boys.

The breaks to follow weren't nearly as magical as Peter's liberation from Romania, but there were many, all of them, in one way or another, smaller reverberations of the first. He was welcomed into Exeter Academy, and then earned his way into Princeton, finally Stanford Business School where he graduated with an MBA '63. He was offered a job at Young & Rubicam in 1963 right out of Stanford, and stayed there for his entire career - 37 years.

A One Company Man
Very early in his Y&R career he met his wife, Barbara Anne, for whom he worked briefly in the research department. They were married in 1965, and Barbara gave birth to their only child, Andrew, in 1967. As a young account executive, Peter became captivated with the research work that probed what potential customers wanted and needed. That might seem fine for ordinary young men, but why would the son of heroes, blessed with many of their talents, want to devote his life to selling mouthwash?¹

Peter became the kind of salesman who threw people off balance with a sincerity they were unaccustomed to. A senior executive at Bristol-Myers once objected when the 29-year-old Peter, brimming with enthusiasm, kept referring to what "we" were going to do for the product they were discussing. "Young man," the executive said, "it is not 'we.' It is our money. It is Bristol-Myers'." Peter's reply turned the executive into a firm ally: "Sir, I believe that you pay us to have the same kind of loyalty to your products and your objectives as you do. I don't see a difference between Bristol-Myers and Young & Rubicam, sir."²