After all, he was a family man with a wife and son. And a second child due in four months.
George Keller could, almost have been working in the Museum of Modern Art. Every morning for the past four years, since Labor Day 1963 to be precise, he had been going to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, in New York City, passing various security procedures and ultimately taking an elevator to the fifty-sixth floor. There he would enter portals marked simply “Room 5600.”
On the way to his luxurious office, he would walk down corridors lined with Renoirs, Picassos, Cézannes, and van Goghs. Not to mention equally priceless statuary. For he was in the midst of one of the finest private art collections in the world.
It was at this rarefied height that Governor Nelson Rockefeller and his brothers had their base of operations, each maintaining a wing devoted to his various interests, patronage, philanthropy, politics, and combinations thereof.
On Henry Kissinger’s recommendation, George had been hired to join the staff writing memoranda on international affairs for the governor. As Henry put it, “You would be laying the groundwork for the foreign policy of the Rockefeller presidency.”
If he had any doubts about leaving Harvard, they were dispelled by the knowledge that scarcely a year out of graduate school he was already earning the equivalent of a full professor’s salary.
He had not lacked for attractive offers. With each summer he spent helping to organize the Harvard International Seminar, his responsibilities had grown in proportion to his rise in Kissinger’s esteem. By the time he received his Ph.D. in government, he was the co-editor of Confluence, the seminar’s flagship publication.
Henry was fiercely loyal to his protégés and never hesitated to include George in the strategy for his own advancement. This was not out of uncritical affection. George was clearly an asset, for both his academic brilliance and his innate feeling for diplomacy. It was, if not an alliance of equals, at least a genuine partnership.
Naturally Harvard had wanted George to stay on. The department chairman even called in Kissinger to discuss how they could persuade the young scholar to remain in the academic ranks. His adviser countered that George was a strong-willed man.
“I sense his aspirations lie in Washington and not in Cambridge,” Henry offered. “But I will do my best.”
Kissinger did not exert undue pressure on George to remain at Harvard. For he himself had more use for soldiers to man the advance guard of his own career. Hence, by placing George with his long-time patrons, the Rockefellers, he had an ally he could count on in the “real world.”
In June 1963, George Keller not only received his doctorate but — and perhaps of greater importance — took the oath of fealty to the U.S. Constitution. Thus officially becoming a proud and patriotic American.
The granting of his citizenship was to him a kind of late-arriving birth certificate. By this time he had not only secured his future, he had all but suppressed his past.
It was almost as if he had never been Hungarian. Or had never had a father or a mother. Or a sister. Or a fiancée named Aniko. Only once in a great while did he have a nightmare about being lost in a blinding snow storm, not being able to find his way home. He had even conscientiously avoided reading the Hungarian press, except when it was absolutely necessary for his course work. He was like Athena in Greek mythology, sprung full-grown from the forehead of Zeus. Only in George’s case his creator was Henry Kissinger.
And so George Keller set out for New York — in some eyes the greatest city in the world. But, in his view, merely a suburb of Washington.
His philosophy in acquiring a new wardrobe was based on the personal theory that if a garment was tailor-made it had to be better. He found out who had been the late President Kennedy’s tailor and ordered several new suits in every “distinguished” color.
In fact, he became something of a sartorial proselytizer. He would even chide Andrew, whom he occasionally met at the New York Harvard Club either for lunch or squash, “Eliot, I can’t for the life of me fathom why you still buy off the rack. After all, you’re an up-and-coming banker.”
“I’m only just a trainee,” his classmate would counter affably. “Besides, we New England Yankees are indoctrinated to be thrifty.”
He did not mention, nor did George with his impeccable sense of tact, that two years before, upon turning twenty-five, Andrew had come into a trust fund of several million dollars.
There were other advantages to working for the Rockefeller organization. For example, access to unobtainable concert and theater tickets. Not to mention bright, pulchritudinous young women who also worked in Room 5600.
George enthusiastically took advantage of all these opportunities. He reveled in the glittering first nights at the opera and important theatrical events. He had house seats when Fonteyn and Nureyev first danced the young Russian’s version of Swan Lake in America. Indeed, when Danny Rossi played the Bartok Second Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic, George was sitting in the Rockefeller family box with Sally Bates, the governor’s charming and beautiful assistant for urban affairs.
As Danny strode on stage, George could not keep himself from whispering to Sally, “This is like old home week for me. Bartok is Hungarian. And Rossi is a Harvardman. He and I were classmates.”
“Do you know him personally?” she inquired, most impressed.
“We were both in Eliot House,” George replied evasively.
“Oh, that’s exciting. Can we go backstage and meet him afterward?”
“Uh — I don’t think we should,” he backtracked as suavely as possible. “I mean, Danny’s always exhausted after he performs. Some other time.”
The normally staid atmosphere of Room 5600 seemed electrified during those days in 1964 when Nelson Rockefeller was making his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Kissinger was there so often that George wondered how he managed to teach his classes.
Nominally, Henry was on the Rockefeller staff as foreign policy adviser. But he delegated to George the drafting of the position papers, while he himself huddled in the inner sanctuary with Rocky to discuss the strategy of the campaign.
George went along with the entourage to the Republican Convention in San Francisco. And even after their patron lost the nomination to Barry Goldwater, he stayed on to assist Kissinger in writing the foreign-policy planks of the party platform.
On Election Night, George and Henry stood in a corner of the subdued hotel ballroom watching each return increase the magnitude of their candidate’s crushing defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson.
“Well, Henry, I guess that’s the end of the ball game.”
“Not at all, George, not at all.”
“What do you mean? They’re swamping us nearly two to one.”
“Not us,” Kissinger replied. “Only Senator Goldwater. Just remember the Democrats will also need expert advice.”
Inwardly George thought his old teacher was merely putting up a brave front. Kissinger would be relegated to the classroom just as he would be to Room 5600.
And yet, three years later, while Lyndon Johnson stood helplessly mired in the pernicious swamps of the Vietnam war, a chubby, bespectacled Harvard government professor presented himself in the office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The academic offered to relay secret messages via certain French contacts to Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese leader.