During World War II, Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, fighting side by side with the Wehrmacht until 1944, when it joined the Allied powers and faced occupation by the Red Army forces. Following the war, Romania became a socialist republic and member of the Warsaw Pact. Peter's father, Valeriu C. Georgescu was the manager of the Romanian Ploesti Oil fields under Standard Oil of New Jersey, Due to this position Valeriu had been asked to spy for the Soviet Union and then asked by the FBI to turn double agent. At one point Peter, his elder brother, Constantin and grandfather were jailed by the new soviet satellite regime. Concurrently his father, then away on business in New York City, was suddenly exiled. In 1954 Peter was finally traded along with his brother for unnamed Soviet spies after his father, having gone tothe press at the advice of the U.S. Government, obtained the intervention of Congresswoman Frances Payne Bolton of Ohio and President Dwight Eisenhower. Also in 1954, shortly following the boys' release and safe arrival in the United States, they appeared on the Today Show with Dave Garroway in an interview focusing on their ordeal and erstwhile adventure. Peter Georgescu went on to attend Phillips Exeter Academy at the invitation of the headmaster and subsequently to earn his BA degree from Princeton University and his MBA from Stanford.
Business career and writing
Georgescu became chairman and CEO of Young & Rubicam in 1994 and served in those positions until 2000. As chairman he began to streamline the company's operations. In 1995 Y&R began an acquisition push increasing ownership in advertising agencies and public relations firms across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. Georgescu is the author of the books The Constant Choice: An Everyday Journey From Evil Towards Good and The Source of Success and he wrote the foreword for "Eisenhower on Leadership: Ike's Enduring Lessons in Total Victory Management". He was interviewed on The Constant Choice by Leonard Lopate on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC, the NPR affiliate in New York City. He was elected to the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame in 2011. An opinion piece Georgescu penned in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times, on financial disparity, titled, "Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal with Income Inequality", in which he argues that monetary disparity in the U.S. has to be addressed as the situation otherwise would lead to unbearable taxes or social tempest, engendered over one thousand comments on the newspaper's Facebook page. Georgescu has sat on the Board of Trustees of NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital since 1996. Georgescu endorsed Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
