“Please, Marika, I have to see her. I have to. I want to help her.”
She shook her head and quietly concluded the conversation. “You should have done that eighteen years ago.”
She turned her back and would not speak to him again.
The next morning when he arrived at the hospital, George Keller was informed that his father had died peacefully in his sleep during the night.
He took the first flight back to Paris. He had never felt more lonely in his life.
The moment he cleared customs at Washington’s Dulles Airport, George picked up the phone and called Catherine Fitzgerald at the Nader office.
“Hi, how was the trip? The papers said you did well in Moscow.”
“It’s a long story,” he replied. “Right now I need an urgent favor from you.”
“The sound of that worries me, Dr. Keller. You never do anything without an ulterior motive. What exactly is it you’re after?”
“A wife,” George replied.
There was sudden silence at the other end of the wire.
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“You know I have no sense of humor. Now, will you marry me?”
“I won’t say yes unless you name a specific time and place.”
“How’s Friday noon at the clerk’s office at the Municipal Center on E Street?”
“If you’re even one minute late,” she warned playfully, “I promise you I’ll walk.”
“And if you’re late,” he retorted, “I promise you I’ll wait. Now do we have a deal?”
“Let’s say we’ve had a successful negotiation,” she replied. And before hanging up, added with sudden tenderness, “George, I do love you.”
After the wedding, Cathy permitted her parents to give them a small reception at the family home in McLean, Virginia. There were several of Cathy’s old friends from school, a few Nader’s Raiders, some of her father’s law partners and their wives. George invited only one couple — Henry and Nancy Kissinger.
The Secretary of State proposed a witty toast that utterly disarmed and enchanted the bride, who had spent the preceding night dreading the thought of seeing her old nemesis.
“I hope we can be friends now,” Henry smiled as he kissed Cathy.
“Dammit,” she replied happily, “it’s true what they say about you, Henry. Your charm is irresistible.”
“I hope you hear that, Nancy,” quipped the Secretary to his new bride.
For a Republican working in Washington, D.C., late July 1974 was hardly a time for honeymoons. Though Cathy moved into George’s townhouse right after the wedding, she barely saw him. And then only very late at night.
For now it became increasingly deaf that because of the Watergate scandal, Nixon was going to have to resign from office.
While Henry Kissinger metaphorically — and sometimes literally — held the tormented President’s hand, George helped Al Haig set the White House in order.
If his wedding had lacked confetti, it was more than made up for by the mass of shredded paper emanating from the Executive Mansion late those evenings as George “deepsixed” documents that various members of the “Palace Guard” brought in to him.
George destroyed the material so quickly that he didn’t have a second to determine what he was being given. He simply stuffed it into burn bags to be carted off.
Cathy was awake when he arrived home one morning at three o’clock.
“I don’t know whether to offer you a nightcap or breakfast,” she joked. “If it were anyone else, I’d think there was another woman.”
“Hell, it’s like a deathwatch over there, Cath. Al Haig feels it’s only a question of time.”
“Why doesn’t Nixon just quit and put everybody — especially the country — out of its misery?”
George looked at her.
“It’s a helluva decision,” he said softly.
“Yes, but he’s got a helluva lot to answer for.”
“So does every politician,” George responded. “We’ve all got some kind of skeleton in our closet.”
“Not you, Georgie,” she said, embracing him. “You’re still a high-minded public servant, aren’t you?”
“Of course,” he answered, trying to seem jocular.
“Then why not quit while you’re ahead? When Nixon goes, let’s go too.”
“Don’t be silly, Cathy. Now’s the time the Administration needs me most.”
He didn’t add that it was a rare opportunity to make a quantum leap ahead in his career.
“Ah,” she said, kissing him on the cheek, “my patriotic husband.”
At eleven-thirty on the morning of August 9, Henry Kissinger buzzed George to come into his office. The White House Chief of Staff was also present.
“Morning, Al,” said George, cheerily doing his best to imitate a military salute.
Haig merely nodded somberly in the direction of the Secretary of State, who was seated at his desk holding a small piece of white paper.
“Oh,” George said solemnly, “is that it?”
Kissinger nodded and handed George the document, which read simply:
Dear Mr. Secretary,
I hereby resign the office of President of the United States.
George scanned it several times and looked at Haig.
“Where’s the President now?” he asked.
“Strictly speaking,” Kissinger replied, “at this moment there is no President.”
Haig concurred. “Yeah. Just think, George. Right now the three most powerful guys in the United States — and by consequence the world — are standing together in the same room. Does it feel good?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied noncommittally. But it did, in fact, feel very good.
“Anyway,” said Kissinger, rising from his chair, “unless we want to rule as a triumvirate, we’d better head for Gerry’s swearing in.”
Gerald Ford had spent the majority of his adult life as a contented congressman from Michigan. He had never aspired to the White House. And yet now he had become the most powerful leader in the Western world, in a tension-filled atmosphere he did not really relish.
The responsibility of office did not weigh too heavily on Ford. He could meet that challenge. But he couldn’t bear the cutthroat competition among his aides for access to his ear.
Old football player that he was, he could recognize a tackle trying to break through to reach the quarterback. And he knew he had to clear the field to give himself some running room.
Obviously, Kissinger had to remain for continuity — and for the nation’s image in the world.
Yet, despite the fact that Haig insisted that the new President badly “needed him,” Ford wanted to get at least this Nixon courtier away from Washington. Happily he found a glittering pretext.
He got Al Haig appointed Supreme Commander of the NATO Forces — thereby transferring him to Brussels. He would remain in the White House just long enough to help in the negotiations for the Nixon pardon.
Then, to establish his own global stature, Ford set off with Kissinger to meet Brezhnev at a summit meeting. Naturally, George Keller was in tow. And he was so conspicuously effective that during the long flight home on Air Force One, the President invited him to his quarters.
“What did you talk about?” Kissinger asked with a scintilla of jealousy as he returned to his seat.
“You won’t believe this, Henry,” he replied. “It was about football.”