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WASHINGTON (AP) – Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a titan of American academia, business and diplomacy who spent most of the 1980s trying to improve Cold War relations with the Soviet Union and forging a path for peace in the Middle East, is dead. He was 100 years old.
Shultz died on Saturday at his home on the Stanford University campus, where he was a distinguished fellow of the Hoover Institution, a think tank and professor emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
The Hoover Institution announced Shultz’s death on Sunday. A cause of death was not provided.
A longtime Republican, Shultz has held three prominent government positions in GOP administrations during a long career in public service.
He served as Secretary of Labor, Secretary of the Treasury and Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Richard M. Nixon before spending more than six years as Secretary of State to President Ronald Reagan.
Shultz was the second serving Secretary of State since World War I I was the oldest surviving cabinet member of any administration.
Condoleezza Rice, also former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution, said in a statement that Shultz “will go down in history as a man who made the world a better place.”
Shultz had largely remained out of politics since his retirement, but had advocated for an increased focus on climate change. He celebrated his 100th birthday in December by extolling the virtues of trust and bipartisanship in politics and other endeavors in an article he wrote for The Washington Post.
Coming amid the acrimony that followed the November presidential election, Shultz’s call for decency and respect for opposing views struck a lot like a call for the country to shy away from the political vitriol of the Trump years. .
“Trust is the currency of the realm,” Shultz wrote. “When confidence was in the room, whatever the room – the family room, the classroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room – good things happened. When confidence was not in the room, good things did not happen. Everything else is just details. “
During his lifetime, Shultz was successful in academia, public service, and American business, and was widely respected by his peers from both political parties.
After the October 1983 bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut that killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked tirelessly to end Lebanon’s brutal civil war in the 1980s. He spent countless hours in the diplomacy of shuttle between the capitals of the Middle East to try to obtain the withdrawal of the Israeli forces there.
The experience led him to believe that stability in the region could only be ensured through a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he embarked on an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful mission to bring the parties to the table. negotiations.
Although Shultz did not achieve his goal of putting the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel on the path to a peace deal, he paved the way for the efforts of future administrations in the Middle East in legitimizing the Palestinians. as a people with valid aspirations and a valid interest in determining their future.
As the country’s chief diplomat, Shultz negotiated the very first treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s land-based nuclear arsenals despite Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s fierce objections to Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” or Star Wars.
The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was a historic attempt to begin to reverse the nuclear arms race, a goal it has never given up in private life.
“Now that we know so much about these guns and how powerful they are,” Shultz said in an interview in 2008, “these are almost guns we wouldn’t use, so I think we’d be better off without them.
Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, reflecting in his memoir on the “Highly analytical, calm and selfless Shultz,” paid Shultz an outstanding compliment in his diary: “If I could choose an American to confide in the fate of the nation in crisis would be George Shultz.
George Pratt Shultz was born December 13, 1920 in New York City and raised in Englewood, New Jersey. He studied economics and public and international affairs at Princeton University, graduating in 1942. His affinity for Princeton prompted him to have the school’s mascot, a tiger, tattooed on his posterior, a fact confirmed to journalists decades later by his wife on a plane taking them to China.
At Shultz’s 90th birthday party, his successor as Secretary of State James Baker joked that he would do anything for Shultz “except kiss the tiger”. After Princeton, Shultz joined the Marine Corps and rose to the rank of captain as an artillery officer during World War II.
He got a doctorate. in economics at MIT in 1949 and taught at MIT and the University of Chicago, where he was dean of the business school. His administrative background included a stint as a senior economist with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers and as director of the Nixon OMB.
Shultz was chairman of construction and engineering company Bechtel Group from 1975 to 1982 and taught part-time at Stanford University before joining the Reagan administration in 1982, replacing Alexander Haig, who was resigned after frequent clashes with other members of the administration.
A rare public disagreement between Reagan and Shultz arose in 1985 when the President ordered thousands of government employees with access to highly confidential information to pass a “lie detector” test in order to stop information leaks. . Shultz told reporters: “The minute in this government that I am not trusted is the day I leave. The administration quickly declined the demand.
A more serious disagreement concerned the secret arms sales to Iran in 1985 in the hope of securing the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by Hezbollah militants. Although Shultz opposed it, Reagan went ahead with the deal and millions of Iranian dollars went to the right-wing Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra scandal that followed engulfed the administration, much to Shultz’s dismay.
After Reagan left, Shultz returned to Bechtel, having served as the longest-serving Secretary of State since Cordell Hull under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He retired from the Bechtel Board of Directors in 2006 and returned to Stanford and the Hoover Institution.
In 2000, he became an early supporter of the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush, whose father had served as vice president while Shultz was secretary of state. Shultz served as an informal advisor for the campaign.
Shultz remained a strong advocate of arms control in his later years, but retained an iconoclastic streak, speaking out against several dominant Republican political positions. He created controversy by calling Reagan’s war on recreational drugs a failure and raised eyebrows by decrying the long-standing US embargo on Cuba as “insane.”
He was also a prominent supporter of efforts to address the effects of climate change, warning that ignoring the risks was suicidal.
A pragmatist, Shultz, along with Kissinger, made headlines during the 2016 presidential campaign when he refused to endorse Republican candidate Donald Trump after being quoted as saying “God help us” when asked. asked about the possibility of Trump in the White House.
Shultz was married to Helena “Obie” O’Brien, an army nurse he met in the Pacific during World War II, and they had five children. After his death in 1995, he married Charlotte Maillard, San Francisco Chief of Protocol, in 1997.
Shultz received the country’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1989.
The survivors include his wife, five children, 11 grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
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Longtime PA diplomatic writer Barry Schweid, who died in 2015, contributed to this report.
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The story has been corrected to reflect that Shultz was the second serving Secretary of State since World War II.
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