Washington – Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a titan of the American academic, business and diplomatic world who spent most of the 1980s trying to improve Cold War relations with the Soviet Union and establishing a heading for peace in the Middle East. He was 100 years old.
Schultz died Saturday at his home on the campus of Stanford University, where he was a distinguished member of the Hoover Institution, a think tank, and professor emeritus at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
The Hoover Institution announced Schultz’s death on Sunday. No cause of death was provided.
A lifelong Republican, Shultz held three important cabinet positions in Republican Party administrations during a long public service career.
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He was secretary of labor, secretary of the treasury and director of the Office of Management and Budgets (OMB) under President Richard Nixon before spending more than six years as Reagan’s secretary of state.
Schultz was the longest-serving secretary of state since World War II and had been the former cabinet member who had survived any administration.
Throughout his life, Shultz was successful in almost everything he touched, including academics, teaching, government service, and the corporate world, and was widely respected by his peers in both political parties.
After October 1983 bombing of the Navy barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked tirelessly to end Lebanon’s brutal civil war in the 1980s. He spent countless hours of shuttle diplomacy between Middle Eastern capitals trying to secure the withdrawal of Israeli forces there.
The experience led him to believe that stability in the region could only be assured with a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and he embarked on an ambitious but ultimately failed mission to bring the parties to the negotiating table.
Although Shultz did not fulfill his goal of putting the Palestine and Israel Liberation Organization towards a peace agreement, he paved the way for the efforts of future Eastern administrations by legitimizing the Palestinians as a people with valid aspirations and a valid participation in determining their future.
As the nation’s top diplomat, Shultz negotiated the 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.
Pete Souza, White House through CNP / Getty Images
The 1987 Intermediate Distance Nuclear Forces Treaty was a historic attempt to begin reversing the nuclear arms race, a goal he never abandoned in private life.
“Now that we know so much about these weapons and their power,” Shultz said in an interview in 2008, “they’re almost weapons we wouldn’t use, so I think we’d be better off without them.”
Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, reflecting in his memoirs on the “highly analytical, quiet, and selfless Shultz,” gave Shultz an exceptional compliment in his diary: “If I could choose an American to whom I would entrust fate. of the nation a crisis, would be George Shultz “.
George Pratt Shultz was born on December 13, 1920 in New York City and grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. He studied economics and public and international affairs at Princeton University, graduating in 1942. His affinity for Princeton motivated him to have the school mascot, a tiger, tattooed on his back, a fact confirmed to reporters. decades later by his wife aboard a plane he was taking 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 achieved the rank of captain as an artillery officer during World War II.
He earned 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 management experience included a stint as a senior economist on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Board of Economic Advisers and as director of Nixon’s OMB.
Shultz was president of the Bechtel Group construction and engineering firm from 1975 to 1982 and taught part-time at Stanford University before joining the Reagan administration in 1982, replacing Alexander Haig, who resigned after frequent clashes with other members of the administration.
A rare public disagreement between Reagan and Shultz occurred in 1985 when the president ordered thousands of government employees with access to highly classified information to take a “lie detector” test as a way to cover up information leaks. Shultz told reporters, “The minute I don’t trust this government is the day I leave.” The administration soon backed down the lawsuit.
A year later, Shultz underwent a government-wide drug test considered much more reliable.
A more serious disagreement was over the secret sale of weapons to Iran in 1985 in hopes of securing the release of American hostages detained in Lebanon by Hezbollah militants. Although Shultz opposed it, Reagan continued the deal and millions of dollars from Iran went to right-wing guerrillas against Nicaragua. The ensuing Iran-Contra scandal flooded the administration, to Shultz’s dismay.
In the 1986 testimony in the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he lamented that “nothing is ever installed in this city. It’s not like running a business or even a university. It’s a bustling debate society. in which the debate never stops, in which people never give up, including me, and that is the environment in which you manage. “
After Reagan left office, Shultz returned to Bechtel, having been the longest-serving Secretary of State since Cordell Hull under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He retired from Bechtel’s board in 2006 and returned to Stanford and the Hoover Institution.
In 2000 he became one of the first supporters of the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush, whose father had been vice president while Shultz was secretary of state. Schultz was an informal campaign adviser.
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Shultz continued to be an ardent supporter of gun control in his later years, but maintained an iconoclastic streak, protesting against several major Republican political positions. He created some controversy by calling a failure of the war on recreational drugs, defended by Reagan, and raised his eyebrows by denouncing as “insane” the US embargo on Cuba.
He was also a staunch supporter of efforts to combat the effects of climate change, and warned that ignoring the risks was suicidal.
A pragmatist, Shultz, along with Kissinger, made headlines during the 2016 presidential campaign when he refused to approve Republican candidate Donald Trump after being quoted as saying “God help us” when asked about Mr. Trump’s possibility 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 her death in 1995, he married Charlotte Maillard, San Francisco’s chief of protocol, in 1997.
Shultz was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal for Freedom, in 1989.
Among the survivors are his wife, five children, 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.