WASHINGTON (AP) – 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 forging a heading for peace in the Middle East, he is dead. He was 100 years old.
Shultz 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 Shultz’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.
He was Secretary of Labor, Secretary of the Treasury, and Director of President Richard M. Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget before spending more than six years as Secretary of State for President Ronald Reagan.
Shultz was the second acting secretary of state since World War I. I and I had been the former cabinet member who had survived any administration.
Condoleezza Rice, also a former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution, said in a statement that Shultz “will be remembered 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 a greater focus on climate change. He marked his 100th birthday in December by praising the virtues of trust and bipartisanship in politics and other efforts in a play he wrote for the Washington Post.
Arriving amid the bitterness that followed after the November presidential election, Shultz’s call for decency and respect for opposing views led many to demand that the country shun the political vitriol of the Trump years.
“Trust is the currency of the kingdom,” Shultz wrote. “When there was confidence in the room, whatever the room: the family room, the school, the locker room, the office, the government room or the military room, good things happened. When the trust it wasn’t in the room, good things weren’t happening. Everything else is details. “
Throughout his life, Shultz was successful in academia, public service, and the corporate United States, and was widely respected by his peers in both political parties.
After the October 1983 bombing of Beirut’s naval barracks that 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 fierce objections from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” or the Galaxies.
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 destiny. 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 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.
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. Shultz was an informal campaign advisor.
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 the war on recreational drugs, defended by Reagan, a failure and raised his eyebrows denouncing as “insane” the U.S. 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 Trump’s possibility in the House. White.
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.
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Longtime AP diplomatic writer Barry Schweid, who died in 2015, contributed to this report.
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History has been corrected to reflect that Shultz was the second longest-serving Secretary of State since World War II.