Diplomat sought stronger relations with Soviet Union
WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State George 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 course for peace in the Middle East, died Saturday. He was 100.
Shultz died at his home on the campus of Stanford University, where he was a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution, a think tank, and professor emeritus at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
The Hoover Institution announced Shultz’s death Sunday.
A lifelong Republican, Shultz held three Cabinet positions in GOP administrations during a lengthy career of public service. He was labor secretary, treasury secretary and director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Richard Nixon before spending more than six years as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state.
Condoleezza Rice, also a former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution, praised Shultz as a “great American statesman” and a “true patriot.”
Shultz had largely stayed out of politics since his retirement, but had been an advocate for an increased focus on climate change. He marked his 100th birthday in December by extolling the virtues of trust and bipartisanship in politics and other endeavors in a piece 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 many as an appeal for the country to
shun the political vitriol of the Donald Trump years.
“Trust is the coin of the realm,” Shultz wrote. “When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the military room — good things happened.”
Over his lifetime, Shultz succeeded in the worlds of academia, public service and corporate America, and was widely respected by his peers from both political parties.
After the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked to end Lebanon’s civil war in the 1980s. He spent countless hours of shuttle diplomacy between Mideast capitals.
That led him to believe that stability in the region could only be assured with a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he set about on an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful mission to bring the parties to the negotiating table.
Shultz ultimately shaped the path for future administrations’ Mideast efforts by legitimizing the Palestinians
as people with aspirations and a stake in their future.
As the nation’s chief diplomat, Shultz negotiated the first-ever treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s ground-based nuclear arsenals despite fierce objections from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev 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 he never abandoned in private life. “Now that we know so much about these weapons and their power,” Shultz said in a 2008 interview, “they’re almost weapons that we wouldn’t use, so I think we would be better off without them.”
George Pratt Shultz was born Dec. 13, 1920, in New York City and raised in Englewood, New Jersey. He was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1989.
Survivors include his wife, five children, 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.