■ Ronald Reagan’s longtime Secretary of State George Shultz died at age 100.
Shultz, 100, led Reagan’s bid to improve Cold War relations
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, has died. He was 100.
Shultz died Saturday 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 cause of death was not provided.
A lifelong Republican, Shultz held three major 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.
Shultz was the second-longest serving secretary of state since World War II and had been the oldest surviving former Cabinet member of 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 stayed out of politics since his retirement, but he 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 a piece he wrote for The Washington Post.
Over his lifetime, Shultz succeeded in the worlds of academia, public service and corporate America, and he was widely respected by peers from both political parties.
As the nation’s chief diplomat, Shultz negotiated the first treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s groundbased nuclear arsenals despite fierce objections from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative.”
The 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was a historic attempt to begin to reverse the nuclear arms race.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, reflecting in his memoirs on the “highly analytic, calm and unselfish Shultz,” paid an exceptional compliment : “If I could choose one American to whom I would entrust the nation’s fate in a crisis, it would be George Shultz.”