GEORGE SHULTZ DIES AT 100
George Shultz, one of only two people to serve the U.S. in four Cabinet-level posts and a major force in economic and foreign policy in two Republican administrations, died Saturday at his home in Stanford, Calif. He was 100.
The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Mr. Shultz was long affiliated after stepping down as secretary of state in 1989, announced his death but did not provide additional details.
Mr. Shultz’s prodigious inside knowledge of the U.S. government was rivaled by few figures in recent memory, and his soft-spoken, cerebral manner obscured his strong conservative views about the wisdom of keeping spending under control, limiting regulation and vigorously confronting terrorists.
He was famously a pragmatist on some of the consequential issues he faced while in power. As President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, Mr. Shultz played a critical role in the dramatic easing of tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union that took place in the late 1980s.
Unlike some of his colleagues in the administration, Mr. Shultz thought that Mikhail Gorbachev represented a departure from previous Soviet leaders and pressed Reagan, against bureaucratic and political obstacles, to pursue a more constructive relationship with the United States’ longtime Cold War adversary.
As President Richard Nixon’s top economic adviser in the preceding decade, Mr. Shultz helped implement wage and price controls, even though he opposed the policy in private, and he was involved in the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement that had governed currency fluctuations since the end of World War II.
In two decades of government service, Mr. Shultz acquired a reputation for good judgment and integrity, advising Nixon to tell all about his role in the Watergate scandal and confronting Reagan over his aides’ unwillingness to be truthful about the events known as the IranContra affair. But some of his colleagues thought he chose not to know the details of the illegal arms sales to Tehran and using the proceeds to support anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua, in part to protect his own reputation.
At the Hoover Institution, Mr. Shultz played a behindthe-scenes role in national Republican politics. In April 1998, he arranged for a number of conservative intellectuals, including then-Stanford provost Condoleezza Rice, to meet with Texas Gov. George W. Bush as he prepared to run for the White House. Mr. Shultz was also a prominent supporter of and adviser to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
George Pratt Shultz was born in New York City on Dec. 13, 1920. An only child, he was raised in Englewood, N.J., and attended the private Loomis School in Windsor, Conn. His father, Birl, was dean of the Educational Institute of the New York Stock Exchange, a training school for employees of the exchange.
He graduated from Princeton University in 1942 with a bachelor’s degree in economics and played on the varsity basketball and football teams. After service in the Marine Corps in the Pacific during World War II, he received a doctorate in industrial economics in 1949 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (He reportedly had a tattoo of a tiger, the Princeton mascot, on his bottom, although he refused to confirm it.)
In 1946, he married Helena O’Brien, and they had three daughters and two sons. In 1997, two years after the death of his first wife, he married Charlotte Mailliard Swig, the longtime chief of protocol for San Francisco. In addition to his wife, survivors include five children; 11 grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
Mr. Shultz specialized initially in issues of labor relations and employment. In 1955, he got the first of his many government jobs, working for President Dwight Eisenhower as a senior staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers.
In 1989, Reagan awarded Mr. Shultz the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.