The steady diplomat who helped end the Cold War
George Shultz 1920–2021
George Shultz built one of the deepest Beltway résumés of the late 20th century. He served three U.S. presidents and held four Cabinet posts, as labor secretary, treasury secretary, and budget director under Richard Nixon and as secretary of state under Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989. It was in the latter job that he made his biggest mark. With Cold War tensions running dangerously high, the unflappable consensus builder opened diplomatic channels to the Soviet Union and encouraged Reagan to engage with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Opposed by administration hard-liners, Shultz helped bring about the 1986 Reykjavik summit between the two leaders and the following year’s Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first-ever pact to reduce nuclear arsenals. Ten months after Shultz left office in January 1989, the Berlin Wall came down; in December 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed. Shultz attributed his diplomatic successes to a simple concept. “Trust is the coin of the realm,” he said. “Everything else is details.”
“Born into a prosperous New York family,” Shultz attended boarding school in Connecticut and then studied economics at Princeton, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). After graduating in 1942, he joined the Marines and saw combat as an artillery officer in the Pacific during World War II. Leaving the corps as a captain, he earned a Ph.D. in industrial economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and from 1952 to 1968 “developed an impressive record as an industrial relations arbitrator.” He also served as a staff economist on President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors and took professorships at MIT and the University of Chicago, becoming dean of the latter’s business school in 1962. Six years later, Nixon appointed him secretary of labor.
Shultz was soon named director of the Office of Management and Budget, becoming “the president’s right-hand man on economic matters,” said The Washington Post. He then served as treasury secretary and “refused to allow the IRS to investigate Nixon’s political enemies.” That angered Nixon, who called Shultz a “candy-ass.” But Shultz “emerged unscathed from the Watergate scandal,” resigning to head the engineering giant Bechtel. He remained in the job until he became Reagan’s secretary of state in 1982. He arrived at a perilous moment, said The New York Times. “The Middle East was exploding, the U.S. was underwriting covert warfare in Central America, and relations with the Soviet Union were at rock bottom.” In addition to improving relations with Moscow, Shultz worked “to forge peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians, setting the stage for later efforts such as the Oslo process,” said Foreign Policy. He was unsullied by the Iran-Contra affair—in which the profits from secret arms sales to Iran were channeled to Nicaraguan rebels—that engulfed the Reagan administration, denouncing the dealings when they emerged in 1986.
After Reagan left office, Shultz returned to Bechtel, retiring in 2006. He “remained active both in academia and politics,” said the Los Angeles Times, but called his time in government the highlight of his career. “I can look back on things I was involved in that made a difference,” he said in 2015. “Really, that is what life is about—you are trying to make a difference.”