“If I could choose one American to whom I would entrust the nation’s fate in a crisis, it would be George Shultz,” wrote Henry Kissinger of his fellow secretary of state. That encomium from the master of realpolitik was indicative of the respect and esteem that Shultz, who died earlier this month at his home on the Stanford University campus at the age of 100, was held, and not just by ideological compatriots such as Kissinger.
President Biden, who knew him well from his days with the Reagan administration, remarked on his death: “He was a gentleman of honor and ideas, dedicated to public service and respectful debate, even into his 100th year on Earth. That’s why multiple presidents, of both political parties, sought his counsel.” President Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, wrote, “His counsel to me was generous & wise — his love of freedom always evident.” In today’s harshly polarized environment, the respect that Shultz commanded was almost unique.
And well earned. Shultz was best known for his critical role in America’s Cold War triumph during his service as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. He was the longest-serving secretary of state since WWII, and his skillful diplomacy undergirded Reagan’s triumph in the Cold War.
But that was merely the pinnacle of a rich career in politics, academia, and business that would make him one of just two Americans in history to hold four Cabinet positions. He would remain influential in public policy circles past his 100th birthday.
Shultz was born in 1920, the only child of a New York Stock Exchange executive in Englewood, New Jersey. He matriculated at Princeton University before going on to fight as a Marine in WWII, where he saw fierce combat in the Pacific theater. Throughout a distinguished career heaped with countless honors, Shultz was most proud of his service in the Corps and would regularly introduce himself at important events as “George Shultz, United States Marine.”
After the war, he obtained a Ph.D. in industrial economics at MIT and would teach there for almost a decade, taking a year off to work in Washington as senior staff economist on President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers. From there, he moved on to the University of Chicago, where he would become dean of the business school while developing close relationships with the eminent “Chicago School” economists, including Milton Friedman. Those relationships would prove invaluable in his next task: President Richard Nixon’s secretary of labor. Nixon would later appoint Shultz the first director of the Office of Management and Budget and subsequently as secretary of the treasury.
At Treasury, Shultz navigated a particularly volatile period of economic history, negotiating the end of the Bretton Woods system and the gold standard. He dealt with the occurrence and then aftermath of the 1973 Arab oil crisis, which would spur his lifelong interest in energy policy. He also played the principal role in the founding of the G-7, the meeting of the world’s most powerful industrialized countries.
A key test came when Nixon attempted to use the IRS to hound his enemies. Shultz stymied the plan, earning Nixon’s ire and cementing a reputation for refusing to take ethical shortcuts even when those around him did. He resigned office a few months before Nixon did to work for the powerful international construction company the Bechtel Corporation, where he would eventually serve as president.
While in California with Bechtel, Shultz became better acquainted with former California Gov. Reagan and became convinced over a series of meetings that Reagan had both the interest in and aptitude to be a strong president, lending him important support in his 1980 campaign. He would serve as chairman of Reagan’s economic policy board and then succeed Alexander Haig as secretary of state in 1982.
Shultz’s term was highlighted by skillful outreach to Mikhail Gorbachev and the subsequent decline in Cold War tensions. In contrast to some of Reagan’s more hawkish aides, Shultz correctly understood that Gorbachev represented a decisive new turn in Soviet leadership, a man, in the words of fellow cold warrior Margaret Thatcher, “we could do business with.” He developed a particularly close relationship with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze.
Not every venture was successful, of course. The Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon that killed more than 200 was particularly painful for this proud Marine. And the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal, while not implicating him personally (he had been kept in the dark by its perpetrators and denounced it when he was made aware of it), cast a shadow over the final years of his tenure.
There was more on the positive side of the ledger. His skillful handling of the transfer of power to Corazon Aquino in the Philippines earned praise, and Shultz worked diligently to strengthen a then-tense relationship with Japan while completing normalization of our relationship with China.
But it was in managing the U.S.-Soviet relationship that Shultz shined most brightly. “Without Reagan, the Cold War would not have ended. But without Shultz, Reagan would not have ended the Cold War,” Gorbachev would note years later.
In retirement, Shultz moved full-time to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he held court as an eminence grise, received politicians and policymakers from around the world, and served as a master convener for meetings on a dizzying variety of public policy topics.
In his later years at Hoover, he turned, in particular, to two projects: working to free the world of nuclear weapons (a joint project he undertook with Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger, and Bill Perry), bringing a degree of strategic heft and seriousness to the topic by arguing that in a post-Cold War environment, their dangers were no longer worth their deterrence advantages. He noted proudly in 2015 that the number of nuclear weapons was now just one-third of that at the time of Reagan and Gorbachev’s 1986 nuclear summit in Reykjavik. He also increasingly took on national leadership in energy and climate policy, leading an influential energy policy task force at Hoover while promoting carbon pricing (in conjunction with former Secretary of State James Baker) and the importance of energy innovation (in close concert with MIT).
Well into his 90s, he kept an academic and social calendar that would have exhausted men decades younger. His final book, A Hinge of History, appeared just three months before his death. He also remained actively involved in both state and national politics. While Shultz had been an important early backer of George W. Bush, he had a cooler relationship with the Trump administration. Trump’s brash demeanor and penchant for insults were an anathema to the courtly Shultz, and Trump’s tendency toward America First unilateralism was bracing to a man schooled in multilateral Cold War alliance-making. Nonetheless, he quietly offered advice to Pompeo and many other senior figures in the administration who sought it out.
Both publicly and privately, Shultz could be inscrutable. “Sphinx-like” was an apt description often used by journalists. In meetings, he was happy to let others garner attention and talk themselves into corners before decisively steering a conversation in a desired direction with a few words at a key moment. Yet he was a master of social graces and small gestures and was a renowned host with his second wife Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, the longtime chief of protocol for the city of San Francisco and the state of California. Shultz and Mailliard married in 1997, two years after the death of his first wife, Helena “O’Bie” O’Brien, to whom he was happily married for almost 50 years.
For all of his sociability, Shultz could be relentlessly tough when the situation demanded: “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table,” he once observed.
Shultz is survived by his wife Charlotte, five children from his first marriage, 11 grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren. In a note Charlotte circulated to friends and colleagues announcing his death, she related a letter that Shultz received from his father when he was 12 years old: His father prayed that his son would grow up to be “a real man, a pride to his family, and a credit to himself,” inspired to “lofty ideals, noble deeds, and great achievements.”
Rarely has a son so self-evidently fulfilled a father’s wishes.
Jeremy Carl is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. Previously, he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he directed the Shultz-Stephenson Task Force on Energy Policy, co-led by George Shultz.
