The go-to man for GOP candidates

PALO ALTO, Calif.At 94, George P. Shultz is still the indispensable adviser.

Republican presidential contenders, to prove their bona fides on economic and foreign policy, or just the skill of governing, have trekked to Shultz’s corner office at the conservative Hoover Institution on the campus of Stanford University, if for no other reason than to be able to say later when asked about their readiness for the White House: I met with Secretary Shultz.

Shultz, a World War II Marine Corps veteran, is one of only two people to have served in four Cabinet positions — director of the Office of Management and Budget, secretary of labor, secretary of treasury and secretary of state. He served under Republican Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and even did a little work for President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat.

With international and domestic challenges looming as the 2016 presidential contest gets underway, it is Shultz’s wealth of experience, particularly his work as a top adviser and confidant to the revered Reagan, both as secretary of state and chairman of the president’s Economic Policy Advisory Board, that has made him a go-to on the training circuit for Republican presidential candidates.

The Washington Examiner interviewed Shultz about what makes a good president and what kind of advice he has given to the GOP 2016 contenders who have called on him. The discussion was edited for length and clarity.

Examiner: What is the most important thing for candidates to know about governing versus campaigning?

Schultz: Very important question. Campaigning is an act of division. Governing is exactly the opposite. Governing is an act of inclusion. You try to bring people on board, find where there’s common ground and talk to people and work with people. It’s an entirely different thing. And if you keep campaigning all the time, you can’t govern. You just can’t. So I think it’s very important to see that distinction.

And also, here’s a big point where I think our federal government has gone way off the rails. We ought to go back to governing the old-fashioned way. The Congress should do budgets from the bottom up. And the president should govern through the people who are nominated by the president and are confirmed by the Senate. What has happened gradually, over time, is more and more White House centric — you get czars. Congress should put a stop to that. The other side of the coin, is you say this to the Senate: This is the way I’m going do it. My key people are going to be people you have confirmed. The other side of that coin is: I want a prompt up-or-down vote on all my nominees. And, I should have the benefit of the doubt because these are the people that I have to work with.

Examiner: Somebody comes to you and says, ‘I’m running for president. What is the No. 1 thing I need to know so I can be good at my job?’ You say…

Shultz: If the person is a senator, I’d say: Why don’t you go back home and run for governor? Then you’ll know something about what it takes to manage something. Senators don’t manage anything. They talk. They talk pretty good, usually. But they’ve never run anything. People often said: Oh, Ronald Reagan, he was a movie actor. He’d been governor of California for eight years, so he understood how you run things, and the difficulties and the compromises and how to get — how to govern. So, I think, governing is — as we were saying earlier — governing is the opposite of campaigning.

Examiner: Senators would counter that they’re steeped in international affairs, whereas governors are unprepared.

Shultz: One of the ways to start is to think of what I call Ronald Reagan’s playbook in the foreign affairs area. No. 1, take positions where you know you can execute. You’re going to have to, you can make something happen. No. 2, be really realistic. No rose-colored glasses. Don’t be afraid to see something good, but don’t kid yourself. No. 3, be strong, not just militarily, but economically. Have a strength of purpose and some confidence that you’re on the right path. No. 4, develop the U.S. agenda. What is our agenda? The minute you start saying, what will the other guy accept, you’re negotiating from his agenda. Don’t do that.

Just think of what is our agenda, what is it that we want and then be ready to engage realistically on that basis. So those are pretty good principles. With the Soviets, human rights was No. 1 on our list. They said, it’s none of your business. We said, well, it is our business; and Helsinki, the accords you signed up, and for quite awhile I never got anywhere. I would give lists and [Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei] Gromyko wouldn’t take them. Then he took them. So, if you don’t start with your agenda you’re lost.

Examiner: Republicans still love to associate themselves with Reagan. What should they take away from his presidency?

Shultz: Well, I think you have to think pretty deeply about the issues, and as I said, develop a strategy. And he had a clear strategy in foreign affairs and it was followed diligently.

Examiner: Was Reagan successful internationally because U.S. adversaries feared Reagan?

Shultz: It’s important that people realize that you mean what you say. I go back to my time in Marine Corps bootcamp, at the start of WWII. Sergeant hands me my rifle, he says, take good care of this rifle, this is your best friend. And remember one thing, never point this rifle at anybody unless you’re willing to pull the trigger. No empty threats. And that lends itself broadly as, do what you say you were going to do. If you did that, people can deal with you. They trust you. You say you’re going to do something and you don’t do it, then why deal with you? Because I can’t trust you. So [presidential adviser] Bryce Harlow, who I knew back in the Eisenhower administration and the next administration, Bryce always used to say, trust is the coin of the realm. You’re dealing with members of Congress, be careful what you promise. And if you promise to do something, do it. Even if you have to really work at it, do it. Because trust is the — you can’t deal with anybody if you can’t trust them.

Examiner: Talk more about how trust is important to having a successful presidency.

Shultz: Reagan always used to say ‘Trust but verify.’ And it drove [Soviet Premier Mikhail] Gorbachev crazy, but if you are willing to be verified, I can trust you. Here’s an example with Reagan. One time [German Chancellor] Helmut Kohl came into the Oval Office and he and President Reagan and I are sitting there with an interpreter and he says, ‘Not long ago President [Francois] Mitterrand in France and I went to a cemetery where French and German soldiers were buried. We had a handshake and the picture went all over. It was a great thing for our countries.’ And President Reagan was about to come to Germany in three or four months or so, however long, but anyway, it was time planned. He said, ‘Would you go to a cemetery where there are Germans and Americans are buried and we would do the same thing?’ So, Reagan agreed.

And the Germans picked a cemetery called Bitburg and somebody went over from the White House and looked at it and seemed to think it was alright. So it was announced. It was winter when it was announced and the press goes over and they brushed the snow off and they find [Nazi] SS are buried there. Elie Wiesel came to the White House and said, ‘Mr. President, your place is not with the SS, your place is with the victims of the SS.’

So we tried to get the Germans to change; there were alternatives. At one point Helmut called, sent us a message saying, if you don’t go to Bitburg my government will fall. My friend Helmut Schmidt came over to see me. He’d been chancellor and he was my close friend and he told me that he had just learned that one of his grandfathers was Jewish. He said, you’ve got to go to Bitburg. He said, you should go to a [concentration] camp first. We’d already figured that out.

It was unrelenting. So, finally we go. The president goes to Bitburg and after that I left. I went to Israel to give the dedication address at…[a] Holocaust museum that they had built. And then I went to London and I stopped by and I see [British Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher. Margaret shakes her head about Bitburg, says, ‘There isn’t any other leader in the free world who would take the beating at home that he took because he was carrying out a promise.’ There is one thing you know about Ronald Reagan, if he gives you his word, that’s it.

Here’s another thing about Ronald Reagan. You remember, early in his presidency, the air traffic controllers went on strike. And again, people came running into him [saying,] Mr. President, Mr. President, this is very complicated. He said, ‘It’s not complicated, it’s simple. They took an oath of office, they violated it, they’re out.’ And all over the world, people [thought], has the man gone crazy? These are the air controllers. What’s going to happen? But he had put, he had a secretary of transportation who had been the chief executive of a large transportation company, so this is a man who knew how to execute things and he understood the problem and he kept the planes flying. So, we’re talking about national security things. All over the world, the message went, hey that guy plays for keeps. He knows how to execute. Execution is a big thing.

Examiner: Ideology aside, what makes an effective president?

Shultz: A key is to have a strategy. Nixon was a strategist…Ronald Reagan was a strategist. He was long-headed and I’ll give you an example. I was chairman of his economic policy advisory panel during the primaries, during the election campaign, and for the first year and a half of his time in office, before I was secretary of state. And, he came into the office and he knew that we couldn’t have a decent economy with the kind of inflation that was going on. And we all knew that, and we all said that.

And there was [Federal Reserve Chairman] Paul Volcker over at the Fed. Paul had been my undersecretary when I was secretary of the treasury so I knew Paul well. And, he was doing what you had to do, namely, discipline the money supply. And people would run into Reagan and say, Mr President, Mr President, we’re going to cause a recession, we’re gonna lose seats in the midterm election. And, Reagan basically — he didn’t say this, but basically he said, if not now, when? If not us, who? And he basically put a political umbrella over Paul. And, I let Paul know that.

But Paul told me, I was talking to him recently, he said, I remember seeing many occasions when reporters dished up a question to Reagan, sort of inviting him to come down on the Fed, and he never did. So what happened? We did have a recession, we did lose seats. But by early ’83, inflation was under control and everybody could see that it was going to stay that way. And the incentive that had been put into the economy kicked in, and the economy as you remember took off like a bird in 1983. But that was a president taking a long-headed deal and saying the country has to get rid of the inflation if we’re going to be healthy. That means we’re going to take a short-term hit for a long-term objective. That’s strategic thinking — and acting on it. And, that takes guts, political guts. And, the ability to stand up to things.

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