WASHINGTON (AP) – Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a titan of American academy, business and diplomacy who spent most of the 1980s trying to improve Cold War relations with the Soviet Union and plotting a course for peace in the Middle East, died. He was 100 years old.
Shultz died on Saturday at his home on the Stanford University campus, where he was an illustrious member of the Hoover Institution, a think tank and professor emeritus at the Stanford School of Management.
The Hoover Institution announced Shultz’s death on Sunday. The cause of death was not provided.
A lifelong Republican, Shultz held three important cabinet posts in the Republican Party administrations during a long career in public service.
He was secretary of labor, secretary of the treasury and director of the Office of Administration and Budget for President Richard M. Nixon before spending more than six years as Secretary of State for President Ronald Reagan.
Shultz was the second oldest secretary of state since World War I I and I had been the oldest surviving 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 remained largely out of politics since his retirement, but he advocated a greater focus on climate change. He celebrated his 100th birthday in December, extolling the virtues of trust and bipartisanship in politics and other endeavors in an article he wrote for The Washington Post.
Coming amid the harshness that followed the November presidential election, Shultz’s plea for decency and respect for opposing views reached many as a call for the country to avoid the political vitriol of the Trump years.
“Trust is the currency of the kingdom,” wrote Shultz. “When trust was in the room, whatever it was – the family room, the classroom, the locker room, the office room, the government room or the army room – good things happened. When trust was not there, good things did not happen. Everything else is details. “
Throughout his life, Shultz has been successful in the academic world, in public service and in corporate America, and has been widely respected by his colleagues from both political parties.
After the October 1983 bombing of the Beirut marine barracks that killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked tirelessly to end the brutal civil war in Lebanon in the 1980s. He spent countless hours of space shuttle diplomacy between the capitals from the Middle East trying to guarantee the withdrawal of Israeli forces from there.
The experience led him to believe that stability in the region could only be assured with an agreement for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he started an ambitious, but unsuccessful, mission to bring the parties to the negotiating table.
Although Shultz fell short of his goal of putting the Organization for the Liberation of Palestine and Israel on a path to a peace settlement, he did pave the way for the efforts of future Middle Eastern administrations by legitimizing Palestinians as a people with aspirations and a valid interest in determining their future.
As the country’s top diplomat, Shultz negotiated the first treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s ground-based nuclear arsenals, despite fierce objections by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Reagan’s or Star Wars’ Strategic Defense Initiative.
The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was a historic attempt to start reversing the nuclear arms race, a goal he never abandoned in private life.
“Now that we know so much about these weapons and their power,” said Shultz in an interview in 2008, “they are almost weapons that we would not use, so I think we would be better off without them.”
Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, reflecting in his memoirs on “Shultz highly analytical, calm and altruistic”, made an exceptional compliment to Shultz in his diary: “If I could choose an American to whom I would trust the fate of nation in a crisis, it would be George Shultz. ”
George Pratt Shultz was born on December 13, 1920 in New York City and was raised in Englewood, New Jersey. He studied economics and public and international relations at Princeton University, graduating in 1942. His affinity for Princeton led him to tattoo the school’s mascot, a tiger, on the back, a fact confirmed to reporters decades later by his wife on board. a plane that was taking them to China.
At Shultz’s 90th birthday party, his successor as secretary of state, James Baker, joked that he would do anything for Shultz “except kiss the tiger”. After Princeton, Shultz joined the Marine Corps and rose to the rank of captain as an artillery officer during World War II.
He earned a Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1949 and taught at MIT and the University of Chicago, where he was dean of the business school. His management experience included a stint as a senior economist on the staff of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers and as director of Nixon’s OMB.
Shultz was president of the 1975-1982 construction and engineering company Bechtel Group and taught part-time at Stanford University before joining the Reagan government in 1982, replacing Alexander Haig, who resigned after frequent clashes with other members of the government.
A rare public disagreement between Reagan and Shultz occurred in 1985, when the president ordered thousands of government employees with access to highly confidential information to do a “lie detector test” as a way to plug information leaks. Shultz told reporters, “The minute in this government that I am not to be trusted is the day I leave.” The government soon gave up on the demand.
A more serious disagreement was over secret arms sales to Iran in 1985, hoping to secure the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by Hezbollah militants. Although Shultz objected, Reagan went ahead with the deal and millions of Iranian dollars went to the right-wing Contra guerrilla in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contras scandal that followed flooded the administration, much to Shultz’s dismay.
After Reagan stepped down, Shultz returned to Bechtel, having been the longest serving secretary of state since Cordell Hull under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He retired from Bechtel’s board in 2006 and returned to Stanford and the Hoover Institution.
In 2000, he became one of the first to support the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush, whose father had been vice president while Shultz was secretary of state. Shultz served as an informal advisor to the campaign.
Shultz remained an ardent supporter of gun control in his later years, but maintained an iconoclastic tendency, speaking out against various Republican political positions. He created some controversy when he called the war on recreational drugs, advocated by Reagan, a failure and raised his eyebrows when he described the former US embargo on Cuba as “insane”.
He was also a prominent supporter of efforts to combat the effects of climate change, warning that ignoring the risks was suicide.
A pragmatist, Shultz, along with Kissinger, made headlines during the 2016 presidential campaign when he refused to endorse Republican candidate Donald Trump after being quoted as saying “God help us” when asked about Trump’s possibility at the White House.
Shultz was married to Helena “Obie” O’Brien, an Army nurse he met in the Pacific in World War II, and they had five children. After her death in 1995, he married Charlotte Maillard, head of the San Francisco protocol, in 1997.
Shultz received the country’s highest civilian tribute, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1989.
Survivors include his wife, five children, 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
Preparations for the funeral were not announced immediately.
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Longtime AP diplomatic writer Barry Schweid, who died in 2015, contributed to this report.
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The story was corrected to reflect that Shultz was the second oldest secretary of state since World War II.