Washington – 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 East Medium, died. He was 100 years old.
Schultz died Saturday at his home on the Stanford University campus, where he was a distinguished member of the Hoover Institution, a think tank and professor emeritus at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
The Hoover Institution announced Schultz’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.
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He was secretary of labor, secretary of the treasury and director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) under President Richard Nixon before spending more than six years as Reagan’s secretary of state.
Schultz was the oldest secretary of state since World War II and the oldest former Cabinet member in any administration.
Throughout his life, Shultz has succeeded in almost everything he has touched, including academics, education, government service and the corporate world and has been widely respected by his peers from both political parties.
After October 1983 bombing of the Navy barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked tirelessly to end Lebanon’s brutal civil war in the 1980s. He spent countless hours of space shuttle diplomacy between the capitals of the Middle East trying to ensure 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 nation’s top diplomat, Shultz negotiated the first treaty to downsize the Soviet Union’s ground-based nuclear arsenals, despite fierce objections by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative,” or Star Wars.
Pete Souza, White House via CNP / Getty Images
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 a 2008 interview, “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 on his memoirs of “highly analytical, calm and selfless Shultz”, gave Shultz an exceptional compliment 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 officials 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 year later, Shultz underwent a government-wide drug test considered much more reliable.
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.
In a 1986 testimony to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chamber, he lamented that “nothing calms down in this city. It is not like running a company or even a university. It is a society teeming with debates in which debate never stops, in which they never give in., including me, and this is the atmosphere in which you manage. ″
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. Schultz served as an informal advisor to the campaign.
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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 by calling Reagan’s war on recreational drugs a failure and raised his eyebrows when he denounced the United States 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.