Washington Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a titan of American academia, business and diplomacy who spent most of the 1980s improving Cold War relations with the Soviet Union and a course for to bring peace to the Middle East is dead. He was 100.
Schultz died Saturday at his home on the campus of Stanford University, where he was a leading student at the Hoover Institution, a brainstorming and emeritus professor at Stanford’s School of Business.
The Hoover Institution announced Schultz’s death on Sunday. A cause of death was not provided.
Shultz was a lifelong Republican and held three key cabinet positions in IDP administrations during a long career of public service.
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He was Labor Secretary, Treasury Secretary 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 longest-serving Secretary of State since World War II and was the oldest surviving former cabinet member of any administration.
During his lifetime, Shultz succeeded in virtually everything he touched, including academics, education, civil service, and the corporate world, and was widely respected by his peers from both political parties.
In October 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked tirelessly to end Lebanon’s brutal civil war in the 1980s. He spent countless hours spending diplomacy between Mideast capitals trying to secure the withdrawal of Israeli forces there.
The experience led him to believe that stability in the region could only be ensured by a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he embarked on an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful mission to bring the parties to the negotiating table.
Although Shultz did little to put the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel on a path to a peace agreement, he paved the way for the Middle East efforts of future governments by legitimizing the Palestinians as a people with a valid pursuit and a valid interest in determining their future.
As the country’s chief diplomat, Shultz negotiated the very first treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s ground – based nuclear arsenal, despite fierce objections from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev against Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative”.
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The 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Agreement was a historic attempt to reverse the nuclear arms race, a goal he never abandoned in private life.
“Now that we know so much about these weapons and their power,” Shultz said in an interview in 2008, “they are almost weapons we would not use, so I think we would be better off without them.”
Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger reflected in his memoirs on the ‘highly analytical, calm and unselfish Shultz’ and gave Shultz an exceptional compliment in his diary: ‘If I could choose one American to whom I fate of the country would entrust a crisis, it would be George Shultz. ‘
George Pratt Shultz was born on December 13, 1920 in New York City and grew up in Englewood, New Jersey. He studied economics and public and international affairs at Princeton University, graduating in 1942. His affinity with Princeton prompted him to have the school’s mascot, a tiger, tattooed on his back, a fact his wife confirmed decades later to reporters aboard a plane 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 captaincy as an artillery officer during World War II.
He obtained a doctorate. in 1949 in economics at MIT and taught at MIT and the University of Chicago, where he was dean of the business school. His administrative experience includes a period of senior staff economist at President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Board of Economic Advisers and as Nixon’s OMB director.
Shultz was president of the construction and engineering company Bechtel Group from 1975-1982 and taught part-time at Stanford University before joining the Reagan administration in 1982, replacing Alexander Haig, who resigned after frequent clashes with others. members of the administration.
A rare disagreement arose between Reagan and Shultz in 1985 when the president ordered thousands of government officials with access to highly classified information to take a “lie detector” test as a way to fill in leaks. Shultz told reporters: “The moment I am not trusted in this government is the day I leave.” The administration soon withheld the claim.
A year later, Shultz filed a drug test under the government that is considered more reliable.
A more serious disagreement was over the secret arms sales to Iran in 1985 in the hope of securing the release of US hostages held in Lebanon by Hezbollah militants. Although Shultz objected, Reagan went through the deal and millions of dollars from Iran went to the right-wing Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. The ensuing Iran-Contra scandal upset the government to great dismay.
In 1986, testifying to the Foreign Affairs Committee, he lamented that “nothing is ever going to settle in this city. It’s not like running a business or even a university. It’s a boiling debating society in which the debate never stops, in which people never give up, including me, and this is the atmosphere in which you supervise. ″
After Reagan leaves office, Shultz returns to Bechtel, having been the longest-serving Secretary of State since Cordell Hull under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He resigned from Bechtel’s board in 2006 and returned to Stanford and the Hoover Institution.
In 2000, he became an early supporter of the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush, whose father was vice president while Shultz was secretary of state. Schultz was an informal adviser to the campaign.
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Shultz remained an ardent advocate for gun control in his later years, but he maintained an iconoclastic streak and spoke out against several mainstream Republican policy positions. He created some controversy by calling Reagan’s war on recreational medicine a failure and raising eyebrows by calling the long-standing US ban on Cuba ‘insane’.
He was also a prominent proponent of efforts to combat the effects of climate change, warning that ignoring the risks was suicide.
A pragmatist, Shultz, made headlines with Kissinger during the 2016 presidential campaign when he refused to endorse Republican nominee Donald Trump after being quoted as “God help us” when asked about the possibility of Mr. Trump in the White House.
Shultz was married to Helena “Obie” O’Brien, an Army nurse he met in the Pacific during 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 was awarded the highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1989.
Survivors include his wife, five children, 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.