Former Secretary of State George Shultz, an influential foreign policy figure during President Ronald Reagan’s administration, died on Saturday at Reagan’s 100th birthday party at his home in Stanford, California, the Hoover Institution said on Sunday. said.
Shultz, a leading Hoover institution, held three key cabinet positions in Republican administrations during his long career as a civil servant. Before spending more than six years as Reagan’s Secretary of State, he served as Labor Secretary, Treasury Secretary, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Richard Nixon. His administrative experience also included a period as a senior staff economist with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Board of Economic Advisers.
As the country’s chief diplomat in the 1980s, Shultz forged a Middle East peace course and sought to improve Cold War relations with the Soviet Union.
On this July 13, 1982, the designated Secretary of State George Shultz, right, speaks to members of the Senate’s foreign relations before the start of the panel’s afternoon session on Capitol Hill in Washington. From left. Senator Joseph Biden, D-Del .; Sen. Charles Percy, R-Ill., Chairman of the panel and senator Edward Zorinsky, D-Neb.
(AP Photo / Ira Schwarz, file)
Shultz negotiated the first treaty ever to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s land-based nuclear arsenals. The 1987 agreement was a historic attempt to reverse the nuclear arms race.
In 1989, Shultz was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civil honor in the country.
He was the oldest surviving former cabinet member of any administration.
The war veteran was born on December 13, 1920 in New York City and raised in New Jersey. He studied economics and public and international affairs at Princeton University and studied in 1942.
He then joined the Marine Corps and rose to captaincy as an artillery officer during World War II.
In 1949 he obtained a Ph.D. in economics at MIT. He taught at MIT and the University of Chicago, where he was dean of the business school.
Shultz was recently a professor emeritus at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
He was married to Helena “Obie” O’Brien, an Army nurse he met during World War II, and they had five children together. Two years after her death, in 1997, he married Charlotte Maillard, San Francisco’s Chief of Protocol.
Shultz is survived by Maillard, his five children, 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
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The cause of death was not provided by the Hoover Institution.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.