WASHINGTON (AP) – Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a titan of American academia, business and diplomacy, who spent most of the 1980s trying to improve Cold War relations with the Soviet Union and a course for peace in the Middle East has passed away. He was 100.
Shultz died Saturday at his home on the campus of Stanford University, where he was a prominent fellow at the Hoover Institution, a brainstorming and emeritus professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.
The Hoover Institution announced Sunday’s death. 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.
He was Labor Secretary, Treasury Secretary and Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Richard M. Nixon before spending more than six years as President Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State.
Shultz has been the next Secretary of State since World War I I was and was the oldest surviving former cabinet member of any administration.
Condoleezza Rice, also a former foreign minister 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 has remained largely out of politics since his retirement, but has been a proponent of a greater focus on climate change. He marked his 100th birthday in December by expressing the virtues of trust and duality in politics and other endeavors in a piece he wrote for The Washington Post.
Shultz’s call for decency and respect for opposing views came amid the disaster that followed the presidential election in November.
“Trust is the coin of the kingdom,” Shultz wrote. ‘When there was trust in the room, whatever it was – the family room, the school room, the dressing room, the office room, the government room or the military room – good things happened. When trust was not in the room, good things did not happen. All the others are details. ”
During his lifetime, Shultz excelled in the world of academia, public service, and the American business world, and was widely respected by his peers from both political parties.
After the bombing of the Beirut marine barracks in October 1983 in which 241 soldiers were killed, 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 Soviet Union’s ground – based nuclear arsenals, despite Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s vehement objections to Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” or Star Wars.
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 “extremely 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 between Reagan and Shultz took place in 1985 when the president ordered thousands of government officials with access to highly classified information to conduct a ‘lie detector test’ 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 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.
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. Shultz was an informal adviser to the campaign.
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 saying, “God help us” when asked about Trump’s possibility 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.
___
Longtime diplomatic writer Barry Schweid, who passed away in 2015, contributed to this report.
___
The story has been corrected to reflect that Shultz has been the next foreign minister since World War II.