Reagan’s longtime secretary of state George P. Shultz dies at 100

A lifelong Republican, Shultz held three major Cabinet positions in GOP administrations during a lengthy career of public service.

By World Israel News Staff and 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 forging a course for peace in the Middle East, has died. He was 100.

Schultz died Saturday at his home on the campus of Stanford University, where he was a distinguished fellow at 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. A cause of death was not provided.

A lifelong Republican, Shultz held three major Cabinet positions in GOP administrations during a lengthy 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.

Supporters of Israel expected Shultz to be hostile to Israel when he became secretary of state. They were pleasantly surprised. At the 1987 conference of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) he slammed the idea of the Palestine Liberation Organization being qualified to participate in an international peace conference.

“Remember how afraid we were of Shultz when he first came?” an AIPAC delegate said at the time. “And now look at him!”

Schultz was the longest serving secretary of state since World War II and had been the oldest surviving former Cabinet member of any administration.’

Moshe Arens, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., writing in Haaretz in 2016 of a recent speech Shultz made while visiting Israel, said:

“In his speech he recalled the first contact he had had with Israel – his Israeli graduate student in Economics at the University of Chicago, Yossi Levy. Levy, a brilliant student, surprised him when on the eve of the Six-Day War informed him that he would have to interrupt his studies and return to Israel to join his army unit. A week later he learned that Levy had fallen in battle.

“‘I asked myself,” Shultz said, ‘what kind of a country is this that commands such loyalty from such talented people, and what kind of a region is this that has conflicts that take the lives of such talented people.'”

Arens also wrote that Shultz “took up the cause of Soviet Jewry. He knew the names of the refuseniks denied the right to go to Israel, many of them languishing in Soviet prisons. In his negotiations with Soviet leaders attempting to wind down the Cold War, he would always bring up their names pleading for their release.”

Opposed Iran deal

Shultz opposed the 2015 Iran deal. In an April 2015 Wall Street Journal op-ed co-written with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Shultz said:

“Mixing shrewd diplomacy with open defiance of U.N. resolutions, Iran has gradually turned the negotiation on its head. Iran’s centrifuges have multiplied from about 100 at the beginning of the negotiation to almost 20,000 today. The threat of war now constrains the West more than Iran. While Iran treated the mere fact of its willingness to negotiate as a concession, the West has felt compelled to break every deadlock with a new proposal. In the process, the Iranian program has reached a point officially described as being within two to three months of building a nuclear weapon. Under the proposed agreement, for 10 years Iran will never be further than one year from a nuclear weapon and, after a decade, will be significantly closer.”

Shultz marked his 100th birthday in December by extolling the virtues of trust and bipartisanship in politics and other endeavors in a piece he wrote for The Washington Post.

“Trust is the coin of the realm,” Shultz wrote. “When trust was in the room, whatever room that was — the family room, the schoolroom, the locker 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. Everything else is details.”

Over his lifetime, Shultz succeeded in the worlds of academia, public service and corporate America, and was widely respected by his peers from both political parties.

After the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked tirelessly to end Lebanon’s brutal civil war in the 1980s.

As the nation’s chief diplomat, Shultz negotiated the first-ever treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s ground-based nuclear arsenals despite fierce objections from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” or Star Wars.

The 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was a historic attempt to begin 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’re almost weapons that we wouldn’t use, so I think we would be better off without them.”

Kissinger, reflecting in his memoirs on the “highly analytic, calm and unselfish Shultz,” paid Shultz an exceptional compliment in his diary: “If I could choose one American to whom I would entrust the nation’s fate in a crisis, it would be George Shultz.”

George Pratt Shultz was born Dec. 13, 1920, in New York City and raised in Englewood, New Jersey. He studied economics and public and international affairs at Princeton University, graduating in 1942. His affinity for Princeton prompted him to have the school’s mascot, a tiger, tattooed on his posterior, a fact confirmed to reporters decades later by his wife 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 the rank of captain as an artillery officer during World War II.

Start in economics

He earned a Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1949 and taught at MIT and at the University of Chicago, where he was dean of the business school. His administration experience included a stint as a senior staff economist with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Council 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 other members of the administration.

In 1986 testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he lamented that “nothing ever gets settled in this town. It’s not like running a company or even a university. It’s a seething debating society in which the debate never stops, in which people never give up, including me, and that’s the atmosphere in which you administer.″

After Reagan left office, 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 an early supporter of the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush, whose father had been vice president while Shultz was secretary of state. Schultz served as an informal adviser to the campaign.

Shultz remained an ardent arms control advocate in his later years but retained an iconoclastic streak, speaking out against several mainstream Republican policy positions. He created some controversy by calling the war on recreational drugs, championed by Reagan, a failure and raised eyebrows by decrying the longstanding U.S. embargo on Cuba as “insane.”

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, San Francisco’s protocol chief, in 1997.

Shultz was awarded the nation’s 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.

Ronald ReaganSecretary of State