George Shultz

George Shultz (born December 13, 1920, New York, New York, U.S.—died February 6, 2021, Stanford, California) was an American government official, economist, and business executive who, as a member of the presidential cabinets of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, significantly shaped U.S. economic and foreign policy in the late 20th century.

Shultz was raised in an affluent family in New Jersey. After graduating from Princeton University in 1942 with a bachelor’s degree in economics, he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served in the Pacific theatre during World War II, eventually attaining the rank of captain. At the end of the war, Shultz enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a doctoral degree in industrial economics in 1949 and stayed on as a faculty member. In 1957 he accepted a position as professor of industrial relations at the University of Chicago and five years later rose to become dean of its Graduate School of Business. While employed in academia, Shultz often arbitrated disputes between corporate management and labour organizations and won respect for his evenhandedness. He also became involved in public service, with key roles on economic task forces and advisory committees under three presidential administrations in the 1950s and ’60s.

After Nixon was elected president in 1968, Shultz, a fellow Republican, was appointed U.S. secretary of labour. Despite a rise in labour conflicts during his tenure, as well as controversy over a plan he oversaw that introduced racial hiring quotas in federal construction projects, Shultz maintained congenial relationships with both business and union leaders. In June 1970 he was named director of the newly created Office of Management and Budget, and in 1972 he was appointed secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury. In those positions, he helped formulate the Nixon administration’s economic policies, including attempts to control rampant inflation through wage and price freezes. He also negotiated a set of trade agreements with the Soviet Union in 1973 before resigning from office a year later to pursue interests outside Washington. For most of the next eight years, Shultz served as president of the Bechtel Corp., a global engineering firm headquartered in San Francisco, while teaching part-time at Stanford University.

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Shultz returned to government in 1982, when President Reagan appointed him to replace Alexander M. Haig, Jr., as secretary of state. In contrast to the volatile Haig, Shultz brought an unassuming manner to the office, and his approach to diplomacy, developed closely with the president, was characterized as pragmatic and incrementalist. As secretary, he promoted peace in the Middle East and in Latin America while at the same time advocating direct action against terrorism, especially after the bomb attacks against U.S. and French armed forces in Beirut in 1983. In addition, Shultz effectively managed delicate diplomatic relationships with China and the Soviet Union, in particular pursuing arms agreements (such as the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987) with the latter that helped ease Cold War tensions.

Upon leaving the White House with Reagan in 1989, Shultz returned to the private sector and to Stanford, where he became a fellow at the Hoover Institution, a campus-based conservative think tank. Also that year he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Among his many publications were The Dynamics of a Labor Market (1951; with Charles A. Myers), Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines (1977; with Kenneth W. Dam), and the memoir Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (1993).