George Shultz, a leading policy figure in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, died at age 100 on Saturday, at his home on the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, Calif.
Shultz was a businessman and household-name government figure, who was Secretary of State, Treasury Secretary, Labor Secretary, and who was credited with ending the Cold War.
But he also had a tie to the Alaska economy and building the state.
After decades in government and in academia with The Hoover Institution, Shultz was president of Bechtel Corporation between 1974 and 1982, running the company’s global and domestic construction projects that included the Trans Alaska Pipeline System, also known as TAPS.
The pipeline project saw first pipe laid in 1975 and was completed in 1977, with Bechtel as the management contractor.
Approval for the project came under President Richard Nixon. After the U.S. Senate was tied on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, Vice President Spiro Agnew cast the tie-breaking vote in 1973. Nixon signed the bill.
Shultz had been Labor secretary for Nixon and also was director of the Office of Management and Budget. In 1972 he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury Department, and was influential in shaping the Nixon Administration’s economic policies, including attempts to control runaway inflation with wage and price freezes. He negotiated trade agreements with the Soviet Union in 1973, and the next year joined Bechtel, basing himself in Palo Alto, where he was also a fellow with the Stanford Hoover Institution.
He later joined the Reagan Administration and was Secretary of State in the 1982-1989, helping Reagan bring an end to the Cold War, one of his most storied achievements.
Born Dec. 13, 1920, two years after the end of World War 1, he was 100 years old when he died.
Read more about his biography at Britannica.com or at The Hoover Institution’s tribute page.
The Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall came crashing down with the great assistance of Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher, Pope John Paul and.
…………… Secretary of State George Shultz. What a great line-up of world political leaders. Makes Obama/Biden look like junior high drug dealers.
We stand on the shoulders of giants.. and now we are ruled by people you wouldn’t trust to watch your kids while you went to the movies…who are, themselves, told what to do by foreign powers and wealthy elites.
These are dark times.
Totally agree !!
Tillerson and Pompeo – I would add them to your latter list, Chrissy. I also agree that we need true conservative diplomacy as we saw with George Shultz who was a great American by any measure.
He finally got to go into God’s Glory. If I lived to 100, I may think God forgot about me. Last year, Christian Science Monitor it had a good introductory piece about this man for those who never heard about this man. I was surprised someone like him was still living among us. He was a treasure for America. He makes me and everyone else whether they are Democrat or Republican or Non partisan reveal us for what we are — a Nation of Unread generations and over-opinionated with opinions that have no weight, and we don’t read enough books and we don’t have enough friends challenging what we read and our perceptions so to grow our minds and be a well developed and well rounded thoughtful leaders. His generation of leaders, the Ted Stevens generation, pursued books that particularly challenged their own opinions and the received leaders who countered their own experiences and ideas.
Comments are closed.