At first glance, it’s tempting to see former U.S. President Ronald Reagan as the big ideas president. He drew clear moral lines between democracy and authoritarian communism, prompting the downfall of the Soviet Union, while his successor, George H.W. Bush, was a manager—hands-on and detail-oriented as he oversaw the transition from the bipolar world of the Cold War to the unipolar, American-dominated 1990s.
The career of George Shultz, Reagan’s secretary of state for most of his presidency starting in 1982, is a counterpoint to that narrative. Shultz pushed Reagan to a more open dialogue with the Soviets and helped ensure that the two superpowers avoided armed conflict. Shultz, for his part, was happy to credit his boss, and he wrote in his 1993 memoir that “Ronald Reagan knew far more about the matters of salient importance than most people—perhaps especially some of his immediate staff—give him credit for or appreciated. … He believed in being strong enough to defend one’s interests, but he viewed that strength as a means, not an end in itself.”
As capably captured by Philip Taubman in his official biography of the 60th secretary of state, In the Nation’s Service, Shultz had a front-row view of both the Reagan administration and the end of the Cold War. Indeed, he was an active player in it, instrumental in directing Reagan’s more cooperative approach to the Soviet Union and helped along by a willing partner in Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
In December 1988, as Reagan prepared to hand power over to George H.W. Bush, Gorbachev said over lunch with Reagan, Bush, and George W. Bush that “there’s a revolution taking place in my country.” Earlier that day, speaking to the United Nations, he had thanked the Reagan administration for its cooperation in bringing about an irreversible change: “We acknowledge and value the contribution of President Ronald Reagan and the members of his administration, above all George Shultz.” The cooling down in U.S.-Soviet relations—and the coming end of the Soviet Union—was the culmination of years of hard diplomatic work on the part of Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Shultz. This work is often overlooked by both friends and foes of Reagan and Bush.
The struggle within the Reagan administration on how to treat the Soviet Union was between Nancy Reagan, deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, and Shultz on one hand, and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, CIA Director William Casey, and national security advisor William Clark on the other. As Taubman skillfully demonstrates, members of the former group—favoring a more cooperative approach to dealing with the Soviet Union—struggled to make their voices heard over the hawkish views on the Soviet Union held by the latter. Nancy Reagan, Taubman writes, worked to build up the personal bond between Shultz and her husband. In early 1983, the first lady arranged for Shultz and his wife to have a private dinner at the White House with her and her husband. “The melding of minds was precisely the outcome that Nancy Reagan wanted,” Taubman writes. “The idea of putting the Reagans and Shultzes together in a cozy setting squared perfectly with Nancy Reagan and Mike Deaver’s growing sense that the bristling relations between Washington and Moscow, including deadlocked arms control talks, threatened to undermine the president’s record and his legacy.”
However, the relationship between Shultz and Ronald Reagan still needed time to build into the one that helped push the administration towards a more conciliatory approach to the Soviet Union. Shultz threatened to resign a number of times when he was bypassed during the policymaking process. Reagan always went out of his way to make sure Shultz stayed on, recognizing that his willingness to engage with the Soviets on issues of mutual interest was the job of the secretary of state. Despite opposition within the Reagan administration, Shultz was able to open the door to the in-person meetings between Reagan and Gorbachev in Geneva; Reykjavik, Iceland; Washington; Moscow; and lastly, in New York, just before Reagan left office.
Yet to characterize Shultz as a dove compared to hawks such as Weinberger and Casey is also a misnomer. After the October 1983 attacks on the U.S. Marines in Beirut by Iranian-backed Shiite militants, Shultz favored an aggressive military response. He told a congressional briefing that “if we as Americans decide we do not want the role and influence of a great power, then I shudder to think what kind of world of anarchy and danger our children will inherit.” But Shultz ultimately lost out to the view of Weinberger, and the United States deferred to France, which conducted airstrikes against a training camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. The United States withdrew from Lebanon in February 1984.
What makes Shultz’s success as secretary of state especially impressive is that his prior government experience, primarily in the Nixon administration, was almost exclusively in the realm of domestic policy. He had no experience of note in foreign policy, though he did work in international business as president of Bechtel, a global family-owned construction business, between the Nixon and Reagan administrations. When Shultz returned to government in July 1982 as Reagan’s secretary of state after the departure of Alexander Haig, he was met with skepticism by pro-Israel lawmakers who feared his business connections in the Arab world, where he worked extensively with Bechtel, had biased him against Israel. In fact, Shultz was quite sympathetic to Israel and often referenced the death of a graduate student he knew when he taught at the University of Chicago, Joseph Levy, who was killed in the 1967 Six-Day War. In an interview with Taubman for the book, Shultz asked about Levy’s willingness to fight for Israel: “What kind of a country is this that can command the loyalty of such talent? There’s got to be something special there.”
But while Shultz was mostly a blank slate in terms of foreign policy, his temperament was to talk—to the Soviet Union and others. (Not everyone in the administration thought this way, and Clark, the national security advisor, was upset when Shultz set up a meeting between Reagan and Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin in 1983.) In the Nixon administration, Shultz had worked on school integration in the South, and he applied the same principle under Reagan. “As long as people are arguing about principle, you can’t get anywhere,” he told Taubman of his time working on integration in an interview for the book. “If you can translate it into problems, people are pretty good at solving problems.”
Shultz dealt with many issues that will be familiar to Biden administration officials and European leaders today. On Aug. 30, 1986, the Soviet government arrested Nicholas Daniloff of U.S. News and World Report. The Russian government is currently holding the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich for a similar charge of espionage. “The incident quickly escalated into a nasty crisis in Soviet-American relations,” Taubman writes, “with Shultz playing a leading role as he tried to broker a resolution.” Daniloff and Gennadi Zakharov, a Soviet diplomat arrested in New York a week before Daniloff was seized, were ultimately released in a prisoner swap.
Taubman spent over a decade working on this biography, and he was given access to Shultz’s personal archives and interviewed Shultz extensively before his death in 2021. It is clear that Taubman wanted to tell the story of Shultz’s success in navigating a divided administration, ultimately gaining the trust of Reagan and translating that trust into progress in U.S.-Soviet relations as the Soviet Union came to an end. That it did so peacefully is a testament to Shultz’s work. But it does not mean that Shultz did not have serious lapses in judgement throughout his career.
Taubman does not avoid these more awkward, and less flattering, episodes. The most obvious is Shultz’s involvement, in his twilight years, with Theranos Inc. and its disgraced founder Elizabeth Holmes. Shultz was enamored with Holmes’s work and perhaps with Holmes herself, and he was a key component in building the company into a PR behemoth. Taubman writes that Shultz “lavished attention” on Holmes, helping her to assemble a noteworthy board of directors and raise money from Rupert Murdoch and other investors.
Shultz’s grandson, Tyler, worked for the company—not coincidentally, of course, but through his grandfather’s connection—and realized that something was amiss. The grandson confronted his grandfather with his concerns, but the former secretary of state was undeterred. Ultimately, the company came crashing down because its technology—sold as a one-stop shop blood test, with which hundreds of diseases could be tested by the prick of a finger—was not functional.
Most former government officials use their name and title to make a living after their government career has ended. Shultz was not alone in this, but he did have the misfortune of picking not just a losing company, but a fraudulent one, as his vehicle. Shultz’s name gave Theranos credibility, and Elizabeth Holmes got one thing right: in the short term, it was more advantageous to have someone like Shultz involved than it was to have a functioning product that no one knew about.
Shultz’s role in the Nixon administration has also been scrutinized. Like many Trump administration officials who stayed on even after the problems within the administration became clear, Shultz “believed he could help keep the government from unraveling as Nixon’s abuses of power were exposed”—even as “the prospects of impeachment grew and Nixon’s drinking and psychological instability became ever more evident.” But it is likely that ambition also played a role in Shultz staying on until just three months before Nixon’s resignation in August 1974. Then-Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns wrote in his diary at the time, “Shultz is tired, but I think he likes being Secretary too much to give it up … Shultz has no use for the President, morally. He does not miss many opportunities to tell me this.”
Shultz was not a flawless character, but he does deserve a large share of the credit for guiding the Cold War to a peaceful end, and Taubman has done a valuable service to our understanding of that era. Shultz’s mistakes and misjudgments, whether in government or later with Theranos, do not undo his successes. His last years and his work with Theranos, however, do serve as a reminder that spectacular achievements in a particular time of life do not guarantee that all future endeavors will have the same results.
However, Shultz’s time with the Reagan administration should serve as a model for administrations today. Contrary to the view often presented of him, Reagan was just as willing to negotiate with the Soviet Union as he was to fuel an arms race to break the Soviet economy. George Shultz was his right hand in that endeavor. A look back at his career raises the question: Is there anyone like Shultz in today’s Republican Party, and will a future Republican president allow them to be as bold of a diplomat as Shultz was?
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