Ex-U.S. Secretary Schultz Dies At 100
By Stefan J. Bos, Chief International Correspondent Worthy News
(Worthy News) – Former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who spent most of the 1980s trying to end the Cold War and reach Middle East peace, has died. He was 100.
Shultz forged a new era in American-Soviet relations while surviving bitter infighting in then-President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
His death was announced Sunday by the California-based Hoover Institute, a think tank, where he was a distinguished fellow. The Institute did not announce the reason for his death.
Shultz, a professor emeritus at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, had still marked his 100th birthday in December by calling for decency.
In The Washington Post newspaper, he praised the virtues of trust and bipartisanship in politics and other efforts.
Following the tensions following the November presidential election, Shultz wrote: “Trust is the coin of the realms.”
“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,” he added.
Trust was what he needed in historic negotiations throughout the turbulent 1980s. After the October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked to end Lebanon’s brutal civil war in the 1980s.
He spent countless hours of shuttle diplomacy between Mideast capitals trying to secure Israeli forces’ withdrawal.
Commentators say the experience led him to believe that stability in the region could only be assured with a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Although Shultz fell short of his goal to put the Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel on a peace agreement course, he shaped the path for future administrations’ Mideast efforts.
Separately, the U.S. chief diplomat negotiated the first-ever treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s ground-based nuclear arsenals. The breakthrough came 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 added in an interview in 2008, “they’re almost weapons that we wouldn’t use, so I think we would be better off without them.”
Former Secretary of State Henry A. 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.”
Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.
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