George P. Shultz

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Image:Shultz.jpg George Pratt Shultz (born December 13, 1920) served as the United States Secretary of Labor from 1969 to 1970, as the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury from 1972 to 1974, and as the U.S. Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989.

Shultz is a member of the Hoover Institution, American Enterprise Institute, the New Atlantic Initiative, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and the Committee on the Present Danger. He also serves on the board of directors for the Bechtel Corporation, Gilead Sciences, and Charles Schwab Corporation.

Shultz received a B.A. degree in economics from Princeton University in 1942. That same year he joined the U.S. Marine Corps and served until 1945, attaining the rank of Captain. In 1949, Shultz earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology degree in industrial economics.

He taught in both the MIT Department of Economics and the MIT Sloan School of Management from 1948 to 1957, with a leave of absence in 1955 to serve on President Dwight Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers as a senior staff economist.

In 1957, Shultz joined the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business as professor of industrial relations. Later, he was named dean in 1962. Image:George P Shultz sig.jpg Shultz served as President Richard Nixon's secretary of labor from 1969 to 1970, after which he was director of the Office of Management and Budget. He then became secretary of the Treasury from May 1972 to May 1974. It was during this period that Schultz, along with Paul Volcker and Arthur Burns, supported the decision of the Nixon administration to end the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system.[1]

In 1974, he left government service to become president and director of Bechtel Group. On July 16, 1982, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to serve as the sixtieth U.S. secretary of state. A dove on foreign policy, he frequently clashed with the more hawkish members of the Reagan administration. In particular, he was well known for outspoken opposition to the "arms for hostages" scandal that would eventually become the Iran Contra situation. Shultz was a leading proponent of a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. In a 1983 testimony before congress he said "we must cut the Nicaraguan cancer out." He was also opposed to any negotiation with the government of Daniel Ortega, "Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table."

George Shultz left office on January 20, 1989 but continues to be a strategist for the Republican Party. He was an advisor for the George W. Bush 2000 Campaign, and senior member of the so-called "Vulcans," a group of policy mentors for Bush which also included among its members Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice. His most senior advisor and confidant is former ambassador Charles Hill, who holds dual positions at the Hoover Institution and Yale University.

After leaving public office in 1989, Shultz surprised many of his fellow conservatives by becoming the first prominent Republican to call for the legalization of recreational drugs. He went on to add his signature to an advertisement, published in the New York Times on June 8, 1998, entitled "We believe the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself."

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In August of 2003, Schultz was named co-chair (along with Warren Buffett) of California's Economic Recovery Council, an advisory group to the campaign of California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

On January 5 2006, he participated in a meeting at the White House of former Secretaries of Defense and State to discuss United States foreign policy with Bush administration officals.

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