George shultz children

(b. 13 December 1920 in New York City), politician and statesman who served as U.S. Secretary of Labor (1969–1970), first director of the Office of Management and Budget (1970–1972), Secretary of the Treasury (May 1972–May 1974), and Secretary of State (July 1982–January 1989).

Shultz is the only child of Birl E. Shultz, founder and director of the New York Stock Exchange Institute, and Margaret Lennox (Pratt) Shultz. He grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, and attended a private school in Windsor, Connecticut. Shultz received his bachelor degree cum laude in economics from Princeton University in 1942. Later that year Shultz enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served as an artillery officer in the Pacific theater through 1945, earning the rank of captain. On 16 February 1946 he married Helena Marie O'Brien, with whom he had five children. After his service, he earned his Ph.D. in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1949.

Shultz taught economics at MIT until the then little known University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (GSB) hired him in 1957 as a professor of industrial relations. Shultz served in the first of his government posts when he was appointed as a senior staff economist to President Dwight Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisors in 1957. In 1962 Shultz was appointed dean of the GSB and served until 1968. While at Chicago, his fellow economist Milton Friedman's monetarism theories greatly influenced Shultz. Later, Friedman's theories and Shultz's application of them were crucial to the economic policies of President Richard M. Nixon.

Shultz was involved as both a writer and editor for several books and articles on industrial and labor relations during his tenure at Chicago, including Strategies for the Displaced Worker: Confronting Economic Change (1966), co-written with Arnold R. Weber. The material for the 1961 book Management Organization and the Computer, edited with T. A. Whisler, came from the proceedings of a 1959 seminar sponsored by GSB and the McKinsey Foundation. Shultz described this work as a "wake-up call" on the coming paradigm shift in management practices that technology would cause. "But no one paid any attention," recalled Shultz. Also, Guidelines, Informal Controls, and the Market Place: Policy Choices in a Full Employment Economy (1966), edited with Robert Z. Aliber, detailed a GSB conference in response to the growing trend of the executive branch to influence labor and industry by offering wage-price guidelines. Such guidelines and federally ordered "freezes" were Nixon's prescription for containing unemployment and inflation.

One of Shultz's personal accomplishments at GSB was the integration of the M.B.A. program. As dean, he worried about the absence of minority representation. Shultz visited many of the major African-American universities to find out why none of their students applied to GSB. "I was told that the school was too expensive," he later said, "and none of the candidates believed they'd be hired into management positions after graduation." Shultz then recruited several major corporations to underwrite fellowships that guaranteed summer jobs between the M.B.A.'s first and second years. "This was something of a breakthrough," said Shultz.

Shultz continued his personal research on labor market problems, specifically the effect of strikes on major industries. The period from 1963 to 1973 saw a marked rise in labor contract rejections, and unauthorized "wildcat" strikes reached a post–World War II high. Industry tried to contain wages, and union leaders struggled to overcome member apathy and the growth of racial and feminist activism within their ranks. The John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations practiced an interventionist policy by invoking the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act and declaring a strike a "national emergency" to compel the parties to the negotiating table. (The Taft-Hartley Act outlawed a "closed shop," where all employees must be union members; allowed the president to delay strikes by ordering a "cooling off" period; and restrained labors' political and economic power.) Shultz, however, believed that labor and management differences were best resolved when left alone. Political reality tested Shultz's academic theories once he was inside the Nixon White House.

Shultz garnered his secretary of labor post on 11 December 1968 by successfully heading up a Republican task force to develop economic proposals and recommendations for Nixon to implement if elected president. If Nixon's cabinet was colorless, then, according to Newsweek magazine, Shultz was "the grayest of the gray." Soft-spoken, physically stiff, and yet with Marine Corps discipline, Shultz was Nixon's choice for the difficult tasks, such as the Job Corp reorganization of 1969 and the settling of the postal workers' strike of 1970. Shultz had the respect of all for his principles, flexibility, and intelligence. Some even called him an "intellectual conglomerate."

As labor secretary, Shultz resolved the inherited 1968 international longshoreman strike. The Labor Department's eighty-day Taft-Hartley injunction, issued under Johnson, was about to expire. The national press corps asked Shultz, "Now, what are you going to do, Professor?" Nixon accepted Shultz's noninterventionist recommendation, and the parties soon settled. As he had at GSB, Shultz continued to work on racial equality. He effectively established goals for minority employment at federally subsidized construction sites, a program called the Philadelphia Plan. Moreover, he quietly ended the racially sensitive Charleston, South Carolina, hospital strike. Later Nixon appointed Shultz to chair the Cabinet Committee on School Desegregation, to ensure that school districts in the Deep South complied with federal regulations. Little did Shultz realize that Nixon's economic policy had a political objective: building a coalition of conservative white southerners and northern blue-collar workers by appealing to racial and cultural fears. Nixon saw the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) president George Meany and his union as a crucial ally in this plan. Shultz was Nixon's unofficial ambassador to the AFL-CIO.

From his post at the Labor Department, Shultz was Nixon's most trusted economic adviser. When Nixon created the Office of Management and Budget, he named Shultz its first director in the hope that he might run the economy from there. However, Shultz's Friedmanesque gradualist monetary policies exacted a political price as the economy slowed. Ever the team player, Shultz served the Nixon administration even though he opposed all three phases of the New Economic Policy of Nixon and Treasury Secretary John Connally. The policy included interventionist wage and price controls and involved Connally's support of Nixon's suspension of the Bretton Woods agreement that allowed the dollar's convertibility into gold, which Shultz philosophically opposed. Nonetheless, in May 1972, Nixon appointed Shultz as secretary of the treasury. Even as Nixon and Shultz tried to forestall the Great Recession that lasted into 1975, the Watergate scandal preoccupied Nixon. (Watergate was the name for the political scandal surrounding the break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office complex, which was subsequently traced back to the White House and the Committee to Re-elect the President.) Shultz counseled the President to "tell all" about his participation, but in May 1974, William Simon replaced Shultz, who reentered the business community, becoming executive vice president of Bechtel Corporation in San Francisco.

Later, Shultz accepted another cabinet position when President Ronald Reagan replaced Alexander Haig with Shultz as secretary of state. Sworn into the cabinet on 16 July 1982, Shultz served until January 1989, becoming the only man ever to have held four cabinet-level posts. After his last stint of public service, Shultz returned to academia in January 1989 at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he was named the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow. Shultz also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award given to a civilian, on 19 January 1989.

Shultz wrote a 1,184-page best-selling memoir, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (1993). Other accounts of Shultz's life and political career are in Dan Rather and Gary Paul Gates, The Palace Guard (1974); William Safire, Before the Fall: An Inside Look at the Pre-Watergate White House (1975); and Laurence I. Barrett, Gambling with History: Reagan in the White House (1983). See also Allen J. Matsuow, Nixon's Economy: Boom, Busts, Dollars, and Votes (1998). Articles about Shultz are in Time (5 July 1982), Newsweek (5 July 1982 and 7 Feb. 1983), the New Republic (15 Dec. 1986); the Economist (2 Apr. 1988 and 3 Dec. 1988), and Newsweek (31 May 1993).

Robert Vellani