H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-36 on Taubman, In the Nation’s Service89 min read

“He’s just a goddamn economist,” President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, supposedly said about the man who succeeded him on 16 July 1982. “What does he know?” That man, George Pratt Shultz, knew at least how to retain Reagan’s confidence for the remainder of his presidency. As a reporter for the New York Times, Philip Taubman covered much of Shultz’s tenure as secretary of state. In the Nation’s Service is the first—and hopefully not the last—book-length biography of Shultz, who in 1993 published a well-regarded memoir, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State.[1]

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum

Roundtable Review 16-36 

Philip Taubman. In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz. Stanford University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781503631120.

2 May 2025 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-36 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo

Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Thomas Maddux
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany S. Keenan

 

Introduction by James Graham Wilson and Elizabeth C. Charles, Office of the Historian, US Department of State  2

Review by James Goldgeier, American University. 5

Review by Paul Lettow, American Enterprise Institute and America in the World Consortium.. 9

Review by Joe Renouard, Hopkins-Nanjing Center, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, Nanjing, China  17

Review by Elizabeth N. Saunders, Columbia University. 24

Response by Philip Taubman, Stanford University. 29

 

“He’s just a goddamn economist,” President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, supposedly said about the man who succeeded him on 16 July 1982. “What does he know?” That man, George Pratt Shultz, knew at least how to retain Reagan’s confidence for the remainder of his presidency. As a reporter for the New York Times, Philip Taubman covered much of Shultz’s tenure as secretary of state. In the Nation’s Service is the first—and hopefully not the last—book-length biography of Shultz, who in 1993 published a well-regarded memoir, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State.[1]

The reviewers broadly praise Taubman’s book, which covers Shultz’s life, careers, and the four cabinet posts he held for different administrations. James Goldgeier writes that Taubman might have engaged more with recent secondary literature on the final decade of the Cold War, yet goes on to say that his narrative suffers no loss, and that he supplements the historical record through interviews, Shultz’s personal papers, and excerpts from Executive Assistant Ray Seitz’s diary. Elizabeth Saunders criticizes Shultz—more so than the book under review—for sometimes allowing a combination of loyalty and deference to hierarchy to interfere with speaking up and doing the right thing during the later years of the Richard Nixon administration. As with Saunders, Joe Renouard calls out then Secretary of the Treasury Shultz’s approval of the dubious decision to audit Democratic National Committee Chair Lawrence F. “Larry” O’Brien in the summer of 1972.

Renouard credits Taubman with avoiding hagiography and ultimately crafting a clear-eyed assessment of a statesman whose motivations and actions resonate today. Both he and Goldgeier comment on Shultz’s skills as a problem solver and sometimes “problem anticipator,” and on Taubman’s ability to sketch a “portrait of a pragmatic problem-solver who sought to develop solutions based in empirical reality rather than abstract theories.” Saunders also points out that Shultz had a great ability to “focus on systems and the people within them.” These attributes served him well while leading the Department of State and promoting Reagan’s foreign policy vision.

Paul Lettow applauds Taubman’s chapters on Shultz’s life and career before July 1982 but criticizes Taubman’s depiction of Shultz’s tenure as secretary of state. According to Lettow, Taubman’s narrative downplays the significance of Ronald Reagan’s steadfast views on nuclear weapons and communism and pays insufficient heed to national security decision directives (such as NSDD-32, which sought “[t]o contain and reverse the expansion of Soviet control and military presence throughout the world;”[2] and NSDD-75, which sought “[t]o promote, within the narrow limits available to us, the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system in which the power of the privileged ruling elite is gradually reduced.”[3]) that National Security Council staff members produced during the first Reagan administration. “I don’t have a foreign policy,” Lettow quotes Taubman, quoting Shultz. “President Reagan has one. My job is to help him formulate it and help him carry it.” Here and elsewhere, Lettow suggests we ought to take Shultz at his word.

In his response, Taubman responds to the four reviews. He describes how his views of Reagan and Shultz changed while writing this book and expresses his hope, which all scholars can share, that it will stimulate further historical debate about the Reagan presidency and the end of the Cold War more broadly.

 

Contributors:

Philip Taubman is affiliated with Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, where he has been based since retiring from the New York Times in 2008. During a three-decade career at the Times, he served, among other posts, as Moscow bureau chief, Washington bureau chief, and deputy editorial page editor. In addition to the Shultz biography, he is the author of Secret Empire: Eisenhower, The CIA, and the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage (Simon & Schuster, 2003), and The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb (HarperCollins, 2012). McNamara at War: A New History, co-authored with his brother, William Taubman, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Amherst College, will be published by W.W. Norton in September 2025.

Elizabeth C. Charles is a Historian in the Office of the Historian in the Foreign Service Institute at the US Department of State. She received her PhD from the George Washington University and is currently working on Soviet and arms control volumes in the Foreign Relations of the United States series. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the US Government or the US Department of State.

James Graham Wilson is a Historian in the Office of the Historian in the Foreign Service Institute at the US Department of State. He received his PhD from the University of Virginia and is currently working on national security policy and arms control volumes in the Foreign Relations of the United States series. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the US Government or the US Department of State.

James Goldgeier is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Professor of International Relations at the School of International Service at American University, where he served as Dean from 2011–2017. He is a senior adviser to the Bridging the Gap initiative, and he is a co-editor for the Oxford University Press Bridging the Gap book series. His most recent books are Evaluating NATO Enlargement: From Cold War Victory to the Russia-Ukraine War (co-edited with Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023) and Foreign Policy Careers for PhDs: A Practical Guide to a World of Possibilities (co-authored with Tamara Cofman Wittes, published by Georgetown University Press in 2023).

Paul Lettow is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a Senior Fellow at the America in the World Consortium. He is the author of Ronald Reagan and His Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (Random House, 2005) and numerous book chapters and articles, including “US National Security Strategy: Lessons Learned” (Texas National Security Review, Spring 2021). Lettow has worked on the National Security Council staff at the White House and at the US Department of State. He earned his AB in History from Princeton University, DPhil in International Relations from Oxford University, and JD from Harvard Law School.

Joe Renouard is Senior Lecturer and Resident Professor of History and American Studies at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Nanjing, China. He specializes in American foreign policy, diplomatic history, human rights in international affairs, and transatlantic relations. His most recent books are The Transatlantic Community and China in the Age of Disruption: Partners, Competitors, Rivals (Routledge, co-edited with Daniel S. Hamilton) and Human Rights in American Foreign Policy: From the 1960s to the Soviet Collapse (Penn Press). He has contributed essays to the Los Angeles Times, the National Interest, the Diplomat, International Affairs Forum, American Diplomacy, International Policy Digest, the Washington Examiner, Z Network, the Journal of American Culture, the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, H-Diplo/RJISSF, HNN, the Prague Post, Education about Asia, and several edited collections.

Elizabeth N. Saunders is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. She is the author of The Insiders’ Game: How Elites Make War and Peace (Princeton University Press, 2024) and Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Cornell University Press, 2011).

George P. Shultz had a remarkable career in academia, business, and government. He was a leader in all three sectors, culminating in his service as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state from 1982–1989. Philip Taubman, who was a reporter and editor at the New York Times for nearly three decades before joining the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University,[4] was given exclusive access to Shultz’s papers and did multiple interviews with his subject, as well as with others with direct knowledge of Shultz’s life and career. While Shultz wanted Taubman to write this biography, the latter makes clear that the former did not interfere with how the story was told. Taubman notes that he told Shultz, “It’s your life but my book” (xiii), and the book is indeed a very balanced portrait. The author’s crisp writing style moves the narrative along nicely, and we come to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of Shultz’s belief that he could solve the problems in front of him whether as dean, corporate executive, or cabinet official.

While the book does not draw on the larger scholarship of the period (such as, for example, Simon Miles’s excellent coverage of the years 1980–1985[5]), the interviews the author and his assistants conducted with Shultz and other key players are very valuable for the historical record. What is on vivid display throughout the book is Shultz the problem-solver, who wanted to get things done wherever he was working. This included addressing the lack of black students on the campus at the University of Chicago, where he proactively got companies to agree to offer scholarships for African American students; and work he did on the desegregation of schools in the South during the Nixon administration. And he wasn’t just a problem-solver. Riley Bechtel, who later became CEO of his family’s company in 1990, said that Shultz was “as good a problem anticipator as problem solver” (105).

Thus, he was not an ideologue, like many of his colleagues in the Reagan administration, and that led Shultz to be hugely frustrated, particularly in the first Reagan term, when the foreign-policy process was extremely dysfunctional, in part because the president was not willing to step in to address the dysfunctionality among his chief aides, and in part because of extreme competition among the key players, especially Shultz and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. The latter served as Shultz’s deputy at the Office of Management and Budget in the Nixon administration and then at the Bechtel Corporation and was now free to thwart his former boss. And while the ideologues had the upper hand in the first term because there was no Soviet leadership with which to engage seriously, that changed in March 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev became the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Now, with Reagan reelected and Gorbachev seeking change, Shultz had his opportunity. Reagan’s presidency would have looked completely different without Gorbachev. The first term was extremely short on foreign policy accomplishments, and that is where things could easily have headed in a second without the changes that Gorbachev introduced domestically and in foreign policy. But it wasn’t just that Gorbachev came to power wanting to shake things up; Reagan had to respond to the opportunity, and he did. With Shultz at the helm at the State Department, Reagan had the perfect person to implement his response. It still was not easy at the start, and not just because of the hardliners within the administration. Little discussed in the book is the ferocity of the reaction to Reagan’s desire to engage the USSR from conservatives on Capitol Hill and among the Washington, D.C. punditry class. When Reagan prepared to meet with Gorbachev for the first time in November 1985, for example, Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA) declared that it was “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”[6]

The ideologues did not appreciate Shultz the problem-solver. Hardliner Richard Pipes, who oversaw East European and Soviet affairs at the White House for Reagan, said of Shultz:

Being primarily an economist and businessman, he lacked a deeper understanding for the whole ideological and political dimension of our relationship with the Soviet Union. Like most corporate executives, he tended to treat our conflict with it as a CEO might treat disagreements with his firm’s labor union: that is, assume that the two parties shared a common interest in the enterprise and only haggled over the division of profits. But in dealing with the USSR there really was no room for compromise, except on minor issues of no consequence, because the Soviet Union acted on the principle that foreign relations were a zero-sum game (126).

Among the most interesting items from the interviews that Taubman conducted, which show how deep Shultz’s problem-solving thinking lasted even decades after events occurred, are Shultz’s musings about the 1986 Reykjavik summit, where the US and Soviet leaders talked about abolishing nuclear weapons. Differences over Reagan’s cherished Strategic Defense Initiative got in the way, and in particular Reagan’s unwillingness to commit to confining testing to the laboratory for ten years. Reflecting on the summit many years later, Shultz mused that perhaps he could have asked, “What exactly do you mean by laboratory? Is space a laboratory? When you say the word ‘laboratory,’ you think of a little room and people in white coats. But maybe we could have found out how to define laboratory in a way that would have been acceptable, but I didn’t think of that and we didn’t do that” (320).

Taubman does an excellent job demonstrating how Shultz learned lessons early in his life and career that he carried with him for the rest of his life. When he joined the Marines, he learned, “If you are known as someone who delivers on promises, then you are trusted and can be dealt with. In the end, trust is the coin of the realm” (21). Chairing a task force in the Lyndon Johnson administration, the president told him, “George, if you have a good idea, and it’s your idea, it’s not going to go very far. But if it becomes my idea, it just might go somewhere” (46). Anyone who wants to be successful in an organization has to learn this simple lesson, but not all do. Shultz did.

Both former president Richard Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were dismissive of the idea of Shultz being named as Reagan’s secretary of state, since they argued he did not know enough about foreign policy. Kissinger argued, “This means that George will be at the mercy of the State Department bureaucracy” (117). Given that Shultz is known for the way he made great use of the expertise in the State Department, unlike many who have served in the top position, it would have been interesting to learn more about that aspect of his time there. The book primarily focuses on the machinations at the top, and the interactions of Shultz with the president and other members of the cabinet.

Did Shultz use the bureaucracy as much as he did because he understood how it could be helpful to him given the tremendous expertise of our nation’s diplomats, or did these efforts reflect his lack of knowledge, as Kissinger suggested (or perhaps it is a little of both)? Shultz was no Kissinger when it came to a foreign policy background, but he knew as much as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, who was famous for relying on a small group of aides and cutting out much of the department from deliberations. Shultz appointed veteran diplomat Raymond Seitz to serve as his Executive Assistant, rather than choosing a political appointee. Seitz was hugely helpful to Shultz as secretary and for the book, as Taubman makes excellent use of Seitz’s journal as a source.

One of the great ironies of Shultz’s service in the Reagan administration (and something that was also evident in his earlier government jobs) is how often the great problem-solver threatened to resign (which may have been a way to solve problems, but it certainly comes across as rather unseemly given how many times it happened). Taubman describes Shultz as frustrated and miserable much of the time because of the foreign policy process. In Reagan’s first term, Shultz was out of the loop on Central America policy, and in the second term, he was largely out of the loop on what became the Iran-Contra scandal, the selling of arms to Iran to gain the release of hostages and then the use of the proceeds from those arms sales to circumvent Congress and support the Contras in Nicaragua. Taubman writes, “Shultz’s faith in the orderly making of foreign policy, a reflection of his broader faith in the orderly management of organizations, left him vulnerable to the disorderly activities of zealots with access to the president” (327).

People often forget how disappointed Reagan and Shultz were that the incoming George H.W. Bush team that followed them didn’t accept right away that the Cold War was over. Recalling Reagan’s last meeting with Gorbachev after the 1988 election, with President-elect Bush present, Shultz said in an interview with Taubman:

I was very upset. They felt Reagan and I were all wrong in the way we were approaching the Soviet Union, that it couldn’t change and wouldn’t change. They couldn’t have been more wrong. They really were wrong, deeply, deeply wrong. But [incoming national security adviser] Brent [Scowcroft] had this idea and he persuaded Bush to do a review, so everything was put on hold (368).

Fortunately, the momentum of Gorbachev’s reforms continued, enabling the Eastern Europeans to rise up successfully against their Communist rulers, ultimately leading to the collapse of the USSR, and vindicating the Reagan and Shultz approach.

George Shultz took office as President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state in July 1982. At the time, Leonid Brezhnev still sat atop the Soviet system. For years before that, the Soviet Union had appeared to be on the march geopolitically and increasing its military power in absolute terms and relative to that of the United States and its allies. Only recently had the United States, at the end of the Jimmy Carter administration and in the first year and a half of the Reagan administration, abandoned détente and moved toward a more straightforwardly competitive Cold War policy. By the time Reagan and Shultz left office on 20 January 1989, however, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had undertaken profound reforms in Soviet foreign and domestic policy that would, in short order, unravel the Soviet empire and the Soviet Union itself; the United States and USSR had agreed for the first time to eliminate a category of nuclear arms and were progressing toward further, broader reductions; and, asked what had become of the “evil empire,” Reagan had famously declared in Red Square that “You are talking about another time, another era.”[7]

The art historian Reindert Falkenburg once observed, “Ponder on the obvious, because the obvious is not.”[8] Reagan and Shultz were the main protagonists on the US side as those extraordinary developments unfolded in the Cold War during those nearly seven years. The Falkenburg principle would suggest that there is something to be gained by examining, with as much dispassion and historical spadework as we can, what Reagan and Shultz were actually up to in guiding US relations with the USSR during that critical period, and why. For example: How did they perceive, try to shape, and respond to Soviet leaders’ decisions?

Philip Taubman’s biography of Shultz is thus welcome. As far as this reviewer is aware, it is the only major biography of Shultz yet to appear, a remarkable fact given both his prominence in the dénouement of the Cold War and the 35 years that have passed since he left office. Taubman is a longtime former New York Times reporter who knew and covered Shultz, including as the Times’s Moscow correspondent during the mid-1980s. Shultz asked him in 2010 if he would be interested in pursuing this project, and gave him access to sealed archives and numerous interviews (xii-xiv).

The book is strong on Shultz’s life and career before he took the reins at the State Department. Born in 1920 and the product of a stable, supportive upbringing, with an emphasis on education and ethics, the smart, athletic Shultz developed his characteristic patience and doggedness through his time at Princeton, in the Marines in the Pacific during World War II, and as an academic, first at MIT as a PhD student and faculty member in industrial economics, and then in senior roles at the University of Chicago, where he rose to become Dean of the Graduate School of Business in 1962 (1-38; 41-51). Taubman helpfully explores Shultz’s year in the Eisenhower administration from 1955 to 1956 as a staff member on the White House Council of Economic Advisors, where Shultz was exposed to Eisenhower’s emphasis on planning and his unique melding of a White House staff-led policy process with a strong and deliberative Cabinet (38-41). And Taubman’s account of Shultz’s experiences in three different Cabinet-level roles under President Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1974, as secretary of labor and then director of the Office of Management and Budget, and finally as secretary of the treasury, is fascinating and revealing. Shultz played a leading role in, among other important developments of the era, the desegregation of southern schools and the Nixon administration’s abandonment of US willingness to trade gold for dollars at a fixed price, leading to floating exchange rates. Shultz was competent and principled and widely perceived to be so, all of which was helpful to Nixon. Shultz thereby both grew and sustained his prominence and influence in the administration. Yet he did not seek to overshadow or undermine Nixon. Shultz understood where Nixon wanted to head on major domestic and economic issues, broadly agreed, and helped him get there (51-103). Nixon thought himself a strategist, and as Taubman shows, Shultz was adept at conveying to Nixon how a strategic principle could best be implemented through a particular policy action (63). Yet Shultz also fought losing battles on policy, opposing wage and price controls for years and ultimately resigning over the issue (82-84).

Taubman indicates that Shultz was actually President Reagan’s first choice for secretary of state from the start. Nixon, seeking to retain influence over US foreign policy, offered Reagan advice in 1980 that undercut Shultz in favor of Alexander Haig, who was very much a Nixon and Kissinger man. Unlike Haig, Shultz held views on foreign policy that were more closely aligned with Reagan (about which more later) than with Nixon and Kissinger. Reagan, apparently sensing all of this, reached out first to Shultz. But an earlier message that Shultz did not want to lead Treasury again came through to Reagan as meaning that he did not want any Cabinet role. So they spoke but only in pleasantries, and Reagan ended up choosing Haig (116-117, 130-144). Reagan, however, jettisoned Haig within a year and a half. Reagan had quickly come to perceive that Haig wanted to run, not implement, his foreign policy (109-111). Another important reason, although not specified by Taubman, was that Haig did not share basic principles of Reagan’s approach, including that the Soviet Union was vulnerable economically and technologically and that it could be pressured to change.[9]

Taubman’s account of Shultz’s time as secretary of state is less useful, alas. Taubman hews to a narrative: that Shultz battled retrograde hardliners surrounding the President and ultimately overcame them to steer a confused, inattentive Reagan, who had competing inclinations—both belligerent anti-Communism and a haltingly-expressed but sincere longing to improve US-Soviet relations and reduce nuclear threats—toward his better instincts. Shultz and Reagan then worked together to tamp down the Cold War, and found willing partners in Gorbachev and Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze (passim, but see especially x-xix, 109-195).

That narrative is problematic, mainly because it pushes aside or downplays what we know now about Reagan himself. Reagan held strong, distinctive, and unorthodox views on foreign policy before becoming president, and was determined to pursue them as US policy once in office.[10] For decades before becoming president and throughout his presidency, Reagan was focused on and tough-minded about Soviet weaknesses in the Cold War competition. He believed that the USSR was fatally flawed, and that it was especially vulnerable economically and technologically. And he wanted the United States to lead an all-out competition, including but not limited to a military buildup. Reagan was convinced that faced with that all-out approach, the Soviets would recognize that they could not compete or win because of economic and technological (and then political) strain, would agree to reduce nuclear arms, and could start to change their internal system.[11] We know this because he said so, over and over.[12]

Reagan was ruthless when it came to the Cold War, yet he was also a visionary, even a utopian. He loathed nuclear weapons and the prospect of nuclear war, and sought to do something about it. He intended to see nuclear weapons reduced, ultimately to zero, and to have a missile defense serve as catalyst and guarantor of a nuclear-free world. Again, we know this because he said so, over and over. In Reagan’s mind, those strands of his worldview were tied together; for example, a vigorous competition with the Soviets was the way to bring about reductions in nuclear arms, ideally to zero.[13]

Taubman’s book downplays the salience and consequences of Reagan’s own views. In a brief and dismissive section describing Reagan, Taubman writes that “[i]n addition to his florid anti-Communist pronouncements and his concern about nuclear war,” Reagan “dabbled” with the notion that the Soviet “economy was weak and an American military buildup might put added strain on the Kremlin as it tried to match Washington’s defense spending” (135). Given everything we have now seen from Reagan’s public statements and declassified archival material, this is akin to saying that Odysseus dabbled in getting to Ithaca. Taubman also briefly notes Reagan’s alarm at the prospect of nuclear war, nodding to an episode just months after the United States had dropped the atomic bombs over Japan in 1945 when Reagan, the film actor, intended to appear at an antinuclear rally in Hollywood (but was prevented from doing so by his movie studio) (135). Taubman’s source for that statement is a book by this reviewer. Taubman cited it for the same episode in his insightful 2012 book The Partnership: Five Cold Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb, but in the Shultz biography he does not; indeed, there is no citation or reference for that information in the Shultz biography (135, 404).[14] And the discussion of Reagan’s anti-nuclearism glides by without much reflection on the depth and sincerity of that conviction and what it would mean for Reagan’s—and Shultz’s—later conduct (135). Yet examining and taking seriously Reagan’s profoundly-held views on nuclear weapons and missile defense goes a long way, for example, to helping explain the outcome of the 1986 Reykjavik summit, when Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to abolish nuclear weapons but Reagan refused to limit his cherished Strategic Defense Initiative, which he saw as a guarantor of a nuclear-free world.

By setting up and following a narrative that Shultz battled administration hardliners for the soul of Ronald Reagan, won, and then proceeded to thaw the Cold War with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, Taubman overstates the extent to which administration infighting resulted in Reagan being led by his advisors and minimizes the extent to which it ended up with Reagan pursuing through his advisors, at various times and in different ways, his own idiosyncratic approach and agenda.

For example, in Taubman’s narrative, William Clark, Reagan’s national security advisor from 1982–1983, and Richard Pipes, the Director for Soviet affairs on the National Security Council from 1981–1982, embody the hardline officials who surrounded Reagan and prevented Shultz from easing Cold War tensions early in his secretaryship (109-218). Taubman also asserts that while Reagan and Shultz believed in 1982 that the USSR was not a stable system and could change, they were in a distinct minority in thinking that, and “[t]hat a milder Soviet Union would embark on internal reforms, subdued by its own economic and social strains, seemed highly unlikely, if not inconceivable” (143). The latter is a strange statement. Reagan had wanted to reorient US strategy toward engaging in an intense Cold War competition that could help force change in the Soviet system.[15] Throughout 1982, Clark and Pipes spearheaded a series of classified national security directives, signed by Reagan and establishing administration strategy at the highest level, that did just that.[16] The documents were explicit that the aim of the approach was to pressure the USSR economically, technologically, ideologically and politically, and thereby to help promote “the process of change in the Soviet Union toward a more pluralistic political and economic system.”[17] Indeed, the entire thrust of the directives was that Brezhnev’s successors could face the necessity of embarking on significant internal reforms, and that US policy could and should aim to add pressure on them to do so. Reagan found Pipes to be valuable precisely because of his belief in exactly those principles.[18] State Department officials, even under Shultz’s leadership, were hesitant to commit to those principles and strategy, and tried to cabin and qualify them.[19] It would have been immensely valuable if Taubman had examined and tried to clarify Shultz’s own position on and approach to these issues, then and over time. Instead, he dismisses the critical directive as a “battle cry generated by…the ideological warriors around Reagan,” ignoring that it reflected precisely what he says Reagan and Shultz nearly alone believed (176).

It is true that especially in the first term, Shultz jostled, at times acrimoniously, with other administration officials over when and how to engage with the Soviet leadership at the highest levels in dialogue and negotiations. Taubman’s book adds detail to our understanding of these fights, in part by incorporating the accounts from the journal of Shultz’s executive secretary, Raymond Seitz. It is also true, and of real consequence, that once Gorbachev and then Shevardnadze came on the scene in Reagan’s second term, Shultz and Reagan understood more quickly than almost anyone else that Gorbachev and Shevardnadze could be the agents of the change they sought (109-380).

Yet Taubman does not dwell much on the fact that when a brake was put on Shultz’s earliest efforts to engage in high-level negotiations with the USSR under Brezhnev’s immediate successors (Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko) it was often Reagan applying it, or allowing Shultz to proceed but urging him to focus only on specific issues in the talks, such as human rights (170, 193, 217, 230, 261, 282). It could be that Reagan was simply the captive and pawn of hidebound, reactionary conservatives who surrounded him in his White House, as Taubman emphasizes.[20] It could also be that Reagan had his own sense of when to seek dialogue with Soviet leaders to achieve his larger ends—e.g., applying pressure to help force Soviet leaders to reform the Soviet system and agree to deep cuts in nuclear weapons—and when not to, and found useful the various pulling and hauling of his administration officials on the issue for his own purposes. Or some combination of those two.

Nor does Taubman address an important document that William Inboden highlights in his recent book on Reagan. In a memorandum in early 1983, almost exactly as Shultz was developing his agenda for starting a dialogue with the Soviets, Clark himself encouraged Reagan to explore a direct private dialogue with the Soviets, which Clark noted “would make clear that you are not ideologically against solving problems with the Soviet Union.”[21]

Moreover, Shultz was no dove. To the extent he was a pragmatist, as Taubman often refers to him, it was in the service of assertive objectives and a competitive US strategy. Shultz broadened the agenda for US-Soviet negotiations to include subjects beyond arms control, such as human rights, in part to push the Soviets on their vulnerabilities.[22] He was fierce in overcoming political resistance to the deployment of US intermediate-range nuclear forces to Western Europe, thereby paving the way for a demonstration of NATO strength and cohesion and, ultimately, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in 1987 (254). Shultz set out his own views carefully in detailed testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in June 1983, in which he noted that “I am speaking not only for myself but for the President in this statement,” and that he and Reagan had gone over it “line by line.”[23] Taubman mentions the testimony in one paragraph, and describes it merely as “bridg[ing] widely divergent views within the administration,” but does not present its substance (209). Shultz himself described it at the time and later as “laying out the policy right there on the table” and emphasized that “I had worked on this testimony with great care” (217).[24] It is worth revisiting. Shultz said:

Not all the many external and internal factors affecting Soviet behavior can be influenced by us. But we take it as part of our obligation to peace to encourage the gradual evolution of the Soviet system toward political and economic pluralism and above all to counter Soviet expansionism through sustained and effective political, economic, and military competition.[25]

Shultz thoroughly criticized détente in what amounted to a wholesale denunciation and he asserted that while “we now seek to engage the Soviet leaders in a constructive dialog,” he and Reagan aimed to demonstrate to Moscow that restraint “was its most attractive, or only, option.”[26] At the end of his presentation, Shultz said:

Brezhnev’s successors will have to weigh the increased costs and risks of relentless competition against the benefits of a less tense international environment in which they could more adequately address the rising expectations of their own citizens…. For our part, we seek to encourage change by a firm but flexible U.S. strategy.[27]

That testimony would seem to be important and revealing, and indicative of what Reagan and Shultz were up to thereafter. Even as two years later Shultz and Reagan found in Gorbachev and Shevardnadze Soviet leaders who could and would make changes, they kept the pressure on. Taubman usefully highlights that Shultz, on multiple occasions in the mid-late 1980s, told Gorbachev and Shevardnadze matter-of-factly but extensively that in light of the dawning information age and technological revolution, top-down political-economic systems like the Soviet Union would have to change or fall hopelessly and irrevocably behind (292-293, 336-337, 349-350; Taubman notes that Shultz had first written a book on the transformative power of computing in 1960, in the context of business management, and knew of what he spoke, [45]). It seemed to encapsulate all that Gorbachev and the Soviet leadership feared about their economic and technological position and prospects vis-à-vis the United States (292-293, 336-337, 349-350), so much so that State Department officials tried to convince Shultz not to pursue those points, “arguing that ominous warnings about the fate of closed societies in an information age was not an appropriate topic for a meeting with a Soviet leader” (292). Shultz plunged ahead. One gets the sense that he was twisting the knife, but doing so in as cordial, even friendly, a way as possible. That may be pragmatism, but it is of a particularly ruthless variety. It was certainly effective diplomacy in pursuit of strategic objectives.

Shultz was indispensable to Reagan and to the penultimate stage of the Cold War unfolding in a manner that was both peaceful and decisive. He pushed for and then determinedly pursued negotiations with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze that resulted in positive results for the United States and simultaneously refused to relieve pressure on the Soviet leaders for further changes. The latter is almost certainly why both Reagan and Shultz were angry at the outcome of the Reykjavik summit but, relatively quickly thereafter, serene.[28]

While Shultz did tangle with administration colleagues over the timing and pace of dialogue with Soviet officials, for the most part he seems to have agreed with and adhered to the premises and objectives of the administration’s fundamental strategy. Far earlier than most, he recognized, with Reagan, that Gorbachev could be the vehicle through which their objectives could be achieved, but he seems never to have lost sight of those objectives, either. And Shultz was not opposed to Reagan’s anti-nuclearism, even nuclear abolitionism, as others in the administration were. Reagan may well have needed Shultz and his unique mix of determination, negotiating prowess, and creative insight.

Taubman quotes Shultz as being fond of saying, “I don’t have a foreign policy. President Reagan has one. My job is to help him formulate it and help him carry it out” (144). Shultz was, no doubt, overstating the matter in statements such as that, perhaps for the very purpose of increasing his influence with Reagan. But it seems to get at an important truth. The question of what each of them was up to and why—and who was guiding whom—in the nearly seven years that Reagan and Shultz worked together remains a rich seam for future authors to mine.

We have waited far too long to see George P. Shultz’s long and fascinating life of 100 years given the full biographical treatment. As one of only two people to hold four cabinet-level posts (Labor, Management and Budget, Treasury, and State), he was “the man in the room” in multiple presidencies, and he played a decisive role in managing the US-Soviet rivalry and ultimately winding down the Cold War. Philip Taubman’s book is therefore a welcome addition to a growing set of works on American foreign policy in the 1980s,[29] and it arrives just as ’80s nostalgia may be reaching its popular culture peak.[30]

In the longstanding debate over the role of impersonal and personal factors in international affairs, realist International Relations (IR) scholars generally highlight impersonal forces, while biographers and diplomatic historians more often assert that individuals and personalities matter. Taubman is clearly in the latter camp. He argues that America, and indeed the world, was extremely fortunate to have a figure like Shultz (alongside President Ronald Reagan, Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, Foreign Affairs Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, and a few others) patiently shepherding the two rival, nuclear-armed superpowers through a working relationship that could easily have collapsed if it had been overseen by lesser men. In Taubman’s telling, then, Shultz belongs among the pantheon of presidential advisors who have had a major impact on US foreign policy. Prominent such figures in early America included secretaries of state John Jay, John Quincy Adams, and Hamilton Fish, while among twentieth-century figures one thinks of secretaries of state John Hay, Cordell Hull, John Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson, and George Marshall, as well as a few influential national security advisors (Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft). We might contrast these powerful figures with those advisors who prematurely fell from grace (secretaries of state Alexander Haig and Rex Tillerson) or were otherwise overshadowed by their more dominant administration rivals (secretaries of state William Rogers and Cyrus Vance come to mind).

Considering the arduous task of summarizing Shultz’s long life of public service, Taubman is the right man for the job. He first met Shultz forty years ago, and he had a front-row seat for many of the tales told here while covering the Reagan administration for The New York Times. Granted privileged access to Shultz and his papers in the 2010s, Taubman deserves credit for not allowing his study to veer into hagiography.[31] He clearly admires Shultz, but one gets the feeling that he arrived at his conclusions fairly after spending so much time in the documentary record. He paints a portrait of a pragmatic problem-solver who sought to develop solutions based in empirical reality rather than abstract theories.[32] “Deftly solving critical but intractable national and global problems was the leitmotif of George Pratt Shultz’s life,” concludes Taubman. “No one at the highest levels of the US government did it better or with greater consequence in the last half of the twentieth century, often against withering resistance. His quiet, effective leadership altered the arc of history” (ix).

Shultz’s upbringing influenced his diplomatic style. Raised in comfortable surroundings by parents who placed a high value on education, he developed a healthy respect for authority and a strong faith in the free market. He attended prestigious schools (the legendary Princeton tiger tattoo story is recounted here, 18-19),[33] and he was wounded in battle while serving in the Pacific Theater of World War II. His wartime experience taught him that military power was critical to American security and that its judicious use in support of diplomacy was essential (30, 194-195, 249-250). He was a moderately conservative Republican but not a particularly ideological one. As a professor of economics, he worked alongside “Chicago school” economists Milton Friedman and George Stigler while also maintaining close ties to the more liberal MIT economist Paul Samuelson. As labor secretary under President Nixon, his initial team consisted only of Democrats and independents (61). “He was a problem solver, not a zealous ideologue,” writes Taubman. “He combined policy expertise with an instinctively inclusive and effective feel for managing large organizations,…and he worked with a quiet competence and steadiness” (56).

But Taubman is also willing to point out Shultz’s personal flaws, professional oversights, and just plain bad decisions. Shultz occasionally “struggled to…stand up for principles that he considered paramount,” writes Taubman, and even exhibited “a puzzling degree of inaction at critical junctures in his career” (xvi). He stuck by Nixon during Watergate, suggesting the blind spots inherent in the former’s “powerful sense of loyalty” and “tendency to defer to his bosses” (xvi, 101). Taubman dedicates most of Chapter 6 to the Nixon-ordered, Shultz-approved, illegal audit of Democratic National Committee Chair Lawrence F. “Larry” O’Brien (86-100). (One gets the sense from this lengthy vignette that the seasoned investigative reporter is chasing down a journalistic scoop and giving some balance to a book that is otherwise largely admiring of its subject.) In the ’80s, Shultz was strategically naïve about the Iran-Contra affair, claiming despite some evidence to the contrary that he was unaware of arms-for-hostage activities (327-328). Late in life, he went all-in on the ill-fated biomedical company Theranos and its crooked co-founder Elizabeth Holmes. We also see some frank criticisms of Shultz from such insiders as IRS Commissioner Johnnie M. Walters (100), Sovietologist Richard Pipes (126), Deputy CIA Director Robert Gates (159), National Security Advisor Colin Powell (160), and even Richard Nixon (162-163).

But the overall impression of Shultz is positive enough that the reader cannot help but see In the Nation’s Service as an implicit rejection of today’s populist-tinged GOP. George Shultz represented a brand of conservatism that is now marginalized in the Republican Party (ix), and Taubman’s description of Shultz’s personality and work ethic reads like a direct rebuff of everything we associate with Donald Trump as a businessman, politician, and president: Shultz was “exceptionally open-minded,” “guided by an uncommon degree of common sense,” and “even-tempered and patient, sometimes to a fault.” He weighed issues carefully, read history closely, “shunned the limelight, listened intently to all comers and rarely rushed to judgment” (xiv). Taubman also reproaches the party’s hawkish neoconservative wing, which was prominent in Reagan’s first term, by implying that the ideologues surrounding the president were not creative enough thinkers to transcend the East/West struggle.

The book includes some interesting insights for specialists. The early chapters give us a peek behind the curtain of Nixon’s domestic economic-policy apparatus and Shultz’s role in it.[34] Later, Taubman provides a very creative and detailed description of the 1983 KAL007 Soviet shootdown cobbled together from multiple sources (220-223). We also get a few gems from Shultz’s many years as a Washington insider, as when he summarized the capricious nature of political power: “This is a cruel town. When you’re out, you’re out. The town loses interest in you right away” (174). Taubman also highlights the role of a few figures who have generally been left out of Reagan-era histories. One is the veteran diplomat Raymond Seitz, a diligent diarist who became executive secretary and mentor to the initially inexperienced secretary of state. Another is Nancy Reagan, who plays a surprisingly pivotal role in this story. Highly protective of Reagan, she saw in Shultz a loyal and trustworthy figure who deserved access to the president, and she disliked those insiders who sought to use Reagan for their own agendas, especially Alexander Haig and William Clark. Seeing that the first lady played a vital gatekeeping role in Reagan’s life, Shultz wisely cultivated a close relationship with her (183-185). Taubman also shows that Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev played a very constructive role in US-Soviet arms control negotiations (348).

Of course, the heart of the story is Shultz’s time as secretary of state. The central message here is that Shultz “got” Reagan. He perceived that the president had a vision which others in his inner circle did not quite see, and he guided Reagan toward the practical execution of that vision. To Taubman, Shultz deserves far more credit than he has gotten because “he made it possible for Reagan to break free of the ideological warriors who surrounded him and his own belligerent anti-Soviet rhetoric” (xi). Shultz, working closely with his Soviet counterpart Eduard Shevardnadze, “dexterously guided the United States and Soviet Union toward agreements and understandings that resolved or eased many cold war conflicts” (xii).

As a veteran journalist, Taubman clearly recognizes the importance of providing a narrative arc. Only if we understand what Shultz was up against when he accepted his appointment in July 1982 can we appreciate how long and hard he worked to accomplish what he did. Lacking a deep knowledge of foreign policy, and without close ties to Reagan, even Shultz’s admirers thought he would be a marginal presence in the administration (116-117). As his predecessor Alexander Haig put it, “He’s just a goddamned economist. What does he know?”(118) He also faced a remarkably competitive and ideologically driven national security team that was committed to radical changes in US diplomacy. He butted heads with such hardliners as Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, National Security Advisor William Clark, CIA Director William Casey, UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Defense Advisor Richard Perle, and Soviet Affairs Advisor Richard Pipes (125-126). Taubman argues that Shultz’s natural inclination to find common ground through patient negotiation “was fundamentally at odds with…the Reagan dogmatic national security team,” which “was determined not just to constrain the Soviet Union but to defeat it” (114).

One sees here a divide between the neoconservative wing of the Reagan administration, which was bold, ideological, hawkish, confrontational, and allergic to negotiation, and the emergent Shultz wing, which was cautious, managerial, moderately conservative, and open to negotiation—the former seeing little cause to engage with Moscow, believing that this was Nixon’s great failing in the détente era.[35] Consistently marginalized and unable to lead, Shultz threatened to resign on multiple occasions (213-214). He privately said of the administration’s foreign affairs apparatus, “It’s the worst organization I’ve ever seen. It’s worse than a university” (204).[36]

Things turned around for Shultz when he developed a personal rapport with Reagan (180-181), and in time he learned that he and the president agreed that the Soviet system was unstable; that experience, not abstract theory, was the real teacher in life; and that even seemingly intractable disputes can be managed or resolved through negotiation (143-147). Not that he agreed with all of Reagan’s decisions,[37] but they agreed on core objectives, and Shultz’s view became the dominant force during Reagan’s momentous second term (274).

The Reagan-Gorbachev détente of 1985–1989 was clearly a turning point in US foreign policy and in international affairs more broadly, though Taubman is correct in noting that uncertainty loomed over the entire era. Each side had its hardliners who opposed giving an inch on anything (334, 345, 353), and America’s NATO allies were understandably nervous. Beyond institutional inertia, the skeptics had a point. Each side maintained a massive nuclear arsenal and continued to prop up proxy regimes. The first two summits in Geneva and Reykjavik had meager results, and periodic incidents and crises (Iran-Contra, the Daniloff spy incident, Chernobyl) threatened to derail progress. The documentary record of US-Soviet conversations features near-constant argument, posturing, and whataboutism.

But Taubman joins many others in arguing that the dramatis personae were perfectly suited to the moment. Serendipity brought Gorbachev and Shevardnadze to power in Moscow in 1985 (284-285), and the two sides forged unprecedented agreements in arms control and human rights, all while the Soviet system was liberalizing and Moscow was withdrawing from Afghanistan and the third world. In summarizing the story’s dramatic third act, Taubman highlights its key takeaway:

As Reagan himself sensed the peacemaking possibilities, he gave Shultz increased latitude. Over time, Shultz edged ever closer to becoming the indispensable man, the secretary of state he had always wanted to be—the president’s partner in winding down the cold war (275).

It is only natural that a biographer will place his subject at the center of events, and In the Nation’s Service gets it just about right. It is a comprehensive and very enjoyable read, even though Taubman’s Shultz at times comes across less as the nation’s workmanlike chief diplomat and more as the administration’s embattled, Van Gogh-like genius: misunderstood by his contemporaries, stymied by his rivals, and hampered by the bureaucracy. I found myself pulling for him, but I also had to remind myself that other administration figures also played a part in the making of foreign policy. Interestingly, Reagan himself is a rather marginal figure here and is hardly the visionary that some have made him out to be. In writing that “Shultz’s decisive role belies the proposition that Reagan came to power with a coherent vision of how to handle the Soviet Union and then brilliantly executed it” (xi), Taubman challenges the “Reagan victory” school[38] and the prolific (and profitable) popular-press version of Reagan mythmaking.[39] Taubman’s Reagan appears to have been out of touch and unable to handle (or just plain unaware of) his advisors’ internecine turf battles. His light hand allowed advisors to pursue their own agendas, and the free agency of these underlings nearly destroyed his presidency during Iran-Contra (236, 328-329).

However, both Taubman and Shultz assert that Reagan deserves credit for evolving to meet changing conditions and for taking arms control and human rights seriously.[40] We see that both Shultz and Reagan were integral to the creation and sustaining of a four-part agenda for dealing with the Soviets (human rights, arms control, regional issues, and bilateral relations), which Shultz outlined as early as January 1983 (176). Taubman provides much evidence that Reagan took human rights in the USSR seriously; that he was especially interested in religious freedom; that there was plenty of human rights sniping at the summits; and that Gorbachev always resisted being lectured (267-268, 357-358, 360). These conclusions are largely consistent with earlier scholarship on the subject,[41] though Reagan’s human rights record in Central America was far more complicated.

What lessons does the book have for us today? Taubman contends that the architects of American foreign policy in the 1980s promoted American interests effectively, managed the US-Soviet struggle, and ultimately resolved the Cold War.[42] Shultz the economist and global thinker lectured Gorbachev on the information revolution and the superiority of open societies (292-293, 336-337, 349), and his optimistic vision of free markets, free trade, and freedom of movement presaged the age of globalization and the US-dominated “unipolar moment” of the 1990s (370).

Today, that vision seems a tad quaint. America’s leaders face a polarized electorate, the populist rejection of globalization, challenges from a powerful China and a revanchist Russia, the return of Great Power rivalry, and the solidifying of regional blocs as part of “Cold War 2.0.”[43] If Shultz’s life offers any guidance, perhaps it is this: A belligerent posture like that of Reagan’s first term will provide only limited returns against China and Russia, but a more “Shultz-like” approach of long-term engagement might just work. This would entail maintaining the nation’s military and technological edge, aggressively managing the rivalries with Moscow and Beijing to stave off a direct conflict, halting the dangerous drift in the US-China relationship by engaging Beijing in serious negotiations rather than pointless “dialogues,” clarifying that the US will not accept a forcible change to the status quo in the Indo-Pacific region, and all the while seeking opportunities for diplomatic openings and even some cooperation. One can imagine Shultz counseling Americans to maintain their resolve until a future leader can initiate a Nixonian opening to Moscow that would weaken the Russia-China entente. Yet, while the Shultz approach was the right one for the superpower struggle of the 1980s, whether it would also pay dividends under the conditions of the 2020s is another matter altogether.

Before leaving for a research trip to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a friend gave me a memorable warning: “You will feel the chaos and infighting in the documents.”[44] Looking at the papers from the ill-fated deployment of US Marines in Lebanon during President Reagan’s first term, it was easy to see what he meant. Philip Taubman’s insightful biography of George P. Shultz, In the Nation’s Service, shows how Shultz was both a contributor to and intensely frustrated by this chaos and infighting, before he finally achieved the legacy for which is best remembered: helping Reagan forge cooperation with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.[45] Shultz, who wore many high-level hats in the Nixon administration before taking over as Reagan’s secretary of state in July 1982, chafed at the often-hostile environment of Reagan’s first term. But Shultz was certainly one of the parties to the infighting, clashing openly with Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger over many issues, including the use of US military force in the Middle East and the larger question of how to manage the US-Soviet relationship.

Taubman is no stranger to this internal administration drama. As a New York Times Washington correspondent, he chronicled Shultz’s time as secretary of state, including the drama between Shultz and Weinberger—indeed, one of Taubman’s articles for the Times Magazine, published in April 1985, was headlined, “The Feud.”[46] Shultz, of course, emerged as a central figure of Reagan’s foreign policy, helping Reagan realize his hopes of improving the US relationship with the Soviet Union. Yet Shultz, who was no shrinking violet and came to Reagan’s cabinet after serving as treasury secretary, labor secretary, and director of the office of management and budget under President Richard Nixon, spent a significant portion of his tenure in Foggy Bottom deeply frustrated but unwilling to maneuver around the hardliners blocking his access to Reagan.

In the Nation’s Service sheds light on this puzzling aspect of Shultz’s career: why did a figure with such a lengthy resume of high-level positions, who already had experience working for a president (Nixon) who was not easy to serve, and who prided himself on his problem-solving skills, often fail at the “pulling and hauling” of bureaucratic politics in the Reagan administration—indeed, in Taubman’s telling, sometimes declining to pull or haul at all?[47] Once he finally broke through the hardliner wall (with the help of First Lady Nancy Reagan),Taubman argues that Shultz was a very effective translator of Reagan’s vision. But what took him so long, and why was he so passive in the face of the dysfunctional decision-making along the way?

It would be easy to blame Shultz’s difficult path to a more effective working relationship with Reagan on Shultz’s lack of foreign policy experience, and many of his contemporaries did exactly that. Both Nixon and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were dismissive of Shultz because they saw him as inexperienced on foreign policy and national security (116-17). In an interview, Shultz recalled that Alexander Haig, Reagan’s first secretary of state and the man whom Shultz replaced in Foggy Bottom, said, “He’s just a goddammed economist. What does he know?”[48]

Taubman’s biography demonstrates, however, that it was not so much what Shultz didn’t know—and he had more experience and well-formed views than his contemporaries understood at the time—as how he approached government that led to both his greatest achievements and his worst failures. Taubman locates the roots of this approach in Shultz’s admirable yet overly deferential view of organizations, a view honed in his academic work and his desire to understand and improve how organizations function. The theme of Taubman’s book is Shultz’s service to the nation, but the book also chronicles his often-extreme loyalty in service to both Nixon and Reagan, which led to errors of commission and omission. When finally partnered with Reagan, whose views melded well with his own, Shultz could turn that instinct for service toward helping the president realize his vision. But in other cases, he was oddly passive in the face of chaos or even wrongdoing, which resulted in regret that he did not do more to intervene.

In the Nation’s Service provides significant backstory to the Shultz-Reagan relationship, including Shultz’s intellectual development as an economist and later dean at the University of Chicago, and his prior government service in the Nixon administration. This backstory is essential to understanding the winding path he took to Reagan’s side. Taubman’s discussion of Shultz’s formative educational years at Princeton and later MIT, which bookended his military service in the Pacific during World War II, yields two themes that recur throughout Shultz’s time in government service.

The first theme is Shultz’s focus on systems and the people within them, with a view to finding practical ways to improve how systems function. For his senior thesis at Princeton, Shultz studied “The Agricultural Program of the Tennessee Valley Authority” (TVA), gathering statistics in Washington and spending two weeks living with a family in the mountains of Tennessee (16-17). Shultz helped the family with TVA forms to obtain fertilizer, but realized that they knew how to make sure the fertilizer kept coming, because “the farmers knew what the government wanted to hear.” While the farmers “had a kind of ethic that you don’t falsify things,” Shultz “observed their shrewd way of bending the TVA’s aims to their own goals and way of making a living from the land” (17). His conclusion was that there remained a wide gap between the TVA’s abstract goals and processes and the people it served, and that “the administering agency must recognize and respect the existing social patterns and values existing in the milieu where it plans to function” (17).

Considering that Shultz would go on not only to a PhD in economics, but also to a tenured position and ultimately a deanship at the University of Chicago, which was a temple of rationalism, it is notable that he had such an early understanding of how “social patterns and values” could affect organizational outcomes. (As an aside, this emphasis on “social patterns and values” seems somewhat ahead of its time for economics, a discipline that both historians and political scientists love to chide for ignoring or abstracting away from such considerations.)

These themes clearly stayed with Shultz in his work as an economist.

Yet when he took over from Haig as secretary of state eighteen months into Reagan’s first term, Shultz failed to recognize that the hardliners around Reagan had their own “social patterns and values.” To be a hardliner is to have extreme and intense preferences on certain issues, which the Cold Warriors in Reagan’s administration certainly did. It is possible to incorporate such features into models of decision-making, and indeed International Relations scholarship on peace overtures like the ones Reagan and Shultz would later offer the Soviets has done just that.[49] Shultz seemed unable, however, to look on the problem as dispassionately as he had done so many times as an academic. Taubman argues that it took Nancy Reagan’s invitations and prodding to help Shultz get around the hardliners and forge the more moderate course that both he and Reagan had long sought.

The second theme that emerges from Shultz’s pre-Reagan service is his faith in hierarchies and loyalty to those who lead them—faith that could be blind enough to lead him astray. Shultz’s deference was especially strong with respect to the White House. Taubman’s discussion of Shultz’s years in the Nixon administration is quite illuminating on this score. The book reveals details about how Shultz, as treasury secretary, went along with, or at least did not do much to stop, Nixon’s desire to use the Internal Revenue Service (IRS, which was overseen by the Treasury Department) to investigate a Democratic operative, Lawrence O’Brien, in the lead-up to the 1972 presidential election. Although Shultz had stood up to general Nixon administration pressure to use the IRS against Nixon’s enemies, he did not protect the IRS from the intense pressure surrounding the O’Brien investigation.

Taubman recounts that when he presented the full story of the O’Brien episode to Shultz in 2017 during the preparation of In the Nation’s Service, Shultz “seemed stricken as the details of the affair were laid out for him,” and “acknowledged that his resistance stopped well short of telling the White House that targeting O’Brien was improper” (98). Reflecting in 2017 on the pressure from Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman to investigate O’Brien, Shultz said, “I suppose I could have said, ‘Hang up the phone. It’s none of your damn business,’ or something. But, you know, the White House is the White House, you’re going to talk to them.” Shultz went on to describe how he had worked with and liked Ehrlichman on other issues and “had a very good opinion” of him (98-99). Despite his increasing frustration with Nixon and distaste for what became increasingly clear were criminal activities in the Watergate scandal, Shultz stayed on as treasury secretary until May 1974.

Taubman finds Shultz’s conduct lacking, arguing that he was not only excessively deferential to the White House, but also that he enjoyed the trappings of power too much to give it up—and thus stayed on too long in the Nixon administration and said little about its illegal activities. Though Shultz expressed the usual justifications, such as the need to keep the ship steady and prevent a more pliant successor from doing Nixon’s bidding, Taubman judges that Shultz’s “unwillingness to quit a corrupt president and White House staff, even as the misconduct bore down directly on the Treasury Department, also seemed to reflect a misplaced sense of loyalty to Nixon and an affinity for high office and the status and privileges that come with it” (99).

All of this is helpful context for Taubman’s portrait of Shultz’s tenure in the Reagan administration. Although the easing of tensions with Soviet leaders is the main attraction, Taubman’s portrait of Shultz in Reagan’s first term is highly informative. Shultz’s intense frustration with the administration’s Central America policy, especially the National Security Council’s (NSC) end runs around the State Department, as well with the administration’s response to the crisis in Lebanon and what Shultz saw as inadequate retaliation for the bombing of the Marine barracks in October 1983, led to several moments when Shultz considered resigning and even threatened to do so in front of Reagan. He fought Weinberger, privately and publicly, with little success. Shultz’s views on Lebanon and combatting terrorism were closer to those of Reagan and the NSC than to Weinberger’s, but the secretary of defense, helped by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, outmaneuvered him.[50] In private, he showed flashes of defiance against the layers of bureaucracy he felt kept him away from Reagan, telling his executive secretary, Raymond Seitz, “I don’t report to the NSC, I report to the president” (208).

But when he reflected on his role in the Iran-Contra affair, the arms-for-hostages scandal that engulfed the Reagan presidency, Shultz fell back on the deference-to-hierarchy argument. To be sure, Taubman highlights Shultz’s efforts to convince Reagan to recognize that the administration was trading arms for hostages. But Taubman also notes that in his memoirs, Shultz felt he “should have asked more, demanded more, done more,” but he “did not see how.” Tellingly, he pointed to hierarchy and organization, asking, “Did I have myself to blame for the aggrandizement of the NSC? I agonized. Ever since my first days as secretary of state, I had sought to make the national security adviser my channel to the White House and, on day-to-day matters, to the president” (326, quoting Shultz’s memoir).[51] But Taubman does not absolve Shultz, arguing that the secretary of state’s

faith in the orderly making of foreign policy, a reflection of his broader faith in the orderly management of organizations, left him vulnerable to the disorderly activities of zealots with access to the president. His willingness to rely on the White House national security staff after repeated setbacks caused by the incompetence and ideological rigidity of the staff does not make for a persuasive defense of his failure to act more decisively to stop the Iran-Contra affair before it reached critical mass (327).

Taubman ends the book with the unseemly and deeply sad events involving Shultz, his grandson Tyler, and the now-disgraced founder of the health technology startup Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, with whom he sided despite Tyler’s evidence that Holmes and Theranos were manipulating test results and hiding their product’s failures.[52] Taubman reports that even “after Theranos began to unravel, he declined to criticize [Holmes] in an interview for this biography” (377). Taubman connects this failure, which left Shultz’s family “broken,” to his “sense that honorable people supported their friends through troubled times,” as shown “in his continuing allegiance to Nixon…and later by Shultz’ fealty to Reagan in the Iran-Contra affair” (377). This tendency also spilled over into the policy realm: as Taubman observes, Shultz “sometimes hesitated to assert himself and genuflected timidly to his bosses and organizational routines, most evident in the years he struggled as secretary of state to overcome the cold war hawks around Reagan” (379). But, Taubman observes, “over the course of his one hundred years on earth, Shultz was a formidable force for good and peace” (379). Given that Shultz showed his assertive side on many occasions, one wonders, if he had overcome that timidity at crucial moments, how much more good—or at least, preventing bad—he could have done, or how much earlier he might have been able to work for peace.

 

Response by Philip Taubman, Stanford University

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