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Many politicians and diplomats from the 1980s lay claim to a pivotal role in ending the cold war, but the former US secretary of state George Shultz, who has died aged 100, had a better claim than most. And he was not shy in letting people know, as he did at length in his 1,184-page account of his years at the state department, Turmoil and Triumph (1993).
When he became secretary of state in 1982 – a job he was to hold for seven years – relations between the US and the Soviet Union were at a dangerous low. The administration of US president Ronald Reagan was packed with anti-Soviet hardliners. Reagan himself in 1983 dubbed the Soviet Union “the evil empire”.
Shultz seldom let his frustration with anti-Soviet colleagues in the Pentagon, the CIA and elsewhere in the administration show in public. But he let his guard down in a terse response to a reporter who asked whether he was enjoying the job: “I did not come here to be happy.”
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He persevered, opening up a secret channel to the Soviet Union and gradually winning over Reagan, with whom he established a close bond. Relations with the Soviet Union began to improve. Four years after taking office, Shultz was in the room at one of the most extraordinary diplomatic encounters of the 20th century, the 1986 Reykjavik summit at which Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came briefly and tantalisingly close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
When Shultz left office in January 1989, he said Americans were unable or unwilling to recognise that the cold war was over. “But to me it was all over bar the shouting,” he wrote. Ten months later the Berlin Wall came down and in December 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved.
Shultz looked stuffy and conventional, and for the most part he was, but he liked to persuade people he was not as conservative as he appeared. A regular ploy when being interviewed was to direct journalists to a signed photograph of him dancing at a White House dinner with Ginger Rogers. She had written: “Dear George, For a moment I thought I was dancing with Fred. Love, Ginger.”
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Born in New York, George was the son of Margaret (nee Pratt) and Birl Shultz, who in 1922 helped found the New York Institute of Finance to train those working on Wall Street. When he was three the family moved to New Jersey.
He studied economics at Princeton and after graduating in 1942 joined the Marines. Service in the Pacific included the taking of the Palau islands in 1944, when more than 2,000 Americans and 10,000 Japanese were killed.
During a rest and recreation break in Hawaii Captain Shultz met a lieutenant in the army nursing corps, Helena “Obie” O’Brien. They married in 1946 and had five children.
Although an average student at Princeton, he completed a PhD in labour relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 and stayed on to teach.
Throughout the rest of his life, he combined academia – MIT was followed in 1957 by the University of Chicago, and in 1968 by Stanford University – with long spells in business and in government. He was a Republican, but more pragmatic than ideological. He became one of the ultimate Washington insiders, serving under three presidents – Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan – and worked on various federal task forces at the request of John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He was an informal but influential adviser on foreign policy to George W Bush. More
President Ronald Reagan’s longtime secretary of state, George P Shultz, who spent most of the 1980s trying to improve relations with the Soviet Union and forging a course for peace in the Middle East, has died. He was 100.A titan of American academia, business and diplomacy, Shultz died Saturday at his home on the campus of Stanford University, according to the Hoover Institution, a thinktank where he was a distinguished fellow.Shultz held three major cabinet posts in Republican administrations during a long career of public service. He was labor secretary and treasury secretary under President Richard Nixon before spending more than six years as Reagan’s secretary of state. Shultz was the longest serving secretary of state since the second world war and had been the oldest surviving former cabinet member of any administration.Condoleezza Rice, also a former secretary of state and current director of the Hoover Institution, said in a statement that Shultz “will be remembered in history as a man who made the world a better place”.As the nation’s chief diplomat, Shultz negotiated the first-ever treaty to reduce the size of the Soviet Union’s ground-based nuclear arsenals. The 1987 accord was a historic attempt to begin to reverse the nuclear arms race.After the October 1983 bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 soldiers, Shultz worked tirelessly to end Lebanon’s brutal civil war in the 1980s. He spent countless hours of shuttle diplomacy between mideast capitals trying to secure the withdrawal of Israeli forces there.The experience led him to believe that stability in the region could only be assured with a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and he set about on an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful mission to bring the parties to the negotiating table.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.”Over his lifetime, Shultz succeeded in the worlds of academia, public service and corporate America, and was widely respected by his peers from both political parties. He was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the presidential medal of freedom, in 1989.Shultz had largely stayed out of politics since his retirement, but had been an advocate for an increased focus on climate change. He marked his 100th birthday in December by extolling the virtues of trust and bipartisanship in politics and other endeavors in a piece he wrote for the Washington Post.Coming amid the acrimony that followed the November presidential election, Shultz’s call for decency and respect for opposing views struck many as an appeal for the country to shun the political vitriol of the Trump years.“Trust is the coin of the realm,” Shultz wrote. “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.” More
Liz Cheney, the third most senior Republican in the House of Representatives, has raised the possibility of Donald Trump being criminally investigated for provoking violence during the 6 January US Capitol insurrection, pointing to a tweet attacking his own vice-president, Mike Pence, that was posted after the assault had begun.In extraordinary remarks on Fox News Sunday, Cheney made specific reference to the “massive criminal investigation” on the Capitol insurrection that is now sweeping the country. She said that the probe would cover “every aspect” of the events of 6 January and look at “everyone who was involved”.But she reserved her most pointed words for Trump. “People will want to know what the president was doing,” she said. “They will want to know whether the tweet that he sent out calling Vice-President Mike Pence a coward while the attack was underway was a premeditated attempt to provoke violence.”Cheney’s evoking of possible criminal action against the former president comes just two days before the start of his impeachment trial in the US senate for “incitement of insurrection”. Though she will not be participating as a juror at the trial – that role is performed by senators – her comments signaled the turmoil that the impending proceedings are causing in her party.Last week she survived an attempt by fellow House Republicans to remove her from her leadership position in protest at her support of Trump’s impeachment. On Saturday, the Republican party in her home state of Wyoming voted to censure her, calling for her immediate resignation.Cheney said Sunday she would not step down. “The oath I took to the constitution compelled me to vote for impeachment – it does not bend to partisanship or political pressure, and I will stand by that.”But the swirl of criticism around her, coupled with her sharp reference to possible criminal consequences for Trump, point to how the former president continues to roil the Republican party, to the extent of threatening to tear it apart.On Tuesday, he will make US history by becoming the first sitting or former president to be subjected to an impeachment trial for a second time.Ahead of the historic proceedings, prominent Democrats took to the Sunday political shows and spoke with passion about why Trump deserved to be convicted for his role in allegedly inciting the 6 January assault. Ayanna Pressley, a congresswoman from Massachusetts, called on senators to “honor their oath and hold Trump accountable and bar him from ever holding office again”.Speaking on CNN’s State of the Union, she recalled the “harrowing and traumatic” assault on the Capitol and placed it in personal and historical context. “As a black woman, to be barricaded in my office, on the ground, in the dark – that terror is familiar in a deep and ancestral way for me.”She said she was haunted by the image of black staff in the Capitol building cleaning up the mess caused by the white supremacist insurrection. “That is a metaphor for America. We have been cleaning up for white supremacist mobs for generations – and it must end,” she said.By contrast, there was little sign among Republican senators of any substantial appetite to convict. Should all 50 Democratic senators vote to do so, they would still need to be joined by 17 Republican senators to reach the two-thirds majority required by the constitution.Rand Paul, the Republican senator from Kentucky, said Tuesday’s trial was an attempt to criminalise political speech. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, he said: “Are we going to impeach and potentially criminally prosecute people for political speech when they say ‘Get up and fight for your country, let your voices be heard’?”The Republican senator from Louisiana, Bill Cassidy, told NBC News’s Meet the Press that the trial had been rushed. “There was no process. If it happened in the Soviet Union you would call it a show trial.”Pat Toomey, the Republican senator from Pennsylvania who has been critical of Trump, told CNN that he thought it “very unlikely” that the former president would be convicted. Without conviction, senators would not be able to move to a further vote to bar Trump from ever holding public office.The case for impeachment will be presented to senators by House managers. In their brief, they allege that Trump “summoned a mob to Washington, exhorted them into a frenzy, and aimed them like a loaded cannon down Pennsylvania Avenue”.In a 14-page rebuttal, Trump’s lawyers argue that he did not engage in insurrection and that impeaching him as a former president is unconstitutional.The evidence stage of the Senate trial is likely to focus on Trump’s remarks leading up to the violence on 6 January, which left five people dead. At a rally earlier in the day, Trump used visceral language, saying “we will not take it any more” and “you’ll never take back our country with weakness”.It is not known whether impeachment managers plan to single out Trump’s tweet attacking Pence. In the tweet, which has now been removed from Twitter as part of Trump’s suspension from the platform, he criticised the then vice-president for failing to block counting of the electoral college results of the presidential election that Trump lost.“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” Trump posted.The tweet was posted about 10 minutes after it was reported that Pence had been ushered off the floor of the Senate following the violent breach of the Capitol by Trump supporters and white supremacists. During the attack, members of the mob could be heard chanting “hang Mike Pence”. More
When Covid struck, it was governments that decided people could not go to work and governments that took people’s money away. It is now down to governments to decide whether or not to return that money and when to open up the economy. In the US, Democrats want to give generously. While $1.9tn dollars is a lot of money – about the size of Canada’s GDP – it probably is not enough.As Randall Wray of the Levy Institute has pointed out, the US government is engaged in relief, not stimulus, spending. It is offering much-needed assistance to the devastated balance sheets of households, school districts and local governments. Rescuing public services, making sure people don’t starve and building Covid-testing systems is not an economic stimulus but a necessary antidepressant. Reducing the size of the relief package would prolong the recession, which, given the virus’s capacity to surprise, may last longer than the experts predict. President Joe Biden was right to rebuff criticism that Democrats risked overheating the economy, saying the problem was spending too little, not too much. There is slack in the US economy: 400,000 Americans left the labour market in January.Mr Biden aims to control the virus and then create jobs with infrastructure investments to reinvent the post-crisis economy for a zero-carbon world. Call it a spend-then-tax policy. If he succeeds, Mr Biden will go some way to repudiate the conventional economic wisdom that argues that if governments keep borrowing too much, they risk defaulting, will end up printing money and be forced in a panic to put up interest rates. The pandemic revealed this to be bunk. Central banks can keep interest rates low by buying government bonds with money created from thin air. Last year, they bought 75% of all public debt.Within days of assuming power, Mr Biden had a plan, and new thinking, to rebuild a Covid-scarred country. Boris Johnson has little to show after months. His government intends to cut universal credit, raise council tax bills and freeze public-sector pay, weakening household finances. Given this mindset, which has dominated policy since 2010, it is hardly surprising that the £900bn of Bank of England “quantitative easing” money sitting with banks can’t find profits in the real economy. The Bank has “knowledge gaps” about QE. Yet there is truth in the quote attributed to Keynes that “you can’t push on a string” – when demand is weak, monetary policy can do little about it.With interest rates low, no recovery to invest in and no new regulations, UK banks will turn inwards, not outwards. Instead of the City contributing to the productive economy and a just green transition, expect speculation and Ponzi-like balance sheets. It is lobbying to expand lucrative but socially useless activities. In January, Tory peers with City interests argued for a new finance regulator with a “competitiveness” objective – a Trojan horse for deregulation.Central banks are creatures of their legislatures, but have been permitted, for ideological reasons, to work without a social contract. In her recent paper, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, the economist Daniela Gabor warned that unelected technocrats must not be allowed to hand politicians reasons to adopt external constraints that can be blamed for unpopular policies. It is timely advice. The UK will have record peacetime levels of debt. Rishi Sunak says such borrowing is “unsustainable”. Yet UK gilts are a risk-free financial asset, which is why banks crave them.The inequality, financial instability and ecological crises have multiple causes, but their existence is built on radical, free-market economics. It is not the case that the government’s ability to spend is temporary while interest rates remain low, as Mr Sunak claimed. Bond-purchasing programmes can control yields. A system that benefits private finance but subordinates the state and threatens to expose it, post-pandemic, to austerity and elevated levels of unemployment must be resisted. Only those unable or unwilling to believe the evidence of their own eyes would say otherwise. More
Joe Biden has said the United States will not lift its economic sanctions on Iran in order to get Tehran back to the negotiating table to discuss how to revive the Iran nuclear deal.Asked if the United States will lift sanctions first to get Iran back to the negotiating table, Biden replied: “no” in an interview with CBS News, which was recorded on Friday but released on Sunday ahead of the Super Bowl.Former president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the US in 2018 from the atomic deal, which saw Iran agree to limit its enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Biden has said he will seek to revive the deal, but insisted that Iran must first reverse its nuclear steps, creating a contest of wills between the nations.Asked if Iran had to stop enriching uranium first, Biden nodded. It was not clear exactly what he meant, as Iran is permitted to enrich uranium under the 2015 nuclear deal within certain limits.“Will the US lift sanctions first in order to get Iran back to the negotiating table?” CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell asked.“No,” Biden responded.“They have to stop enriching uranium first?” O’Donnell asked. Biden nodded.Earlier on Sunday Iran’s supreme leader urged the US to lift all sanctions if it wants the country to live up to commitments under its nuclear deal with world powers, according to state TV.In his first comments on the matter since Biden took office, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was quoted as saying: “If (the US) wants Iran to return to its commitments, it must lift all sanctions in practice, then we will do verification then we will return to our commitments.”“This is the definitive and irreversible policy of the Islamic Republic, and all of the country’s officials are unanimous on this, and no one will deviate from it,” Khamenei added Sunday, reiterating Iranian leaders’ previous remarks that the US must ease its sanctions before Iran comes back into compliance.The supreme leader, 81, has the final say on all matters of state in Iran and approved the efforts at reaching the nuclear deal in 2015.In response to Trump’s so-called “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran, the country began to gradually violate its atomic commitments, and threatened further provocations in a bid to increase its leverage and get Biden to prioritize a return to the deal as he moves to dismantle Trump’s legacy. Biden has signed a series of executive actions that reverse course on a wide range of issues, including climate change and immigration.Following the killing last December of an Iranian scientist credited with spearheading the country’s disbanded military nuclear program, Iran’s parliament approved a law to block international nuclear inspectors later this month – a serious violation of the accord.Iran also has begun enriching uranium closer to weapons-grade levels and said it would experiment with uranium metals, a key component of a nuclear warhead. The country has announced its moves and insisted that all breaches of the pact are easily reversible. Tehran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.Reuters contributed to this report More
Donald Trump’s impeachment trial that opens on Tuesday could take longer than expected after a leading member of his defense team requested that the proceedings are suspended during the Sabbath so that he can meet his obligations as an observant Jew.David Schoen, 62, has written to senior figures of both main parties in the US Senate asking for an agreement that the trial is postponed from 5.24pm on Friday until Sunday so that he can observe the Sabbath. In the letter, reported by the New York Times, the lawyer apologises for any inconvenience, adding that “the practices and prohibitions are mandatory for me … so I have no choice.”Schoen, 62, is an Orthodox Jew attached to the congregation Beth Jacob in his home town of Atlanta, Georgia.The request presents managers of the trial with a scheduling dilemma. To complete the trial by sundown on Friday would require breakneck speed that could appear unseemly; to delay it until Sunday might push the proceedings into the following week that had been earmarked as a Senate holiday.Schoen and his fellow defense lawyer Bruce Castor, a former district attorney from Pennsylvania, were brought on at the eleventh hour to represent Trump after the previous defense team quit en masse having refused to play along with Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him.Schoen has a colourful list of previous clients in both criminal and civil law. Among them are Roger Stone, the longtime friend of Trump who was convicted of lying to Congress but who later received a presidential commutation.Last September he told the Atlanta Jewish Times: ““I represented all sorts of reputed mobster figures: alleged head of Russian mafia in this country, Israeli mafia and two Italian bosses, as well a guy the government claimed was the biggest mafioso in the world.”Castor also has a checkered professional history. He declined to prosecute Bill Cosby more than a decade before the comic was convicted in 2018.Trump faces one impeachment count of incitement of insurrection relating to the storming of the Capitol building on 6 January. Five people died as a result of the violence which followed an incendiary rally headlined by Trump. More
California’s coronavirus death toll is continuing to climb. Its vaccination rates remain low. And some of its residents are losing faith in their governor.California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has found himself in an increasingly precarious political position: a Republican-led recall movement is garnering support from far-right groups as well as mainstream Republicans and some Silicon Valley bigwigs. And while the effort is unlikely to succeed in unseating him, even long-term allies are publicly questioning his leadership through this latest, most deadly phase of the crisis.He was hailed as a national hero in the early months of the pandemic, but Newsom’s job rating has plunged in recent weeks. Just under a third of voters polled by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies rated the governor’s overall handling of the pandemic well, while 44% said he was doing badly. It’s a complete reversal from September, when 49% of those polled by the institute said Newsom was doing an excellent or good job – and 28% rated him poorly.Criticism has come from all sides. Legislators have been divided over his decision to lift regional stay-at-home orders a week after the state surpassed 3m coronavirus cases. Health workers have been dismayed that some of his recent health directives have diverged from established and emerging scientific research. He has bickered with teachers unions and parents over when and how to reopen the state’s public schools. Activists say he is failing Latino and Black residents, Californians with disabilities and essential workers who are dying at disproportionate rates. And jobless Californians, struggling to access unemployment benefits, have cursed the administration’s bureaucratic inertia.For many across the state, Newsom’s announcements on the economy, vaccine distribution or school reopenings have felt increasingly dissonant from their dire realities as the pandemic progressed.Amy Arlund, an ER nurse in the central valley , said she was enraged that hospitals continued to face staff and equipment shortages. “The trust has been broken with especially our government officials, our leaders and the organizations and the agencies that are meant to protect us,” Arlund said. “It feels like we’re expendable.”Four of her coworkers at the Kaiser Fresno hospital have died because of Covid-19, Arlund said, including a fellow nurse who contracted the virus last summer after the hospital ran so short on PPE and staff resorted to using homemade face shields made of plastic sheets and electrical tape.For Héctor Manuel Ramírez, a disability rights advocate in Los Angeles who had worked on a behavioral health taskforce the governor launched last year, a breaking point was Newsom’s announcement that in an effort to speed up vaccine distribution, the state would start prioritizing people by age, rather than a profession or medical history.The news came as Ramírez was preparing funeral arrangements for their brother, Eduardo.Eduardo was 35, and severely immunocompromised due to Aids, so Ramírez, their family and friends had anxiously watched the state’s chaotic vaccine rollout, hoping his turn would come in the nick of time.It didn’t. Eduardo died – the fourth of Ramírez’s family to have succumbed to Covid-19.Ramírez said Newsom had, unlike many of his counterparts in other states, made a strong commitment to addressing health disparities. “I listened to the governor’s coronavirus updates quite regularly, and his words had always brought hope. Now I feel misled, I feel used. I feel like I am without leadership,” they said.“There has been so much fear and desperation in my community,” they added. “Whether it’s intentional or unintentional, it feels like our leaders have forgotten about us.”I feel misled, I feel used. I feel like I am without leadershipCriticism has also mounted over the state’s handling of school reopenings and unemployment aid. As many of the state’s businesses reopen Newsom has found himself caught up in crossfire between parents of 6m public school students who are anxious to get their children back to class and teachers unions who are worried it’s not safe enough to return.Newsom late last year had proposed a $2bn plan to help schools reopen in the spring, but school leaders, unions and lawmakers have said it’s inadequate. In a heated meeting with the Association of California School Administrators last week, Newsom responded to demands that all teachers receive vaccines before returning to in-person schooling: “If we want to find reasons not to open, we’ll find plenty of reasons.”Meanwhile, the state’s unemployment agency has been under fire over a scathing audit last month, which found that as millions of jobless Californias are still to access unemployment benefits the agency paid out more than $11bn on fraudulent claims.At a hearing on Wednesday, lawmakers from both parties were furious that constituents were queuing in snaking lines at food banks and sleeping in their cars while the state held up aid. “Californians are frustrated, they are infuriated, they are fed up,” said Rudy Salas, a Democratic assemblyman representing parts of the rural Central Valley.Making life-and-death decisions about who should get the vaccine first, balancing the need to address the state’s economic crisis alongside its health crisis, discerning what is and isn’t safe amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, is of course, impossibly difficult, said Dr Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease specialist at the UCSF medical center in San Francisco. Through much of last year, while Donald Trump denied the severity of the pandemic and hawked false miracle cures, Newsom and other governors became “beacons of leadership for the whole country”, Chin-Hong continued. Another poll, from Morning Consult, found that though Newsom’s job ratings had dipped in recent weeks, he’s more popular now than he was before the pandemic struck.As the pandemic has progressed, people have higher expectations“But as the pandemic has progressed, people have higher expectations,” Chin-Hong said – they expect leaders to explain the reasoning behind public health decisions.Newsom failed to do that two weeks ago, when he suddenly announced that he would be lifting the state’s most restrictive stay-at-home orders, Chin-Hong said. Even state legislators said they were taken off guard.“If you think state legislators were blindsided by, and confused about the shifting and confusing public health directives, you’d be correct,” said assemblymember Laura Friedman after Newsom’s announcement. “If you think we have been quiet about it in Sacramento, you’d be wrong.”Health workers said it doesn’t help that Newsom initially kept the data and reasoning behind the changing rules and guidelines opaque. “The reopening announcement was so sudden. People were so confused because outside hospitals there were mobile morgues full of the body bags of people who’d died from Covid-19,” said Chin-Hong. “It really made people feel unsafe.”“There’s definitely a communication problem,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies. “We’re finding that about half of the public is saying that they don’t have trust in the governor.”Newsom’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on such critiques. Many of the groups questioning the governor’s recent policies said he could easily earn back their trust – if he’s willing to work with them.Christian Ramirez, a policy director for SEIU-USWW, a union that represents more than 45,000 service workers in California, said he was excited to hear Newsom announce last month a plan to send $600 to low-income Californians, including undocumented immigrants. “There has been a willingness from Governor Newsom to ensure that essential workers regardless of their immigration status are not left to fend for themselves,” Ramirez said. But the proposal has not yet been signed into law.Ramirez said he’d like for the governor to collaborate with unions and advocacy groups to deliver on his promises. “We know how to reach our community – we have mobilized a record-breaking number of folks to go to the polls and vote in recent elections,” he said. The union could easily leverage its network to help hundreds of thousands of workers quickly fill out the paperwork for unemployment benefits, or sign up for vaccination appointments. “We’re not expecting the governor to do it all alone – and we’re willing to stand with him,” Ramirez said. More
