George Shultz, 1920-2021
George P. Shultz’s life gave meaning to the phrase “the greatest generation.” Upon graduation from Princeton in 1942, he enlisted in the Marines and stormed the beaches of Palau. A successful academic career led him from a professorship at MIT to becoming dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago. He served successfully as president of Bechtel, the global engineering firm. He held four cabinet-level positions in the U.S. government: Secretary of Labor, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Secretary of the Treasury, and finally Secretary of State for Ronald Reagan. And all that was after serving on the Council of Economic Advisers under Dwight D. Eisenhower. Henry Kissinger expressed the kind of confidence Shultz engendered: “If I could choose one American to whom I would entrust the nation’s fate in a crisis, it would be George Shultz.”