Reviewing In The Nation’s Service
BOOK REVIEW: In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz
By Philip Taubman / Stanford University Press
Reviewed by Ambassador Gary Grappo
The Reviewer: Gary Grappo is a former U.S. ambassador who held senior positions including Minister Counselor for Political Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad; U.S. Ambassador to the Sultanate of Oman; and Charge d’Affaires and Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He’s currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Center for Middle East Studies at the Korbel School for International Studies, University of Denver.
REVIEW – They are becoming much fewer now. If not already, they are approaching 100 years of age. They are best known for their exceptional patriotism and loyalty as well as a certain self-imposed discipline. They were “The Greatest Generation,” shaped by the Great Depression and World War II and shapers of the nation in the face of the Cold War.
Former New York Times reporter and editor Philip Taubman has written In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz, an inspiring, comprehensive, and provocative book on one man who epitomized a unique subset of that generation. These were the individuals who rose from both privilege and poverty to serve the nation, in many cases eschewing wealth for public service. They include John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush. George P. Shultz unquestionably belongs in that group. In fact, like Kennedy and Bush, he belongs in an even smaller group of those who enjoyed relative prosperity and even privilege growing up despite the troubled times in which they lived their early lives and yet pursued careers of public service.
I met George Shultz as a graduate student at Stanford in 1981. He served a brief stint at the university and periodically delivered lectures to small groups of students at the Graduate School of Business. This would have been after his service as Secretary of Labor, Director of the newly reconstituted Office of Management and Budget, and Secretary of Labor and just prior to being named by Ronald Reagan as Secretary of State. Within 15 or 20 minutes of listening to Shultz in one of his lectures, I remember being struck by his brilliance and most especially by his thoughtfulness. In his response to every question asked by us students, he would invariably wait briefly, seemingly collecting his thoughts, before offering the most considered and honest response. Some four years later, he would be my boss at the State Department.
Taubman’s masterful telling of Shultz’s life bears out those first impressions. Gifted, brilliant, and committed to developing relations with nearly everyone, Shultz possessed many of the qualities that defined that generation – indefatigable, driven, successful but also modest. One of his talents was building alliances and constructive relations, even with the hardest core communists in the Soviet Union, and always with the objective of solving seemingly insoluble problems.
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Unfortunately, I would never meet Secretary Shultz again after those lectures at Stanford. But like many of my colleagues, I would become a confirmed admirer. Shultz was generally well liked and respected by career Civil and Foreign Service employees at State. Perhaps because he himself had been a civil service employee earlier in his career, he recognized the essential expertise that resides among career public servants. Throughout his life and career, as Taubman makes clear in this exhaustive biography, Shultz avoided ideology of both the left and the right. His defining modus operandi in his official life was rooted in mastery of the subject regardless of complexity and in the relationship-building necessary to solve problems.
Taubman rightly devotes a disproportionate amount of his book to Shultz’s time as Reagan’s Secretary of State. In it, we learn the astonishing dysfunction of the Reagan White House, riddled with ideologues determined to block any effort to find ways to work with Moscow and lower tensions between the then two superpowers. Shultz patiently sought allies wherever he could find them, in Washington as well as Moscow.
Perhaps the most fortuitous relationship came about as a result of a freak February 1983 snowstorm that trapped the Reagans and Shultz and his wife in Washington. Nancy Reagan invited them to the White House for a private dinner. In this private setting with no others present, Shultz would learn that despite the harsh Cold War rhetoric coming from the White House and Reagan himself, the president sought to dramatically reduce tensions between the two powers and most especially the thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at one another. Moreover, he discovered that Mrs. Reagan wanted to dispel the image of her husband as a warmonger. In the latter and ultimately in the former, Shultz would find allies with whom he could work to solve the nation’s most pressing challenge of the post-war period.
Shultz would find others, including Vice President Bush and Chief of Staff James Baker, but few would be able to match the clout of Nancy Reagan, who probably had as much influence on the president an anyone in the Reagan administration. As ideologues came into and left the White House, Shultz would outlast most of them, though, Taubman reveals, not without frustration and disappointment so profound that he considered resigning on several occasions. Reagan would come to recognize and appreciate Shultz’s unique brand of relationship-building with most everyone that could produce genuine results. The peaceful end of the Cold War may very well have begun that snowy evening in Washington.
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Taubman’s thorough documenting of Shultz’s extraordinary life may be most touching in his relating of the story of a young and gifted Israeli PhD student, Yosef Levy, at the University of Chicago when Shultz served as Dean of the university’s business school. Along with his wife, Levy was invited to the dean’s residence for dinner, an honor reserved only for those who made the Dean’s List. Shultz instantly took a liking to the student and recognized him as someone with extraordinary talent and destined for great things in his life. An Israeli Defense Force veteran who had served in the 1956 campaign to capture the Sinai, his life was sadly cut short by the 1967 Six-Day War. What attracted Shultz to the promising Levy was more than his brilliance, however. It was a quality that Schultz himself epitomized, patriotism and unflinching commitment to his own country.
Perhaps it was this favorable impression of Levy that left Schultz a steadfast supporter of Israel throughout his diplomatic career. But it is here that we also learn that as brilliant and capable as Shultz was throughout his career, he made mistakes, and costly ones, too.
During the Lebanon Civil War, Shultz argued persistently to keep US marines in Beirut. This ran against the equally strong advice of Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, who clashed with Shultz often throughout their public careers as well as time at Bechtel. Shultz won that argument and hundreds of marines would pay the ultimate price for his advice and Reagan’s decision to deploy the marines as part of a four-nation peacekeeping force. Reagan would ultimately recall the marines, recognizing the futility of US combat involvement in Middle East sectarian wars.
Nevertheless, Taubman rightly situates Shultz firmly among the ranks of the those who brought the Cold War to an end. One reason was his special relationships with Mikhail Gorbachev and Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Premier and Foreign Minister, respectively. These were developed through Shultz’s patient persistence and inimitable ability to approach and interact even with his opponents to solve problems.
Taubman’s excellent biography deserves great praise for highlighting the enormous debt of gratitude the country owes to George Shultz, not only for his herculean efforts to bring an end to the Cold War but also his many other achievements “In the Nation’s Service.”
In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz earns a prestigious four out of four trench coats.
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