NEW YORK – That of George Shultz, who passed away at the age of 100, a name that certainly does not say anything not only to young people but also to middle-aged people, which even the elderly will have a hard time remembering, given that his government activity ended in 1989. Yet Shultz for at least twenty years it has been a pillar of American politics on an economic level (Minister of Labor, the Budget and later of the Treasury in the Nixon administration) and of foreign policy (Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state who pilot the rapprochement of relations between the United States and a Soviet Union headed towards dissolution). But it was also – something then very little noticed but essential for what we saw happening in the twilight of the Trump era – a strong defender of the strength of democratic institutions during the crisis of Watergate.
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If Nixon, faced with his grave responsibilities in that political scandal, was forced to resign without trying to force it, it was due to various factors: the strength and courage of a press that was then very authoritative, the holding of Republican MPs in Congress determined to defend their president but not to the point of closing my eyes to evidence of his criminal behavior, but also the balance and moral uprightness of a man, Shultz, who ordered Nixon to tell the whole truth about the clandestine activity against the Democratic Party. Even alongside Reagan, Shultz had the strength to make his moral sense prevail over political expediency when he confronted the president and asked him, unlike what other advisers suggested, not to hide the wickedness of the Iran-Contras affair anymore.
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In economics, in the seventies, Shultz contributed to the Nixon plan which led to the overcoming of the monetary system which was created in Bretton Woods at the end of the Second World War, with the uncoupling of the dollar from gold. As Minister of Labor, then, he started the first, timid, welfare protections and guarantees on minimum wages. In the eighties, as head of US diplomacy, he was the first to understand that Gorbachev was different from the Soviet leaders who had preceded him and to persuade Reagan to adopt a more flexible line of dialogue with Moscow. But even after his retirement from active politics, as a scholar living at Stanford University, George Shultz played an active sage role.
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It was he, for example, in 1998, a to introduce to George Bush characters of the intellectual depth of Condoleeza Rice which would later become key elements of his administration once he became president in 1990. Recent years, however, have been marked by a slip: together with Kissinger and other great figures, he offered his credibility in support of Theranos, a company that seemed to have discovered a revolutionary way of testing blood and which, instead, proved to be a fraudulent enterprise.
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February 7, 2021 (change February 7, 2021 | 21:21)
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