The Foreign Service Journal, June 2003

became Secretary of the Treasury in May 1972, serving until May 1974. During that period he also served as chairman of the Council on Economic Policy and chairman of the East-West Trade Policy Committee. In that capacity, Shultz traveled to Moscow in 1973 and negotiated a series of trade protocols with the Soviet Union. He also represented the United States at the Tokyo meeting of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In 1974, he again left government service to become president and director of Bechtel Group, where he remained until 1982. While at Bechtel, he maintained his close ties with the academic world by joining the faculty of Stanford University on a part-time basis. From January 1981 until June 1982, when he was nominated to suc- ceed Alexander Haig as Secretary of State, Shultz was chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Economic Policy Advisory Board. He was sworn in on July 16, 1982, as the sixtieth U.S. Secretary of State and served until Jan. 20, 1989. Returning to private life, he rejoined Stanford University as the Jack Steele Parker Professor of International Economics at the Graduate School of Business. He is also the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Secretary Shultz was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s high- est civilian honor, on Jan. 19, 1989. He has also received the Seoul Peace Prize (1992), the Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service (2001), and the Reagan Distinguished American Award (2002), to name but a few of his many honors. He is a member of the board of directors of Bechtel Group, Fremont Group, Gilead Sciences, Unext.com, and Charles Schwab & Co. He is also chairman of the International Council of J. P. Morgan Chase and serves on the advisory committee of Infra- structureworld. Sec. Shultz’s many publications include: Labor Problems: Cases and Readings (1953); Management, Organi- zation and the Computer (1960); Guidelines, Informal Controls, and the Market Place (1966); Workers and Wages in the Urban Labor Market (1970); Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines (1978); the monograph “Economics in Action: Ideas, Institu- tions, Policies” (Hoover Essays in Public Policy, 1995); and another book, Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines (2d edition), cowritten with Kenneth Dam (University of Chicago Press, 1998). In addition, he pub- lished a best-selling memoir of his time in Foggy Bottom: Turmoil and Triumph: My Years As Secretary of State (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993). Secretary Shultz holds honorary degrees from the universities of Columbia, Notre Dame, Loyola, Pennsylvania, Rochester, Princeton, Carnegie-Mellon, City University of New York, Yeshiva, Northwestern, Technion, Tel Aviv, Weizmann Insti- tute of Science, Baruch College of New York, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tbilisi State University in the Republic of Georgia, and Keio University in Tokyo. Foreign Service Journal Editor Steven Alan Honley interviewed Sec. Shultz by phone on April 22. FSJ: Your award from AFSA for lifetime contributions to American diplomacy places you in the same company as former President George H. W. Bush, former Secretaries of State Cyrus Vance and Larry Eagleburger, and Rep. Lee Hamilton, among others. What is it about for- eign policy that has held your interest for so long, both as a practitioner and an academic? Shultz: I suppose it’s the sheer importance of what takes place to the well-being of our country, and as a cit- izen of our country, to myself. And then, of course, it’s inherently inter- esting. I am a person who was trained as a professional economist, but in the tradition of economics as part of a broad discipline that used to be called, way back when, “political economy.” I’ve always thought of it that way. And so when you have a problem in foreign policy, it doesn’t come to you as an economic prob- lem — it’s just a problem, of certain dimensions. I thought that was fas- cinating, going back to my days in college when I was in what is now called the Woodrow Wilson School [at Princeton] and we had problems to tackle. And so this interest in for- eign policy and diplomacy is long- standing with me. FSJ: What would you say were some of your accomplishments as Secretary of State that you’re most proud of today? Shultz: The things that you feel are the greatest are happenings to human beings, at least for me. In the broad perspective of things, I would cite the developments that led to the end of the Cold War — I was a part of that; the really very positive situation we had throughout the Asia-Pacific region; and the J U N E 2 0 0 3 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 49 “As Treasury Secretary, I noticed, ‘Hey, [FSOs] write good cables. And they’re interesting — apparently they see what’s going on. I can learn from them.’”