The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

58 DECEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL JEG: In your memoir, you talk about how each president has many more advisers than his predecessors, and they often quar- rel with one another and get into fights that the principals often are not even aware of. Would you like to elaborate on that? GS: Well, it seems to me when you try to make policy and carry out policy entirely in the White House, you do not have access to the career people and you do not really use your Cab- inet to full advantage. You wind up not having the right players, and policy is not as good, and is not carried out as well. I remember when General Colin Powell became national security adviser. I knew him pretty well, and he came over to my office and he said, “George, I am here to tell you I am a member of your staff.” I told him that was an interesting state- ment. He explained: “The National Security Council consists of the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense; and that National Security Council has a staff; and I am the Chief of that Staff. Obviously, the President is my most important client, but I am working for the whole National Security Council.” Colin had the right idea. When the Reagan administration was leaving office, he came to a ceremony in my honor and he said, “The chief of staff of the National Security Council and the Secretary of State have not gotten along so well since Henry Kissinger held both jobs simultaneously.” JEG: How would you describe the general approach to for- eign policy you and President Reagan followed? GS: President Reagan and I both thought that foreign policy starts in your own neighborhood. If you have a strong, cohesive neighborhood, you have a much better base then, if something goes wrong. I remember my first trip out of the country as Sec- retary of State was to Canada and the traveling press was saying, what in the world are you doing going there? I replied, “Who do you think our biggest trading partner is?” They all said Germany or Britain or something. One said Japan. I said they were out of their mind: Add all those up together and it does not come to as much as Canada. My second trip out of the country was to Mexico, and we tried to lay the foundation for what eventually came together as the North American Free Trade Agreement. We first had to get an agreement with Canada; then Mexico came in. But, anyway, it was not just the Soviet Union; we had a strategy for North America. We paid a lot of attention to South America, Central America and the Asia-Pacific region, as well. And we had strate- George Shultz and Mikhail Gorbachev meeting in New York City on March 24, 2009, to look back on the U.S.-Soviet exchanges of the late 1980s. The conversation was recorded for use in a three-part television series on the life of George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph . COURTESYOFFREETOCHOOSENETWORK