In The Nation’s Service: The Life And Times Of George P. Shultz - A Conversation With Condoleezza Rice And Philip Taubman

>> Scott Sagan: Good evening. I'm Scott Sagan, professor of political science and co-director of Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute. I'm here simply to welcome you and to remind you of who our two speakers are this evening. Phil Taubman was a Stanford undergraduate editor of the Daily, then went on for a distinguished career at another major newspaper, the New York Times.

He worked as a correspondent for Time magazine briefly, was the sports editor for Esquire. But then in his New York Times career, served as Washington correspondent, Moscow bureau chief and Washington bureau chief, focusing on national security, foreign affairs and intelligence issues. Since joining Stanford or coming back to Stanford in 2008, he's been affiliated with the Center for International Security and Cooperation and has had many roles in the administration.

But has also been a constant author, writing The Partnership: Five Cold War Warriors and Their Quest to Ban the Bomb, Secret Empire, Eisenhower, the CIA and the Hidden Story of America's Space Espionage. And his new biography, which we will be discussing tonight, In Nation's Service: The Life and Times of George P Shultz, was published yesterday.

 

>> Philip Taubman: Indeed.

>> Scott Sagan: And copies will be available in the lobby. Congratulations. Phil will be in conversation with Condoleezza Rice, the Tad and Dianne Taube Director of the Hoover Institution, senior fellow here on public policy and professor of political science. As you all know, she served as the 66th secretary of state of the United States and the National Security Advisor in first George W Bush administration.

What many of you don't focus enough on is what a fantastic scholar she has been throughout her career, writing on military affairs, writing on Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Cold War and the post Cold War world, and many books on international and national security. I can think of no better person to be in conversation tonight about this book than Condi Rice speaking to Phil Taubman.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you very much. Thanks very much for joining us tonight. And we are going to have a conversation, the two of us, for about 40 minutes or so, and then we will open it up for Q and A. I'm a professor. I'll call on somebody if nobody raises their hand.

So please get your questions ready. So, Phil, this is a book that is about a great man, about a wonderful patriot, someone who lived out his last years here at Stanford and at the Hoover Institution. But what a career. And so I'd like to start about your subject, George Shultz, in the following way, to talk a little bit about the man and about the various faces of George Shultz.

And so can you talk about George Shultz, the man, a little bit.

>> Philip Taubman: I would love to thank you for having me. And I want to thank the Hoover Institution for hosting this event. So I knew George for four or five decades, actually. I met him when I was a reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times on an air force plane on the way to Asia and got to know him in his time as secretary of state.

Played tennis with him when he was secretary of state, went to all kinds of dinners and exotic places with him. And then our acquaintanceship continued over the ensuing years. And especially, of course, during the time I was working on this book. So George was a multifaceted person. He actually, I'll start on a topic that you may all not be that familiar with.

George loved a good party. And there was no one better at throwing parties with George, and for George than Charlotte, his late wife. My wife and I had the pleasure of going to a number of these parties. And George was the toast of the evening. He told jokes, he sang, he danced.

He managed to embarrass Henry Kissinger every year on the lawn of his campus home as they were preparing to go to the Bohemian Grove. There would be a party up there. And at a certain point, after the entertainment, there were women swimming in the pool in synchronized fashion.

There was always a Maharashi band there. And the highlight of the evening was always to have Charlotte come over and put a big sombrero on Henry Kissinger's head. Hand them to, I forget what they're called. And then he would stand there, shaking these while the band played. And George was laughing uproariously.

So that was the party. George Shultz. There was the tennis player, George Shultz, which was really a reflection of the rest of George Shultz. Very steady on the court, you know, I didn't know what to do. What are you supposed to do when you're playing the secretary of state?

At one point, I was playing him in Moscow with another correspondent and we were playing doubles with someone else that George had brought. And the correspondent calls me over at the back of the court and he says, are we allowed to win? So George played tennis like the man he was.

Every ball came back. He was just steady, reliable. Then there was George, the academic, the professor that I learned about by researching his past and his history at University of Chicago, at MIT as a professor of economics and dean of the business school at the University of Chicago.

And then, of course, there was George, the diplomat. And the George I knew when I covered him for the New York Times was a very sober minded, kind of puzzling figure in some ways. The correspondents and I often referred to him as the Buddha because he was very hard to read.

He never really gave away what he was thinking. But he, as a diplomat, I think the key to understanding George, the person and the diplomat, was that he was tireless, he was resilient, he was patient, and he always looked for common ground. That was the key. You know, sometimes in Washington today, the last thing that people seem to be interested in is common ground.

That's where George lived. He lived on common ground and finding common ground and applying common sense to solve problems. I think if you have a chance to look at the book, the big takeaway from the book is that George Shultz was the consummate problem solver, pragmatic problem solver.

And that was a reflection of the man. He was steady, quiet, fun to be with, loving with his family. I saw him interacting with his first wife, Obie, and then later with Charlotte. And above all, George Shultz was a very decent man.

>> Condoleezza Rice: That's, I think, a wonderful description of the various aspects of George.

And I want you to unpack one in particular. He was indeed very pragmatic. He believed there was a solution. As a diplomat, he was a great listener. He could walk into a room and hear the other side. And yet he was a man of principle. He was a man who valued the sense of integrity, and I think that was also a very big part of his leadership.

And you talk about that sense of integrity and that character in the book as well.

>> Philip Taubman: You know, Helmut Schmidt, the late german chancellor, I went over to see him in Germany, had a long interview with him. And his point that he kept repeating to me was that you could trust George Shultz, that he was a man of impeccable integrity.

And I think that was true. There were some occasions, as you'll find in the book, where I think he was a little shaky on some of the values that he held dear. But by and large, you know, he was a man of integrity. And his formula, by the way, it sounds simple, but it's actually a profound insight.

I think his formula for problem solving went like this. When you get people in a room and they're arguing over principle, they'll never come to an agreement. But if they see the issue as a problem to solve, they'll work to solve it. He applied that in his field of market economics, and when he was labor secretary in the Nixon administration.

Administration. And he applied it ultimately and most spectacularly as secretary of state in winding down the cold war.

>> Condoleezza Rice: That time as labor secretary is perhaps the least well known of George's stellar public service career. But when you would sit with him for very long, it was a period that was formative for him, where he was extremely proud of some of the things that he did.

And I'd like you to reflect a little bit on that, because much of what he did as labor secretary had to do with essentially the desegregation of the country, the early beginnings of kind of affirmative action in the Nixon administration. He would tell you about times when he was asked to go into the south and bring people together, both black and white, who might not even know each other.

It was something of which he was immensely proud. As a matter of fact, when you were with George, he would talk often, first about that and then about the end of the cold War. And so let's talk about that time as secretary of labor.

>> Philip Taubman: So it's interesting, and it tells you a lot about George.

He got off to a rocky start on this job with Nixon, because the day that George announced the various undersecretaries and deputy and assistant secretaries of labor at a news conference, he introduced a dozen people, and one after the other, they were identified as either Democrats or independents.

And so he goes back to his hotel room, and the phone's ringing off the hook, and it's one of Nixon's aides saying, george, what the hell were you doing? There are no Republicans. How could you appoint all these officials and not have a single Republican? So once he got into the job, one of the things that he did that I think is not well known is he played a critical, pivotal role in the desegregation of southern school systems, public school systems.

This happened because Nixon sort of wanted it both ways politically. Nixon was running, trying to win the votes of white segregationists in the South, bring them into the Republican party. It was part of his so called southern strategy.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, and we forget that this isn't long after Goldwater and the emergence of the Southern strategy in response to what was going on in the civil rights movement and desegregation.

 

>> Philip Taubman: Yeah, and so Nixon, on one hand, was trying to attract white votes in the South, and on the other hand, he was respectful of the Supreme Court decisions. And so he put together a task force and named Spiro Agnew, the Vice President, to head it, and named George the labor secretary, as the deputy director.

It became clear very quickly that Agnew wanted nothing to do with it, and so George became the de facto head of this group. And the way they operated was very interesting. They came up with this strategy that George played the leading role in putting together. They took delegations from each of the Southern states, brought them separately to Washington, and they decided to start with the delegation from Mississippi, which they figured would be one of the toughest to get them to agree to voluntarily desegregate the schools.

They came up to Washington. They picked progressive civil rights leaders in the african american community. They picked white leaders from these communities, many who were sworn segregationists. They came up to the White House. Nixon told them, welcome, we want you gentlemen to work together. By the way, this was in an era when I think there was not a single woman in the room during these discussions.

Then they brought in John Mitchell, the Attorney General, who gave them a warning, basically, and said, we certainly hope you will work together voluntarily to solve this problem. But if you don't, we will bring the power of the federal government to bear. So the first meeting convenes, and the black delegation and the white delegation in the room are barely able to talk to each other.

Some members of the white delegation are using racial slurs that it was hard to believe to the face of the Black people in the room. They start talking, it's not clear they're gonna get anywhere. George stays there for maybe half an hour, and then he gets up and starts to walk out.

And one of Nixon's aides comes right after him and says, mister secretary, what are you doing? And he said, if they can't come to agreement on their own, they'll never come to agreement. They have to decide this by themselves. And so they did. And one after the other, they brought these delegations of black and white leaders to Washington.

And one after the other, they agreed to desegregate the schools in the South. Now, I understand that that desegregation wasn't ultimately the solution, obviously, to inequitable education, but the reality in the numbers, at least for the short term, was stunning. They went from having schools in these southern states that were roughly 24%, I think, desegregated by the time this.

Group led by George was done, it was over 75%. And Tom Wicker, by the way, who preceded me in Washington as a correspondent and as bureau chief, and was no fan of Richard Nixon, I can assure you. Tom wrote in one of his books that this was a miracle that had been achieved by George Shultz.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, and you mentioned George was very good appointing people who were independents and Democrats, probably never even asked. But as secretary of labor in a Republican administration, he also had very good relationships with organized labor. And to the end of his life was really very admiring of some of the tougher labor bosses of the time.

 

>> Philip Taubman: Yeah, so he was a pal of George Meany. Those of you who get the book, you'll see there's a hysterical picture of the two of them playing golf together, which they would do every year. The AFL-CIO would have an annual meeting down in Florida at a hotel, the Fontainebleau, I think, in Miami Beach.

And George would go down as labor secretary, and they'd go out to golf. But here's a wonderful little anecdote that I think captures a lot about George. When President Eisenhower died, George Meaney wanted to go to the funeral. He was not a buddy of Dwight Eisenhower's, but the labor secretary under Eisenhower had been a person who'd been able to navigate successfully between corporate world and the labor world.

George understood that George Meany wanted to go, so he went to the Nixon White House. And he said, I want to get a seat at the memorial service for George Meany. And they said, hell no, why would we give a seat to this leading Democrat? George eventually got him the seat, and Meany was touched by that gesture.

That's the kind of thing that George did. It was these little personal gestures at the time that had multiplier effect on his effectiveness.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah, and he took those same skills then to the position, the role that we know him best for, of course, as secretary of state.

Secretary of state to Ronald Reagan. He became secretary under kind of unusual conditions. You might want to just relate that, because it was pretty interesting entry, but it was also a time when the United States, our lives, others were trying to assess the change that was happening in the Soviet Union.

How real was it? And that's actually, Phil, when you and I and Felicity met. And just a point here about where we are now with news coverage, as opposed to where we were then in those days when you were Moscow bureau chief, and Felicity and many other. The first place that I would stop as a young faculty member who was a student of the Soviet Union was I didn't go first to talk to people in the embassy.

I went first to talk to the journalists because they were out in the country getting to know what was going on. Our people were sort of stuck in the embassy. You were watching the Gorbachev revolution firsthand. But having those journalists who really understood what was going on, who spoke the language, that really doesn't exist to the same degree today for the major newspapers.

But you watched that firsthand, and then that was the world that George Shultz was inheriting. So let's talk a little bit about that period, about what George Shultz saw. How he began to come to his own understanding of what was going on, because it didn't start very well.

First of all, he was sort of strange circumstances to become secretary of state. And in many ways, his first real contact was the KAL shootdown, the Soviet Union shooting down a Korean airline. So can you put those pieces together for us?

>> Philip Taubman: Sure, so many of you may remember, Al Haig was Ronald Reagan's first secretary of state.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: And he was in charge.

>> Philip Taubman: And he was in charge.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes.

>> Philip Taubman: Boy, was he in charge. And we all remember the line when Reagan was shot and Haig was in the White House press room and Vice President Bush was unavailable. He was in flight somewhere and couldn't meet him, obviously, wasn't at the White House.

And Haig stood up in the press room and said, I'm in charge here.

>> Philip Taubman: But before that, he had also publicly declared that he was the vicar of American foreign policy. Well, I think, as Condi knows probably as well as anybody, and George certainly repeated this over the years, the success or failure of a secretary of state depends heavily on the relationship that secretary has with the president, for whom he or she is serving.

And secretaries of state like Cyrus Vance, who did not have close relationships with the presidents they served, failed as secretary. Condi had a terrific relationship with George W Bush. George Shultz didn't really have a relationship with Reagan when he became secretary of state. Haig flamed out, Reagan invited him to come and be secretary of state.

And don't forget, in his many roles previously in the Nixon administration, he had been dealing with diplomatic and international issues infrequently. Yes, the treasury secretary is critical on various international economic issues, but George was not a deeply experienced diplomat, especially on national security issues. So he comes in, and he's read all the speeches that Reagan has given.

They're very harsh, belligerent, anti-Soviet speeches. You remember some of the phrases, the evil empire, communism will end up on the ash heap of history. They were all of this very tough rhetoric. He was building up the defense budget, working very closely with Caspar Weinberger. And with the ascent of Congress, pumping tens and tens of billions of dollars into American defense.

So George comes in with a goal to end the Cold War and improve relations with the Soviet Union. It's like, how could he possibly succeed in this administration? And by the way, Reagan was surrounded by a lot of hardliners who believed in all the things that he was saying, all the rhetoric.

Weinberger, certainly, Bill Casey, head of the CIA, William Clark, who was a national security advisor. They were all very much urging Reagan to take this very tough stand. George comes in and he's kind of lost at sea for a while. I think the heart of the book you'll see is this struggle to try to get traction with President Reagan.

And Reagan, interestingly to me, remained above the battle, seemed aloof from the infighting that was going on in his administration. And every time that George tried to get a one-on-one meeting with the president to talk about US-Soviet relations, he would get over to the White House. And he would discover all these opponents were around the table or arrayed around in the Cabinet Room.

So he was deeply frustrated by this at first. Condi alluded to the shootdown of the KAL flight. So there were really two critical moments, and they both occurred in 1983. George was appointed secretary in June of 82, confirmed in July. By the way, how's this for a startling fact in today's politics?

Unanimous vote of the United States Senate to confirm George Shultz. Try that today. Okay, so we're now fast forward to February of 1983. There is this unbelievable blizzard in Washington. The Reagans can't get up to Camp David. So Nancy Reagan picks up the phone, calls the Schultzes and says, come on over to dinner tonight at the White House.

So they go over to the White House. They have dinner, just the four of them in the family quarters upstairs. And for the first time, he's now been secretary of state for seven or eight months. George Shultz has a conversation with Reagan about the Soviet Union without interference from other aides.

And he discovers that night that he and Reagan are in agreement that there is a dire need to improve relations with the Soviet Union. They were not innocent about this. They knew how tough it would be, but they thought it was essential, among other things, to avoid a nuclear conflagration.

That dinner, by the way, was engineered. Thank Mother Nature for the blizzard, but thank Nancy Reagan for putting the dinner together. She, privately, was fed up with these hardline advisors, and she wanted George to have more time with her husband. So she was a kind of power behind the scenes.

Okay, now fast forward to the end of August 83. This commercial South Korean airliner wanders off course on its flight from Anchorage to Seoul, strays into Soviet airspace, is pursued by Soviet air defense forces, is blown out of the sky by a Soviet fighter jet. Everybody on the plane is killed, including a congressman, American congressman.

It's just before Labor Day weekend, okay? President Reagan is at his ranch near Santa Barbara. The government is dispersed. Everybody's away, basically, enjoying the last days of summer. George happens to be in Washington. He comes into the State Department and takes command. And that is the first moment.

It wasn't something he could sustain. Over the next couple of years, he had to keep fighting to gain command. But that was the first moment at which he really had the wheel in his hands and the way he wanted to proceed. Everybody, including Weinberger and Clark and the others, were saying, cut off relations with the Kremlin.

No further contact with them. Sort of ala Jimmy Carter after the invasion of Afghanistan, no diplomatic contact. We're isolating. We're freezing you out. Well, George thought, it's not such a good idea to freeze out the Kremlin. They've got thousands of nuclear warheads. Let's keep talking to them. Let's be brutally honest with them about what they just did in the skies over the Kamchatka Peninsula.

But let's keep talking. He won that battle, ended up going to Madrid, and had a brutal, probably you may have had some brutal confrontations with Russian foreign ministers. But he had what may well have been the most brutal conversation that an American secretary of state ever had with Andre Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: But yet a couple of years later, then Gorbachev would come to power. And I think George can be credited with helping Reagan to recognize that this might, in fact, be a new day when the desire for better relations was not just on the american side, but also on the soviet side.

 

>> Philip Taubman: Yeah, so George went to the funeral for Chernenko, who, Brezhnev died-

>> Condoleezza Rice: Three of them in a row.

>> Philip Taubman: Andropov died, and then Chenenko died. This was all within a matter of two or three years. And finally they got to Gorbachev, who was 30 years younger than these older leaders, had a fresh outlook on the world, was not a captive of marxist leninist thinking, was a firm believer in the Soviet Union, but understood that it was a failing state, basically, economically and politically and socially.

My wife and I lived there for three years. I just cannot tell you how clear it became to us in a matter of weeks that this was basically a third world country with nuclear weapons. You know, we would go to dinner at the home of Russians, and they would be very proud to serve us dinner.

And the main course, potatoes, because they couldn't get meat. That's what life was like. And so George goes over, meets Gorbachev after the memorial service, and instantly recognizes that there's been a sea change in the Kremlin. And he comes back to Washington and he says to Reagan essentially what Margaret Thatcher had said after Gorbachev had gone to London before he became Soviet leader, which was, we can do business with this man.

And indeed they could. And I think it's essential, though, to understand. I make the argument in the book, and, in fact, Gorbachev made it better than I did. In a quote that starts the book, he said that the Cold War could not have ended without Ronald Reagan, but Ronald Reagan could not have ended the Cold War without George Shultz.

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yeah.

>> Philip Taubman: So they wanted to bank back the tension. They both truly wanted to eliminate nuclear weapons, which was an astounding idea. It still is today. But until Gorbachev came to power, there really wasn't anybody to talk to in the Kremlin. And then Gorbachev comes in and appoints this remarkable foreign minister, Edward Shevardnadze from Georgia.

And George and Shevardnadze bonded in a kind of amazingly constructive and effective way and in a deeply, deeply personal way. There's a letter here at the Hoover archives and library that everybody should have a look at. It was written by Edward Shevardnadze in 1989, after George had left office, and he.

Shevardnadze was still foreign minister. It's a very touching letter talking about their relationship, and in it he refers to them as kindred souls. I mean, can you imagine Andre Gromyco writing that to any American secretary of state?

>> Condoleezza Rice: I don't have that letter from Sergei Lavrov either. Yes, but of course, extraordinary events.

Then Reykjavik by time 1989, and then the end of the Cold War is upon us, does end. But it wasn't all easy for George. There were also the mistakes, the problems of, for instance, the Iran Contra affair. And I think you shed more light on this particular episode than I've seen in any other rendering of it.

So perhaps talk a little bit about that.

>> Philip Taubman: Well, that, again, is actually due to the material right here at the Hoover institution. There is an extraordinary diary here that you'll see, those of you who read the book, that a lot of the description of George's time as secretary of state at the beginning comes from that.

Diary by his executive assistant. And in that diary, I found that George knew more about the trading of arms for hostages than he ever publicly admitted. And then when that operation began, not only did he not oppose it, he essentially said to the people in the White House who were running it, keep me posted on what you're doing.

I don't want to know too much about it. Later, when that operation metastasized into the Iran-Contra affair, which was not only the trading of arms for hostages in the Middle East, but then taking the profits from those arms sales to Iran and diverting them illegally to support the Contras in Nicaragua, that was the Iran-Contra affair.

And George didn't know about the Contra side of it, eventually he came to oppose the arms for hostages. But when the special prosecutor, Lawrence Walsh, investigated that whole case, he came this close. I think most people don't realize, he came this close to indicting George Shultz because they found testimony.

They found in notes taken by a successor executive assistant with a lot of information about the scandal that George had not acknowledged in his congressional testimony. So George was vulnerable to both perjury charges and obstruction of justice charges. They looked very seriously at those. And then Walsh decided, I think, properly, that how could he charge someone who had, over time, become one of the fiercest critics of the whole thing?

But that's a chapter in the book that sheds light on an aspect of George's career that he was, I think, found awkward to talk about. I'll tell you in the audience tonight, I think, is one of my terrific research assistants, Kelsey Davidson, who went on to get a master's at the Kennedy School and a degree at Harvard Law School, is now practicing law up in San Francisco.

Kelsey dug into a lot of this stuff at the National Archives. She came back with a lot of material about this from the Walsh investigation. And when she and I went in to confront Schultz about this, he was staggered about it. And then I think the next time we went in, he looked at Kelsey and says, what else have you learned about me?

 

>> Condoleezza Rice: Sounds like George. Yeah, any time in public service is gonna have those moments when issues are complicated. And that was certainly one of the most complicated ones. So fast forward, George Schultz finishes his service as Secretary of State, having finished a trifecta in the cabinet of labor, treasury, and state.

 

>> Philip Taubman: And don't forget OMB.

>> Condoleezza Rice: OMB, as well comes back, and there's another 30 years. And so in that 30 years, I think the thing that I would say most about George Shultz is he insisted on continuing to learn. He was curious in a way that was very deep.

It wasn't a sort of superficial curiosity. And he launched himself with Sid Drell and Bill Perry and Henry on a world without nuclear weapons. And he launched on climate change here at the Hoover Institution, a task force that came up with an idea that's still toodling around out there of a revenue neutral carbon tax.

He just kept going. So talk about the last few years when we had him here.

>> Philip Taubman: So this goes back to George's days as a professor. George never stopped learning, studying. He had an enormous kind of curiosity about the world, and the habits he developed as a graduate student at MIT and then as a professor at MIT and University of Chicago continued.

And he would often say that after all of these positions that he held over the years, the one that he still regarded as himself as was as an academic. And so when he left the job as secretary of state, he came back to Stanford, which he loved, had a beautiful house here on campus.

And he devoted himself for the next 30 years, really, right up almost to the day he died, working on all of these issues. Nuclear disarmament, major effort by George Shultz to try to move the world towards nuclear disarmament, in league with Kissinger, Bill Perry, and Sam Nunn, and the late Sid Drell here at Stanford, that was a focus of his life.

He worked on economic policy issues, entitlement programs, he worked on climate change. He came to understand that climate change was real, that it was caused by human activity. It was not some kind of mirage that was gonna disappear tomorrow, and so he devoted himself to dealing with that.

He and James Baker, your former fellow secretary of state, came out in favor of a carbon tax. He parted company with the republican establishment consistently on these critical issues. And then, you know, when Donald Trump became president, he became very uneasy with where the Republican Party was going.

He was quite circumspect in his public criticism. But privately, I can tell you, he was very unsettled by what he saw. And so, you know, I was in touch with him literally within a week or two of his death, and he was still working these issues. And right up through his last years, those of you who live on campus, you might have caught a glimpse of George driving his Nissan LEAF around campus, all electric car.

So I looked at it and I thought, my God, this guy's 98 years old. Should he still have a driver's license? But he was driving around campus. That's right, and very often driving his LEAF to see a Stanford football, basketball game cuz he was a huge fan of Cardinal.

By the way, this is where my friendship with Condi really bonded was at Stanford football games.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Football tickets together, it's really important. So amazing life, let's take a moment to kind of sum it up and let me start it this way. When I was asked to be Secretary of State, I called George, and he said it's the best job in government.

I said you should know, you've had every job in government, so I'm gonna listen to you on that. But my memories of George are many, perhaps the one when I see a kind of image of him, he's wearing a tie, and that tie says democracy is not a spectator sport.

And his life really was emblematic of exactly that. For him, in the nation's service was the most important way that one would characterize him So can you talk about that?

>> Philip Taubman: Yeah, I will. And I think, though, before I should say a word or two about the Theranos case, because I know it's the subject that so many people are kind of fascinated by.

And I don't think you can have a book I deal with it, or a conversation about George without touching on it briefly. I won't have a lot to say about it. I don't have a lot to say about it in the book. It was truly heartbreaking to see his engagement with Elizabeth Holmes and his involvement with Theranos.

It was just a staggering misjudgment on his part very late in life, and it sundered his family, as, you know, his relationship with his grandson especially. It was really heartbreaking for me to watch that, and I was sorry to see that become such a kind of central topic of conversation in the book.

I deal with it, but I deliberately do not let it overshadow his other achievements. So, George. I find myself thinking about George now that he's gone and the many things that he did and the service that he gave the nation in so many ways. And the word that keeps coming to my mind is patriot.

And it's a word that is thrown around a lot these days in ways that I think have lost its meaning. I think if you really want to understand what American patriotism is, you look at the life of George Shultz. He served his country as a Marine in combat in World War II.

He came back, he got his PhD in economics at MIT, served the nation and the world of higher education as a scholar, as dean of the University of Chicago Business school, where, by the way, he played a major role in trying to bring more African Americans into the Chicago business school.

He goes on, Labor Secretary, we've talked about. As secretary of state, he devotes himself to solving the biggest problem of the last part of the 20th century, international problem, the cold War. And he and Reagan and Gorbachev and Shevardnadze solved it. It was all but over by the time he left.

So when you look back at his life, that is the life of a true american patriot.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Thank you. Now over to you. If you have a question, please raise your hand, and we will get a mic runner. Yes, I see. Right here. And then, Bob, I'll come to you.

So right in the middle here, yes.

>> Audience 1: Hi, in one of the introductions when George was talking here a year or two ago, I guess, he was introduced, as he says, I just want to be remembered as a Marine. Did you get that in any of your discussions with him?

 

>> Philip Taubman: Yeah, George was so proud to be a Marine. He talked about it constantly. He spent time as much as he could with marines over the years. There was a great dinner that Charlotte hosted up at their place in San Francisco. I forget, maybe it was marking one of his birthdays.

It wasn't his 90th. It may have been a later one. And the centerpiece of the evening, all her parties were incredibly extravagant. And in this one, the sort of the evening was when two very senior marine officers appeared from a room with a dress uniform for George to wear.

Of course, we were led to believe it was a dress uniform from the time he was in the Marine Corps. It was not. It was a new one, fought in a number of bloody battles in the Pacific. And he never remembered. Frankly, he didn't want to talk about this much with me.

And I find that to be true of a lot of the greatest generation who fought in World War Two. When I've interviewed them for various books I've done, they don't really want to talk about what they saw and heard and witnessed because a lot of it was so horrific.

But George eventually would talk about the things that he'd seen. It's always stuck in my mind. There was an engagement on an island that had been occupied by the Japanese. The marines came. The Japanese troops had evacuated, and they thought it was going to be a cakewalk. And then they came under fire from a group of japanese war planes.

And he was in an anti-aircraft group that set up their anti-aircraft equipment, and they were trying to fire. They were disorganized. It was a rout, and a bunch of the marines were killed. George survived. He comes running back to the place where he'd left his most valuable aide and sergeant, and he came back and asked, where's the sergeant?

And another Marine said, sir, he's dead. He never forgot that. And as Secretary of State, it was very interesting because George believed in the judicious use of American military force to achieve diplomatic ends, what you would call coercive diplomacy. But he was very, very careful about the application of power.

And as you know, he devoted a lot of the later years to trying to rid the world of the weapons that could eliminate civilization in an instant.

>> Condoleezza Rice: He also had a memory of being told by his drill sergeant. Yes, right. You want to tell us?

>> Philip Taubman: Yeah, those of you who knew George know this story.

He went to Marine boot camp and a drill sergeant presented him with his rifle, and they're showing him how to take apart the rifle, clean it, put it together, go out and use it. And the drill sergeant says, never point this rifle at anyone unless you're prepared to pull the trigger.

And George would tell that story countless times. And the coda to the story was always, don't make false threats.

>> Bob King: Bob King, if George Shultz were alive today as a young man and Secretary of State, how would he deal with the war in Ukraine? How would he deal with Putin?

 

>> Philip Taubman: I think the best I can do as looking at a life and trying to apply it to the present, I think he would do pretty much what President Biden has done. I think he would have come out very strongly against the invasion, and he would have provided all the american military support that he possibly could, short of the kind of weaponry that might draw the United States and Russia into direct combat for fear that that could lead to nuclear war.

You know, so I think pretty much, you know, he was critical of democratic presidents, but in this case, I think he probably would have done largely what Biden has done. And he was very wary of Putin. He met Putin a few times, and I think he actually warned.

This is, I note this in the book a number of years ago, I think it was 2014 or 2015, he and a colleague, Ambassador James Goodbye, wrote an article that George endorsed. And the article basically made the argument, watch out for Putin. He has territorial ambitions in the states that used to be Soviet republics.

So I think, I think George knew who Putin was and what he was capable of.

>> Condoleezza Rice: And he actually supported, for instance, the expansion of NATO.

>> Philip Taubman: Yes.

>> Condoleezza Rice: He was a very big believer in that. Other questions. Do we have a couple of others? Yes. Over in this quadrant over there, yes.

 

>> Audience 2: Thank you. I have a similar question to the last question. How do you think he would have handled the issue with the immigration or the border crisis at this time? Thank you.

>> Philip Taubman: So that's interesting because I went with George to a luncheon at the Olympic Club in San Francisco four or five years ago.

And he brought with him that day the speech that Ronald Reagan gave about immigration. I recommend everybody here go back and read that speech. It was a really eloquent defense of the role that immigrants have played in American history, the vital role they have played in constantly renewing America.

And Ronald Reagan believed that, and George Shultz believed that. And at that lunch, he interrupted, he was answering a question. He stopped, and he pulled that speech out of his jacket, and he read it out loud to everybody. So there's no question that George believed fervently in the need to welcome immigrants into this country.

That's different, of course, from the situation on the southern border these days, where there is a flow of people across the border that seems out of control at the moment. I don't know what he would have done about that. I don't know what President Biden is gonna do about that.

We all know what Donald Trump tried to do about it. It is a really serious, seemingly insoluble problem at the moment.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Yes. There's another question in the same row.

>> Audience 3: Fantastic afternoon, thank you. Talk about your own experience, Phil, in being George Shultz's biographer.

>> Philip Taubman: So, yeah, being George's biographer, it's an interesting challenge to write a biography of a person who's alive.

And he lived really almost up to the completion of the book, obviously not for its publication. So the genesis of the book, this is a wonderful Stanford esque story. I'm at a luncheon before the big game, right? And it's hosted by the Stanford president on the Stanford campus when big game is here.

It happened to be here that year. George is there. I was there. He pulls me off into the corner. And he says, Phil, you're working on this book about me and Henry and Bill and Sid. What's your next project? I said, I don't have one. He said, would you be interested in writing my biography?

And I said, well, I hadn't thought of that. I'm flattered that you would ask me, but I have to be honest with you. I gotta think about it. I've got another book to finish first. And he was very patient. I finished the other book, and he had said to me, by the way, if you want to do it, I'll give you exclusive access to my papers at the Hoover archives.

And he gave me permission to start looking at those. And sure enough, I found this incredible journal that was kept by his executive assistant, Raymond Sites. So when I finished the partnership, the book on nuclear weapons, I went to George and I said, I'm ready to do the book.

I'd be delighted to do the book, but you and I have to have a clear understanding about how this book is going to get done. It's very simple. I said, it's your life, but it's my book. And he said, perfect, I completely understand that. And so he operated on that basis, and he gave me full access to his archives.

He met with me dozens of times. Basically, anytime I wanted to interview him, he was available. He opened doors for me to go see his counterparts from the time he was secretary of state. That led to my meeting with Helmut Schmidt. It led to meetings with the former British foreign secretary.

You know, George was incredibly helpful, but I had to maintain a distance with him, just as any journalist has to maintain a distance with the people that he or she is writing about. And my feeling was that George, I knew I would be best served by writing an independent account of him, including his failures and his flaws, which are evident in the book.

And I thought he would be better served by such a book, rather than a book written by someone who was writing a hagiography of George Shultz.

>> Condoleezza Rice: Well, I think you'll join me in thanking Phil for really a wonderful conversation, but also a wonderful book. George Shultz is, in many ways, one of the patrons of what we do here at the Hoover Institution, a real inspiration to young and those of long standing.

We don't say old, those of long standing. And he really was such a presence here. And we are delighted that we were able to. To welcome you to talk about the book. And now we would be even more delighted if you go and consider buying the book. It is available right out here.

There's also a reception afterwards for those who would like to attend and maybe spend a little bit more time with Phil. But please join me in thanking Phil Taubman for a wonderful evening.

>> Philip Taubman: Thank you.