McManus: George P. Shultz was the best recent secretary of state, even if he doesn't always get credit
When foreign policy scholars list the best secretaries of state of the last half-century, the usual choices are Henry A. Kissinger, the brilliant but amoral strategist who arranged Richard M. Nixon’s opening to China, and James A. Baker III, the deft tactician who helped George H.W. Bush complete the process of ending the Cold War.
He pushed to limit nuclear arms and to keep human rights a major goal of U.S. foreign policy at a time when that concept was still new. And as much as any American, he deserves credit for making the end of the Cold War possible.When Shultz became secretary of state in 1982, the United States and the Soviet Union were mired in bitter confrontation, including a nuclear arms race that raised fears of war on both sides.
Through conversations with Soviet officials, Shultz also detected interest in détente in Moscow, even before the reformist Mikhail S. Gorbachev came to power in 1985.And he struck an unusual alliance with Nancy Reagan, the president’s wife, who wanted her husband to go down in history as a peacemaker, not a warmonger.
“Without Reagan the Cold War would not have ended,” Gorbachev said in an interview for Shultz’s biographer, Philip Taubman. “But without Shultz, Reagan would not have ended the Cold War.”That wasn’t Shultz’s only achievement. He kept human rights, which Democrat Jimmy Carter had put high on the U.S. foreign policy agenda, as one of his priorities; not all Republicans agreed.
Other aides persuaded Reagan that the arms deals, which violated U.S. policy, should continue even after they touched off a full-scale scandal. Shultz dug in his heels and insisted that the sales stop, saving the administration from further embarrassment.Bottom line: If Reagan is remembered as a great foreign policy president, he owes much of his reputation to the patient, often unspectacular work of his secretary of state.
Reagan was a man of strong instincts, but he was famously inattentive to detail, and he presided over a team of often bitter rivals. “Sometimes in our administration, the right hand doesn’t know what the far-right hand is doing,” the president once joked.Making policy often turned into “a kind of guerrilla warfare,” Shultz wrote in his memoirs. Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and CIA Director William J. Casey tried to block Shultz’s attempts to negotiate with the Russians.