George Pratt Shultz served as Secretary of State from 1982 to the end of the Reagan administration in January 1989. This was the capstone of an extraordinary public career that included four Cabinet posts, the others being Secretary of Labor, Secretary of the Treasury, and Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Shultz, who holds a Ph.D. in economics from MIT, has taught at MIT, Stanford, and the University of Chicago, and is now a Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

His tenure at the State Department saw the beginning of the end of the Cold War and—a not unrelated development—America's first use of force since Vietnam. The Shultz years brought a significant shift in U.S. relations with the Soviet Union and with Mexico, an extraordinary expansion of democracy in Latin America, and fierce foreign-policy battles in Washington between the Reagan administration and the Congress. They were also years in which the Department of State and its secretary held especially great influence. Shultz was an academic turned government official turned business executive (for eight years he had been president of Bechtel Group, the international engineering and construction firm). As secretary of state he showed himself to be an intellectual who combined a love of ideas with a great capacity for management and enormous political savvy, and he was the key element in shaping Ronald Reagan's foreign policy into a powerful servant of American ideals and interests.

Shultz visited the Ethics and Public Policy Center in January for a long talk. During his six and a half years at State he was my boss, inheriting me in one assistant secretary's post and selecting me for two more, and. this meeting was a happy opportunity to talk about old times and reflect on some current matters of foreign policy.