President Ronald Reagan’s longtime secretary of state, George P Shultz, who spent most of the 1980s trying to improve relations with the Soviet Union and forging a course for peace in the Middle East, has died. He was 100.
A titan of American academia, business and diplomacy, Shultz died Saturday at his home on the campus of Stanford University, according to the Hoover Institution, a thinktank where he was a distinguished fellow.
Shultz held three major cabinet posts in Republican administrations during a long career of public service. He was labor secretary and treasury secretary under President Richard Nixon before spending more than six years as Reagan’s secretary of state. Shultz was the longest serving secretary of state since the second world war and had been the oldest surviving former cabinet member of any administration.