Van Hollen, Sullivan Introduce Resolution Honoring Late Secretary George Shultz

U.S. Senators Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), co-chairs of the Senate Foreign Service Caucus, have introduced a resolution honoring the life, achievements and legacy of George P. Shultz, who died on Saturday. Shultz served as secretary of state in the Reagan administration, secretary of the treasury and of labor in the Nixon administration, and senior staff economist in the Eisenhower administration. Early in his career, Shultz also rose to the rank of captain in the U.S. Marine Corps, including serving in the Battle of Angaur during World War II. Schultz had recently celebrated his 100th birthday on December 13, 2020. 

“Statesmanship and service above self consistently characterized the remarkable life of George P. Shultz,” said the senators. “Throughout his distinguished career, Secretary Shultz championed American diplomacy and strengthened its home institution—the Department of State—all in pursuit of a more peaceful, prosperous, and cooperative world order. Secretary Shultz’s example as a patriot and public servant will undoubtedly serve to inspire and guide future generation of American leaders.

“We mourn the loss of Secretary Shultz, and extend our deepest condolences and sympathy to his family.” 

Below is the full text of the resolution introduced in honor of Secretary Shultz: 

Whereas, on December 13, 1920, the Honorable George Pratt Shultz was born in New York City as the only child of Margaret Lennox and Birl Earl Shultz;

Whereas, upon graduating cum laude from Princeton University with a major in economics and a minor in public and international affairs in 1942, Shultz joined the Marines and nobly served his country as a captain with a Marine anti-aircraft unit deployed with the United States Army’s 81st Infantry Division to the Pacific for the bitterly fought Battle of Angaur in the Palau Islands;

Whereas, following the war, Shultz earned a doctorate in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught in the Department of Economics and at the Sloan School of Management until taking leave to serve on President Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisors;

Whereas Shultz then went on to join the University of Chicago as Dean of the Graduate School of Business from1962 until 1968; 

Whereas Shultz left academia to honorably serve our country in a number of critical economic positions, including as Secretary of Labor, the country’s first Director of a modernized Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and Secretary of Treasury;

Whereas, during his time at the Department of the Treasury, Shultz co-founded the “Library Group”, which helped coordinate follow-up to the abolishment of the gold standard and the Bretton Woods system and develop what would eventually become the “Group of Seven” or the “G–7,” an important forum that has strengthened international economic and security policy by regularly bringing together the world’s advanced economies to assess global trends and tackle pervasive and crosscutting issues;

Whereas Shultz served as Secretary of State from 1982 to 1989 and was directly involved in bringing Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev and President Reagan together through a process based upon mutual and verifiable trust, thereby allowing them to reach agreement on the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty), which eliminated ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, and to initiate negotiations to reduce long-range strategic nuclear arms;

Whereas, during his tenure as Secretary of State, Shultz had a strong and mutually supportive relationship with the career Foreign Service, which he relied heavily on to advance key international initiatives and attain foreign policy achievements of the Reagan Administration;

Whereas Shultz recognized the need to better prepare a new generation of diplomatic service officers, whether Foreign or Civil Service, and ensured the creation of what became the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center (NFATC), thus expanding short-term skills training to hundreds of ever more diverse Department of State and Federal Government personnel;

Whereas, upon returning to private life in 1989, Shultz became a Distinguished Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, wrote and edited several books, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, along with more than a dozen other awards and prizes;

Whereas, in his later years, Shultz passionately advocated for a world without nuclear weapons; and 

Whereas Shultz recently called for the strengthening and modernization of the professional education and training of our career diplomats: Now, therefore, be it 

Resolved, That the Senate—

1. honors the life, achievements, and legacy of the Honorable George Pratt Shultz;
2. celebrates the statesmanship that consistently characterized Shultz’s life;
3. acknowledges Shultz’s published concern for and strengthening American diplomacy and its home institution, the Department of State by creating a School of Diplomacy at the National Foreign Affairs Training Center; 
4. commends to future generations Shultz’s example as a patriot and public servant both in war and in the pursuit of a more peaceful, prosperous, and cooperative world order; 
5. extends its deepest condolences and sympathy to the family of the Honorable George Pratt Shultz; and
6. respectfully requests that the Secretary of the Senate transmit an enrolled copy of this resolution to the family of the Honorable George Pratt Shultz.