George Shultz
Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow

Expertise: Global political and economic policy

George P. Shultz is the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He was sworn in on July 16, 1982, as the sixtieth U.S. secretary of state and served until January 20, 1989. In January 1989, he rejoined Stanford University as the Jack Steele Parker Professor of International Economics at the Graduate School of Business and a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution.

He is a member of the board of directors of Bechtel Group and Fremont Group. He is chairman of the J. P. Morgan Chase International Council and chairman of the Accenture Energy Advisory Board. He is also chairman of the California Governor's Council of Economic Advisors and co-chairman of the Committee on the Present Danger.

He was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, on January 19, 1989. He also received the Seoul Peace Prize (1992), the Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service (2001), and the Reagan Distinguished American Award (2002). He is the recipient of the Elliot Richardson Prize for Excellence and Integrity in Public Service, The James H. Doolittle Award, and the John Witherspoon Medal for Distinguished Statesmanship. The George Shultz National Foreign Service Training Center in Arlington, Virginia, was dedicated on May 29, 2002. Shultz as named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2005.

His publications include Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines (2d edition), cowritten with Kenneth Dam (University of Chicago Press, 1998), and his best-selling memoir, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993). His monograph, Economics in Action: Ideas, Institutions, Policies, was published in 1995 as a part of the Hoover Essays in Public Policy series.

He also authored Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines (1978); Workers and Wages in the Urban Labor Market (1970); Guidelines, Informal Controls, and the Market Place (1966); Management Organization and the Computer (1960); and Labor Problems: Cases and Readings (1953).

From 1981 until his appointment as U.S. secretary of state, Shultz was chairman of President Ronald Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board.

He became secretary of the Treasury in May 1972, serving until May 1974. During that period he also served as chairman of the Council on Economic Policy. As chairman of the East-West Trade Policy Committee, Shultz traveled to Moscow in 1973 and negotiated a series of trade protocols with the Soviet Union. He also represented the United States at the Tokyo meeting of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

In 1974, he left government service to become president and director of Bechtel Group, where he remained until 1982. While at Bechtel, he maintained his close ties with the academic world by joining the faculty of Stanford University on a part-time basis.

Shultz served in the administration of President Richard Nixon as secretary of labor for eighteen months, from 1969 to June 1970, at which time he was appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget.

From 1968 to 1969, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

In 1957, Shultz was appointed professor of industrial relations at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He was named dean of the Graduate School of Business in 1962.

He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1948 to 1957, taking a year's leave of absence in 1955 to serve as senior staff economist on the President's Council of Economic Advisers during the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower.

Shultz holds honorary degrees from the universities of Columbia, Notre Dame, Loyola, Pennsylvania, Rochester, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon, City University of New York, Yeshiva, Northwestern, Technion, Tel Aviv, Weizmann Institute of Science, Baruch College of New York, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tbilisi State University in the Republic of Georgia, and Keio University in Tokyo.

Shultz graduated from Princeton University in 1942, receiving a B.A. degree in economics. That year he joined the U.S. Marine Corps and served through 1945. In 1949, Shultz earned a Ph.D. degree in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.