School of War - Ep 58: Philip Taubman on George Shultz

Episode Date: January 24, 2023

Philip Taubman, lecturer at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and author of In The Nation's Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz, joins the show to discuss the legacy of American statesmen George P. Shultz. ▪️ Times  • 01:52 Introduction • 02:14 First encounters with Schultz • 06:44 An old-fashioned patriot  • 10:10 Secretary of State  • 15:38 Different approaches to defeating Communism  • 20:00 Two sides to Reagan  • 26:44 Hawks • 31:05 Schultz, Clark, and Dobrynin • 33:35 Arms control  • 38:24 The end of the Cold War • 41:55 Tension as a tool

When Ronald Reagan came to office in 1981, among not a few American elites, there was a sense of doom. Not a Democrat and not even a reasonable Republican. Ronald Reagan was a conservative. And when it came to the Soviet Union, America's preeminent national security challenge, he was an apparently uncompromising hawk. He had a tendency to speak as though communism was evil and the Soviet regime didn't have legitimacy. And this kind of talk frightened some people. But even though Reagan indeed went on to take an aggressive line with the Soviets, from the very start, he was also open to negotiations. And real diplomatic progress was made with the Soviets, especially on arms control throughout the 80s.

This diplomacy was led by a singular American figure, one of only two men to serve American presidents in four separate cabinet roles, a U.S. Marine veteran of the Pacific, and a man who commanded something that's rare enough in Washington, real respect. Today, let's take a closer look at the Reagan foreign policy, and let's do it by talking about George Schultz. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Hawaii. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who are not these buildings. We'll fight on the beaches.

It will fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McClain. Thanks for joining the School of War. I'm joined today by Philip Taubman, author of In The Nation's Service, The Life in Times of George P. Schultz. He's a lecturer at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University.

He had a 30-year career at the New York Times, specializing in national security issues. Philip, thank you so much for joining the show. My pleasure. So before we get into the subject of your business. book, you've had a sort of long and fascinating career, and I thought you might tell us a bit about your own work. And your encounters with Schultz began early, right? You were a reporter covering the Reagan administration when you came across them. So tell us a bit about yourself and tell us how you first came to know the subject of your book. Right. So most of my career was spent at the New York

Times as a reporter and editor eventually as Washington Bureau Chief. I've served as Moscow Bureau Chief. And it was in the capacity as a reporter in the Washington Bureau in the 1980s in the first term, Reagan's first term, that I encountered Schultz after he became Secretary of State in 1982. I traveled with him abroad on a couple of trips. I got to know him a bit. And my focus of my coverage and the role I played as an editor at the Times was national security affairs. So I've I naturally gravitated towards the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA, other, you know, power agencies in Washington. Got it. Tell us a bit, you talk about in the book about your actual first encounter.

How did it go? What was your view of George Schultz before you met him and how did meeting him affect it? Well, his reputation at the time, you know, was as a kind of reserved figure, a Secretary of State who communicated. with the media, but offered few, if any, news breaks in his communications. So my first meeting with him took place on his Air Force plane on the way to Asia, and I was summoned up to the front of the plane to meet the Secretary of State and his top aides. We exchanged pleasantries, and then a bit later he conducted an airborne news conference, you know, with a half dozen or so correspondence on the plane and indeed made no news. That was my first encounter with him. And, you know, he was,

he kept his distance from the media. Eventually, I guess he became comfortable, you know, talking with me. And at one point, one of his aides said on the next trip, which was to Brazil and a couple of other stops in Latin America, they said, bring your tennis racket. The secretary plays tennis and is always looking for someone to play with. And so sure enough, in Rio one day, I got a call in my hotel room asking if I could play tennis with the secretary, you know, a few hours later. And off we went. It was, you know, a strange experience playing with the Secretary of State. First of all, you know, there were people to retrieve the tennis balls as if you were playing at a Grand Slam tournament. And secondly, there was a doctor, the State Department doctor,

with his medical kit standing by the court in case the Secretary of State keeled over. But his game, interestingly, turned out to be very much like the man himself. Very steady, unflashy, returned everything. It was kind of an interesting window into his personality. And then you'll correct me on the details here if I say anything wrong, but you were colleagues later at Stanford. And, you know, this is an authorized biography. I'm curious how that came about and also how you think about the challenge of, you know, writing a product that has real integrity about someone you had a personal relationship with. How did how did that work?

So it's interesting. You know, writing a biography about a living person is different than writing about someone who's deceased. You have access. I had a lot of access to Schultz. And he gave me access to his papers at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. voluminous materials in an archive that was sealed to everybody else until his death. But at the time, I agreed to do the book. I made very clear to him that I needed to handle it independent of him, even though it was in some ways, I suppose, an authorized biography given the access. So the way I put it to him was blunt, and he readily agreed. I said, George, it's your life, but it's my book. And that means that you have no control. troll over the content of the book. And he said that's fine. And indeed, over the course of the project, which lasted almost a decade, he never tried to influence what I was writing. Well, let's talk about

Schultz then. So, you know, obviously the peak of his career and the period in which he spent the most time in the book is his service as Secretary of State in the Reagan administration. But this is really a great American life. Talk a bit about his family and his early life. Service the Marines. Yeah, you know, in many ways, he was a quintessential American patriot using that term in a kind of old-fashioned way. It gets tossed around a lot these days and I think, you know, is applied in terms that are often inappropriate. But if you look back at George Schultz's life, it was an old traditional patriotic life. Served in the Marine Corps in World War II and the Pacific theater was involved in a number of, you know, combat circumstances. A number of his fellow

Marines were killed around him on one tiny island one day when they came under Japanese air attack. And then he went on from there, you know, completed his education with a PhD in economics at MIT and was an academic for quite a few years after that. And in that capacity, especially as dean of the business school at the University of Chicago. He quietly, but effectively, you know, brought more African-Americans into the business school student body, made no fuss about it, but it was, you know, an early effort on behalf of civil rights. And then when he became Richard Nixon's labor secretary, he also made some important strides on civil rights, especially a major effort, a successful effort at the time to desegregate southern school systems. That was a role he inherited as the

deputy director of a commission that Nixon had appointed that was led by Vice President Agnew, and Agnew wanted nothing to do with desegregating the southern schools, and so the job fell to Schultz, which he handled very effectively. He had a kind of axiom about negotiation and mediation that sounds, it is simple in its expression, but it actually is a very effective method of trying to resolve disputes. And it went this way. If you bring people together and they argue over principle, they'll never come to agreement. If you bring them together and present them with a problem to solve, it's likely they'll solve it. So that's what they did on the Southern School systems. And then he went on, you know, for a period, he

He was the inaugural director of the Office of Management and Budget. Treasury Secretary under Nixon went off to be a senior official at the Bechtel Corporation, the International Construction Company, and then came back to Washington in 82 as Secretary of State. And his contribution there, which was really his signature contribution as a public servant, was to wind down the Cold War, which he did in concert with President Reagan. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his counterpart at the time at the Kremlin, the foreign minister, Edward Chevronoza. So let's spend our time on the 80s then.

So I learned this from your book. He is the only, one of only two Americans to have held four different cabinet posts. And what's especially striking about his example is the three posts, each of increasing prominence in the NICS administration, are all concerned with domestic policy and economics, which is indeed his background and specialty. How is it that he becomes Secretary of State? And was that sort of universally acclaimed at the time, or was there criticism? Well, it was a fluke.

You know, he was very happily working as by that point as president of Bechtel reporting to the, you know, the ultimate authority at Bechtel, which who was Stephen Becht. And Al Haig, Alexander Haig, was Secretary of State. Haig had served in the Nixon administration, had been White House chief of. of staff during the meltdown of Watergate at the end. And Nixon was a big proponent of Hague and urged Reagan to appoint him as Secretary of State. He had other admirers, but he flamed out very quickly as Secretary of State. Antagonized Reagan. People may remember his famous pronouncement on the day Reagan was wounded in an assassination

attempt. And Vice President George Bush was traveling at the time. not in Washington. So Hague went into the White House press room and declared, I'm in charge here now, you know, which struck people as a usurpation of his authority. You know, the Secretary of State was not in charge of the American government at that point. I don't think he meant that literally, but that was kind of the final, you know, blow. So he was fired by Reagan, and there was discussion about whom to bring in to replace him, they considered a number of people, but Reagan eventually opted for Schultz, whom, as you said, had very little foreign policy experience.

And I think there were a lot of people, including Nixon, by the way, who didn't think he was suitable to be Secretary of State. Nixon made that clear to Reagan, but Reagan went ahead. So he had a steep learning curve when he took office. But, you know, he was a very thoughtful guy, a reader, a student of history. But in those first years, a Secretary of State, he could not really gain traction in the Reagan administration, because his view, which was quite different from that of many Reagan aides, was that the Cold War should be defrosted. Relations with the Kremlin should be stabilized as best they could, understanding that, you know, that would never be an ally. And so he pushed for that over and over again in his first years as Secretary of State

and kept getting rebuffed, not directly by Reagan often, but by Reagan's aides. And he became increasingly frustrated. Just to stick with the moment for the question of his selection, I was interested in reading your book. In addition to Nixon, Kissinger levels some criticism of the choice or of the prospect. And he makes the claim that because of his lack of experience, He says he's an impressive guy, obviously. I guess it's hard to find people who didn't think George Schultz was an impressive guy. But because of his lack of specific foreign policy experience, he would be captive to the State Department bureaucracy. How do you evaluate that claim?

I assume Schultz's critics on some level believed it turned out to be true. What's your take on that? So, you know, that's interesting. That's a common sort of worry about secretaries of state that tells you a lot about why. Washington, because the core of it is this view that if you're Secretary of State and you are following the advice of the career diplomats at the State Department, that you will be hopelessly wedded to the idea that all international problems can only be solved by diplomacy, and that the application of military force is a bad idea in every instance, and that you

will become essentially a puppet to the pinstribe crowd, pinstribe suit crowd at the State Department. And that complaint was always raised by Secretaries of State who were not close to the presidents to whom they served. And it could be a death sentence in many ways, you know, for a Secretary of State. Cyrus Vance, Jimmy Carter's Secretary of State, same accusation. William Rogers, Richard Nixon's first Secretary of State before Kissinger became Secretary of State. Same accusation. And I think in many ways, it's unfair, but it is a reality of life in Washington, especially if you're a proponent of policies that are out of favor at the Defense Department, the CIA, and elsewhere around the president. And that's exactly what happened with George Schultz. So this question kind of connects to

your description of his early years in office of pushing for a prag, let's, let's, to use words, I think you use, or words similar to those that you use, sort of pragmatic approach to the Soviet Union and to the Cold War, you know, I think the critics would have, would have assumed, right? And this gets complicated because it's really a question of what the true Reagan administration is or who the true Reagan is. And you have a, you have a take on this. That's interesting. That to be, to be aligned with the consensus of the State Department on this or that question would be to be, at odds with Reagan's true views. Reagan is the paradigmatic Cold War hawk, is morally offended by the Soviet Union in a way that is certainly not universal in the American government or universal at the

State Department. He's not, he's not pragmatic, right? Now, that's not, that's not your take on. What's your, what's your response to that? So, you know, is there, the way this unfolded, somewhat goes against the grain of the accepted history of the Reagan administration. And, and what I was able to learn about this, which I think provides the core of the book and whatever revelations there are in the book, comes from a diary that was kept by Schultz's executive assistant during the first years of his service as Secretary of State. And this diary, it's 800 plus pages, single space typed that was kept by the executive assistant and then was sealed in the Schultz archive until I had got access to it. What it shows, interestingly, is that Reagan and Schultz, while they didn't know it

when Schultz became Secretary of State, actually agreed that trying to reduce international tensions and unwind the Cold War was their ultimate objective, and that trying to reduce, if not eliminate the danger of nuclear war was their paramount concern. So Reagan rolls into office with all this hot anti-Soviet rhetoric, a huge buildup at the Pentagon in terms of Pentagon spending and American defenses, uses phrases like the evil empire to describe the Soviet Union, says communism will wind up on the ash heap of history. And people assumed, and they were not wrong in assuming that Reagan, as you said, was a Cold War hawk. But underneath all of that, he actually was a patient.

peacemaker or wanted to be a peacemaker. And in George Schultz, he found exactly the right partner for that. But it took Schultz a number of years to figure this out, and for he and Reagan to spend the time together talking so that they understood they were actually in agreement on their ultimate goals. And then how much could they have done, you know, had that line of Soviet leaders continued the way it was going, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko. They might never have made any headway. But when Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leaders, suddenly they actually had a counterpart in the Kremlin with whom they could talk, who shared their goals for very different reasons, that winding down

the Cold War was a necessity. Yeah, it's sort of a really big picture question for you, because this was what was on my mind as I was reading your very interesting book, was this question of these two sides of Reagan. And the way you present it, both in the book and just now, is there's this kind of head of steam or this sort of front leading aspect of Reagan, the hawk. But beneath it, this is the sort of metaphor you consistently use. Beneath it, there was this desire to pursue a more pragmatic course, you know, adjust the language here as you see fit. And you are the expert on the 80s and I am not. I did just have on the program a few weeks ago, Willem Bowden from the University of Texas, who has this new Reagan biography, The Peacemaker.

I don't know if you've had a chance to look at it. But he, you know, he's dealing with the same dynamic. I mean, it's impossible to ignore the fact that there are these two sides to Reagan. And the impression I would have from reading his book is that it's less that there's, there's one sort of imposed atop the other, that, you know, the pragmatic side is sort of struggling to get out, as it were. And more that actually these are, these are just two sides at the same point, that for Reagan, there was no contradiction between, on the one hand, hating communism, hating the Soviet Union

and what it stood for and taking measures that were extremely. confrontational, for example, with the defense build up and so forth. And on the other hand, pursuing agreements, you know, pursuing arms control agreements, for example, these diplomatic overtures that were designed to make the world a kind of safer place. And that somehow in his mind, these two things coexisted. And I suppose what I'm asking is, you know, is another version of what is the true Reagan? You know, is it is the true Reagan was a pragmatist kind of hidden by all the ideological stuff? Or is it more of a two sides of the same coin? Like, how would you talk about it? So my take on it is that there were two sides to Reagan.

There was the hawkish side that was in the foreground in his first term. But underneath that, there was the idealistic Reagan. But the main point of my book, I think, is that the idealistic side of Reagan was submerged because, for a number of reasons. One, he was surrounded by hawkish aides who did not have any kind of idealistic streak. And they were hell-bent, basically, on confronting the Kremlin and rolling back Soviet gains around the world. Secondly, Reagan was averse to confrontation. Reagan was, in some ways, you know, above the battle within his administration, was inattentive

to the disputes that were taking place among his age and was reluctant to intervene, and that it wasn't until, and by the way, by the end of his first term, George Schultz had already been there now a couple of years, there was almost no diplomatic activity that was underway that was leading anywhere. So to simplify it, I think, yes, Reagan wanted to wind down the Cold War. He was an idealist, but he didn't really know how, to move ahead with the execution towards a diplomatic resolution of the Cold War, or what would have been tantamount to that, until George Schultz showed up. And Schultz kind of allowed Reagan to be

the idealistic Reagan to come forward. And then it was Schultz who really designed and executed the diplomatic strategy with Gorbachev. So I think Colin Powell, whom I interviewed for the book, to put it very well. He talked about the fact that it was it was Schultz who was able to translate Reagan's inner urges about the Cold War into a diplomatic strategy to actually end the Cold War. And I think absent George Schultz, even with Gorbachev, I'm not sure that would have happened. You tell this dramatic story in the book of a of a dinner between the Schultz and the Reagan's, the architect of which appears to be Nancy Reagan in the midst of a winter storm early in 1983 and early in Schultz's tenure that is the beginning of a closer personal relationship with Reagan and Schultz.

Tell us a little bit about that here. Yeah, that was a critical moment. And, you know, if you look back at the end of the Cold War, you can actually go back to that dinner and you can thank Mother Nature for producing a blizzard that kept the Reagan's at the White House that weekend. they couldn't get up to Camp David. And Nancy Reagan at that point picked up the phone and called Schultz and said, can you and your wife come over for dinner tonight? And that was more than a coincidence. I mean, it was lucky that there had been this blizzard. But Nancy Reagan was determined that her husband's legacy be that of a peacemaker. And she was growing by this point February 83,

increasingly alarmed at the belligerence of the Reagan administration and the rising reputation that her husband was getting as a warmonger. And so she took advantage of the snowstorm to bring Schultz over to the White House. And they had a dinner that was really the first time that George Schultz was able to have a one-on-one conversation with Reagan about World Affairs and the Soviet Union. And it became clear to Schultz that night. He saw the idealistic side of Reagan, really, for the first time in person. And it was at that moment that he realized he really had an ally in Reagan in wanting to unwind

the Cold War. And that was really the beginning of his effort. It took him many years to essentially gain command of American foreign policy because of the opposition. But that was a turning point. And the outcome of the dinner was a meeting between Reagan and the Soviet ambassador, yes? Yeah, and believe it or not, here we are in February 83. So Reagan, as at this point been president for two years, he has never really met Anatoly Dobrenen, the Soviet ambassador. He'd gone over to the Soviet embassy to sign a condolence book when Brezhnev died.

But, you know, previous presidents had had numerous meetings. with Dobrenen, who was a kind of iconic figure in Washington, long-standing Soviet ambassador. So George Schultz says to Reagan at this dinner at the White House, Dobrinan's coming in to see me next week. How about if I bring him over to meet with you? And Reagan says, great, bring him over. So Schultz figures, they'll go over, talk for 10 or 15 minutes,

and that will be it. They get to the Oval Office, or actually, I think they met upstairs at the White House because they were trying to keep the meeting private lasted almost two hours. And at the meeting, they agreed that they would make an effort, Schultz and Dobrenen, to try to get a breakthrough on a human rights issue at the time, which was a number of Pentecostals in the Soviet Union had sought refuge at the American embassy and had essentially been living there.

They were terrified of returning out to the street for fear they would be arrested, and sent to the gulag, the prison camps. And so Schultz and Dobrenen began a quiet effort to try to deal with the Pentecostals. And the offer that Schultz and Reagan made, very unlike what we've seen in recent years in Washington, was if you can deal with the Pentecostals, let them go, eventually let them immigrate. We won't say a word about it. We won't say, yeah, we got you to do that. We won't crow about it.

And that's exactly what eventually happened. Is it, I'm curious about the, I'm just calling the Hawks for purposes of brevity, but folks like Bill Clark, the National Security Advisor, Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, Casey at CIA, right? Is it really as, you know, what could take what you're saying to present a kind of, you know, that they presented a kind of monolithic front against dialogue on the one hand in Schultz. On the other hand, it was sort of the voice of pragmatism and against, confrontation. I don't think it can actually be quite so, so crisp and clean, right? What were,

what were Schultz's actual views in terms of the use of the military and the, you know, the expansion of the military's budget on the one hand? And then I guess I could ask a version of the same question about the Hawks, you know, were they really as as as closed off to dialogue as maybe I heard you suggest? Well, you know, Schultz supported the military buildup, you know, and Schultz was, was hardly soft on communism, you know, he was a determined cold warrior. But he wanted to wanted to reduce the tensions, really, for fear, above all else, that somehow it would lead to a nuclear war between the two superpowers. And interestingly, for a guy who had served in the Marine Corps during World War II, he was

a believer in the use of military force in the interests of diplomacy, so-called coercive diplomacy. And at times, that put him at odds with Casper Weinberger. So, you know, the sort of caricature of the two guys, which is wrong, is that Schultz wanted nothing to do but diplomacy and Weinberger wanted to make war. That's not really an accurate depiction. Weinberger, like all secretaries of defense, was wary of the use of military force because he was in charge of the men and women who would be wounded and killed in the use of American military force. And Schultz, and this is often true with Secretaries of State, was interested in the use of military force in support of diplomacy.

So this played out in the Middle East at the time in a way that might seem counterintuitive with these caricatures that I referred to. So, you know, as the Israelis were moving deeper and deeper into Lebanon at this time to try to subdue the Palestine Liberation Organization, it was Schultz, who was the average of sending Marines into Beirut, Lebanon to keep the peace. And it was Weinberger who was opposed to sending them. And of course, in that case, it turned out disastrously. You know, the Marine barracks outside of Beirut was blown up in a terrorist truck bombing. 250 or so Marines were killed. And Schultz later said it was the worst day of his life as an ex-marine. But in some ways,

it was Schultz who had brought them into Beirut to try to preserve the peace. So when you pull back from the Middle East equation, what you see is Weinberger determined to build up America's defenses, not because he wanted to go to war, but because he thought that was a way to force the Soviet Union to pull back from confrontation. With Bill Casey at the CIA, it was clearly an ideological crusade against communism, and he was determined to oppose the Kremlin at every turn, which he was doing in places like Central America. So, you know, I think it's more complicated, as you suggest. But once it became clear, I think that Schultz wanted to really entertain serious negotiations with the Kremlin.

Weinberger and Casey and Bill Clark, the National Security Advisor, were really inalterably opposed to that. And I think an example. I can give you, going back to the meeting with Reagan at the White House and the effort with the Pentecostals and the Soviet ambassador, not long, first of all, Bill Clark opposed the meeting between Dobrynin and Reagan after he learned about it. And secondly, after it took place, he actually and his aides made the claim, which was, I think, preposterous, that the only reason that Ronald Reagan had agreed to meet with Dobrennan and and had agreed to try to undertake an effort on the Pentecostals was to appease Nancy Reagan.

I almost hesitate to ask this question because I feel like I'm going to play go-between between the brilliant historians and the actual experts who joined me on the program. But in the Inboden book, which I read just a few weeks ago, that I take your point and you have it, you have it documented in your book that Clark is opposed to the Dobrenen meeting. But there is, I recall some discussion, I could look it up, but some discussion of, of Clark laying out before the winter dinner, the Winterstorm dinner, a memo in which there is some discussion, right, of a dialogue with the Soviets.

So is it that he's opposed to all dialogue, or is it he is miffed, perhaps, that the move towards a dialogue happens actually without him or without him being consulted? Well, I think it's a bit of both. I mean, he clearly was annoyed that Schultz had essentially, you know, done this with Reagan bringing Dobryne

But it's clear from the notes that were kept by Schultz's executive assistant, which I drew on, that Schultz had tried to get Clark to come to the meeting between Dobrenan and the president. And Dougherne and Clark wanted nothing to do with it. So, you know, I think, you know, it's always an exaggeration to say that the opponents of, you know, better relations with the Soviet Union, you know, were inalterably opposed to any kind of diplomatic initiative. There were arms control negotiations going on in Geneva, but they were going nowhere because the Americans were really not willing to consider any modification of their positions. So, you know, I understand the idea that, you know, there was discussion around Reagan about

diplomacy, but the reality is it was going nowhere. There was practically no diplomacy. Well, this is a famously disordered White House, right, during the Reagan administration. I always thought that one of Reagan's funniest lines was, you know, unfortunately we have the kind of White House where sometimes our right hand doesn't know what our far right hand is doing, which is really a good line. Well, you know, one of the takeaways for me from the Sites journal was how Reagan was kind of disengaged a lot. And he seemed to be oblivious at times to the fact that Schultz was being shut out, was being kept away from him on one-and-one meetings. It was really only after the Blizzard meeting that, again, due to Nancy Reagan, and in this case, Jim Baker, who was the White House Chief of Staff, and Mike Deaver, who was the Deputy Chief of Staff, the three of them, Nancy Reagan and Baker and Deaver got together, basically.

said, we've got to make time for George Schultz to meet with the president one-on-one. And they did. And then when the lunch, a weekly lunch was arranged, Schultz said, shouldn't Bill Clark come to the lunch? I don't want to do an end run around the National Security Advisor. And Reagan's answer to that was no. Let's just try you and me for a while. Can we talk about the arms control negotiations and sort of the major muscle movements that Schultz focused on through the rest of his tenure? You know, what was the arms control architecture when he comes on to the scene in 82? And what were the major achievements that he left behind? So, you know, the Reagan administration inherited the history of

U.S. Soviet arms control, which involved on one level what are known as strategic nuclear forces, which are the intercontinental ballistic missiles, the bombers and the submarine-launched missiles carrying nuclear warheads, all of which can span continents and would be used in a full-scale nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. And that was always the key was how can we reduce the threat of nuclear, strategic nuclear war as the term was used. And those negotiations, you know, dated back to the Kennedy Johnson administration, through the Nixon administration, the Ford administration, and so on, Carter administration. And there'd been a series of agreements not to reduce strategic weapons, but to limit their growth. And the Reagan administration

came into office, hoping in some ways to continue those negotiations. Those were the negotiations that were largely stalemated in Geneva as Schultz came into office. Then there was a separate set of negotiation involving intermediate range nuclear forces, which were warheads on top of missiles that could be launched in the European theater, basically. Some of these missiles were based in the Western Territory of the Soviet Union, could take out London, Paris, Bonn, within minutes. And the Reagan administration was determined to place counterpart missiles in West Germany, particularly. that could strike Moscow, Leningrad, and other Soviet cities. And so there was a second set of negotiations focused on these intermediate range missiles.

They weren't really making headway. And eventually, and this was a critical point, and if you're sort of looking at the world between hawks and doves, this was an important achievement for the hawks that should never be underestimated. was the success of placing Pershing intermediate range missiles in West Germany. And that was a pivot point, really, in the Cold War, because at that point, the Kremlin knew that those missiles were going to be there and that if they wanted to reduce the risk that those missiles would be launched against Moscow

and Leningrad in particular, there had to be a negotiation. So basically, to make a long story short, Schultz tried to revive both strategic and intermediate range negotiations with the Kremlin. And then when Gorbachev came in, they were actually able to make progress, especially on the intermediate range forces. And oddly enough, it was at the Reykjavik summit, this kind of summit that took place on short notice that was viewed as a disaster and a failure at the time at which Reagan and, Gorbachev actually discussed the abolition of nuclear weapons, and then the talks fell apart.

But it was at Reykjavik in 1986 that the ground was really laid for what was ultimately the Holmark Treaty of the Schultz-Ragan era, which was the treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear weapons. Can I ask you about the way in which you speak about the end of the Cold War in the book and here in the interview. You know, if you, if you had asked me, you know, I was a child during, during the events that are being documented here, but you know, how did the Cold War end? I would have answered something like, well, the Soviet Union collapsed. Reagan, Reagan thought it would always happen, then it happened under George Bush, and then the Cold War was over.

And I take it that there's a nuance that you would suggest needs to at least be added to that, that there was a cooling of the Cold War, if you'll forgive the expression, at the end of Reagan and into Bush was such that, I don't want to put words in your mouth. Is it that if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed, the Cold War still was on its way to being at an end? How would you actually term the diplomatic achievement of Schultz in partnership with Reagan? Well, there's no question. The Cold War ended during the administration of George H.W. Bush, and it was a great achievement of Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, to bring that Cold War to a bloodless end largely,

although I think the larger credit has to go to Gorbachev for trying to do that before he was ousted. But if you go back a few years, essentially the tension, the most dangerous flashpoints in the Cold War were drained away by race, and Schultz and Gorbachev and Chevronozy. And so, you know, just look back to, I think the symbol of that was Gorbachev's

1987 visit to Washington. He came to the capital of capitalism and the superpower United States as a conquering hero, almost, although conquering is the wrong word. He was viewed as a hero. I was there. And as his motorcade moved around Washington, literally tens of thousands of people lined the streets to greet him and welcome him. And if you're looking for a moment when the Cold War ended, I would say, you know, symbolically that was the moment in Washington. Yes, you know, the Soviet Union and the United States remained as rivals at that point and potential ultimately as antagonist.

But the tension was largely drained away at that point. What would have happened, you know, otherwise, it's hard, you know, it's hard to look back on history and try to figure out alternative scenarios. Had the Soviet Union not collapsed, had the Kremlin remained in charge of the Soviet Empire, the ultimate end of the Cold War, I think, might have played out over a longer period. And maybe there would have been a moment of unexpected drama that would have revived the Cold War at that point. Yeah. Last question is this conversation sort of just provokes me to think of it in this way. And I'm curious what your response to this is, you know, you've started using this language of hawks and dugs. And depending on your your politics and your attitudes towards communism, the Soviet Union, you might naturally prefer the sort of generalized approach of one group over the other.

but your INF example specifically makes me want to ask, you know, is there a way in which that for Reagan, the competition actually was essential? That is to say that, you know, the diplomatic successes are hard to imagine without the, you know, the more aggressive policies and vice versa. That even if we move outside the realm of national security, purely speaking, even stuff like the air traffic controllers right out of the gate, you know, a sort of example to sort of fulfillment of Reagan critics' worst fears. Here's truly a loose canon, like somebody who we knew was kind of crazy, and here he is doing crazy stuff,

sort of strengthens, on the other hand, his diplomatic pain, right? This is a guy who actually is willing to take extraordinary measures or extreme measures, depending on your point of view. You know, is there that kind of, even if, you know, I don't think there are too many people who will push back on the notion that towards the end of his presidency in particular, he's quite, he's in certain respects passive. But there's a way in which there's actually that the tension benefits him and benefits his actual goals.

No question. That's true. So I think, you know, absent the military buildup, absent the belligerent rhetoric, I don't know that things would have played out the way they did. So I completely agree that the application of major defense spending, the Reagan support for the strategic defense initiative, so-called Star Wars, you know, space shield, never feasible technologically at the time. It was a pipe dream, but I think it scared the Kremlin that the United States might have a breakthrough in missile defense that would essentially render the Soviet nuclear forces useless. That was a powerful motive.

And then on the other side, you cannot underestimate the importance of the failures within the Soviet Union itself. So it was clear to those of us who worked in the Soviet Union. I was there for three years as a journalist, that it was a failing state in many ways. Its economy was in a stupor. My wife and I would go out to dinners with Soviet citizens, and the major entree at the dinner table would be potatoes because they had no access to meat. And so it was clear that the Soviet Union's economy was failing, that the the state planned, centralized control of the economy was a disaster, and that the defense spending was unsustainable. And all of that was understood by Gorbachev. And so his motive to come to the negotiating table was the fact that he understood the Soviet Union was in deep trouble. And so it's the combination of those forces. The belligerence and military buildup on the American side, the recognition on the Soviet side that they had to do something to wind down defense spending. But it was really George Schultz and Edward Chevronazi at the nexus of that.

Those men were the ones who understood the way to bring those powerful dynamics into a constructive dynamic together was through negotiation and diplomacy. Yeah. One thing we really haven't had time to talk about, but I just want to to note it here at the end as something in particular I took from your book was sort of the style, if you will, of George Schultz, this trustworthy, dependable, straightforward, yet creative, you know, and really talented approach to public service. It's something that you spend a good deal of time documenting. And I think that's a real contribution. He was, I mean, the phrase gets thrown around a lot, but he was in fact a great American. And thanks for documenting his career.

Philip Talbman, author of In the Nation's Service, The Life in Times of George P. Schultz. Thanks so much for joining the show. Yep, my pleasure. Thanks. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.