Remembering SecState George Shultz
Remembering SecState George Shultz
Some personal reminiscences about the former Secretary of State
Upon the passing of George Shultz at age 100... please allow me some fond personal reminiscences - and a few photos - of my very first experiences as CNN’s “world affairs correspondent” covering then Secretary of State Shultz.
We started on the State Department beat at the same time in 1982, when Shultz was appointed by Ronald Reagan. It was during Shultz’s tenure as SecState that CNN was initially denied a seat on his international diplomatic missions aircraft, because CNN was then an unknown quantity. But it was also during his tenure that CNN and I became a fixture on those global missions. That’s because Shultz and the US government realized that American foreign policy was being explained to the world very extensively by the world’s first (and then, sole) all-news TV network.
Among the small press corps covering the Secretary of State at that time, Shultz became known for his bow ties and for frequently dodging our questions by saying that something “remains to be seen.” (Some of us actually abbreviated his phrase in our notebooks with the acronym “RTBS,” and we shared joking glances as he repeated it in our conversations and news conferences.)
Shultz took his press corps seriously, though, cautiously sharing with us his thinking - and President Reagan’s - about complicated Cold War events. Among many strong memories, I recall Shultz glowering angrily when the Soviet Union shot down an unarmed Korean passenger jet flying slightly off-course over Soviet territory from New York to Seoul in September, 1983, killing all aboard and triggering weeks of public outrage around the world.
I also remember Shultz successfully dodging my challenging questions during one 30-minute Sunday interview show, while successfully running-out-the-clock with his own unrelated foreign policy talking points.
Like many others, I give Shultz enormous credit for successfully guiding Ronald Reagan away from Reagan’s staunchly anti-Soviet stance after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in Moscow. I attribute to Shultz’s influence the fundamental decision by Reagan to embrace Gorbachev in negotiations which encouraged a brief moment of democracy in Russia, and led ultimately to the collapse of the USSR.
One of those negotiating moments occurred in January, 1985 in Geneva. Shultz was meeting with the Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, and I was covering the talks, a few weeks before the Reagan-Gorbachev summit there. The other networks had sent their star evening news anchors to cover the Geneva meeting, but CNN had “merely” sent me. I found myself in a makeshift studio doing reports and interviews alongside the “big boys” from NBC, CBS and ABC in 1985. (That was also the occasion for me to learn that Geneva can be VERY cold in January. I've lived the rest of my life with the effects of a frostbitten toe because I stupidly wore dressy, but thin, shoes while standing on cold slate outside the US embassy in a stakeout for eight hours. ;)
Later, Reagan and Gorbachev famously met in Iceland, in a summit during which Reagan almost accepted a Gorbachev proposal that would have required the U.S. to give up all its nuclear weapons. Shultz and other key U.S. officials talked him out of it, and the disagreement prompted the abrupt collapse of the summit, without agreement.
On his international travels, Shultz initially was not a fan of “sightseeing.” He thought he’d be criticized for not “working” when he was abroad. But his first spokesman, former NBC and CBS correspondent Bernard Kalb (Marvin Kalb’s older brother) gradually persuaded Shultz to make time in his travels to experience some of the culture of the countries with whom he was doing official diplomatic business. Shultz adopted the policy enthusiastically.
On his second trip to China in 1987, Shultz was invited to visit Qufu (pronounced “chew-foo”), the ancestral birthplace of Confucius. We went to that remote town in Shandong province by train and saw parts of China most Americans had never seen. While on the train, Shultz listened, on a shortwave radio borrowed from a Voice of America reporter traveling with him, to President Reagan’s Washington speech about the Iran-Contra arms scandal, which was consuming the Washington press corps. Shultz had to borrow the radio because Chinese authorities refused to allow the American Secretary of State to set up and use the official U.S. satellite communication equipment which routinely accompanies Secretaries of State on such diplomatic missions.
At the start of that same trip, Shultz had entered China from Hong Kong, landing his plane at a Chinese military base in Guilin, where he (and his entire entourage, including the press corps) boarded a small boat on the Li River for a beautiful, slow, winding trip amid the picturesque mountains of the Guangxi region (which have been captured by artists for generations). We passed fishing towns in the rural area and caught glimpses of what was literally a “backwater” part of China.
On later Shultz trip, to Morocco, the late Don Oberdorfer (my much more senior Washington Post counterpart) and I asked Shultz’s spokesperson, Charles Redman, if the Secretary of State would conduct any official business on a Sunday in Rabat. Off the record, Redman told us that Shultz would have no official business, that he would spend the day golfing with Moroccan officials. Without informing our home offices, Oberdorfer and I hired a guide/driver, and spent a long and wonderful day exploring ancient Meknes and Fes. We also enjoyed a fabulous visit to the souk (market) in Fes, which, to this day, I think is the world’s best. We returned late Sunday night, very satisfied with ourselves, and checked in again with Shultz’s party to be sure we’d missed nothing. We hadn’t. But Redman passed along a message from Shultz’s wife, Helena (“Obie”): if we EVER did that again on a future trip without inviting HER to join us, there would be consequences!
Footnote: Regrettably, Shultz did suffer some blowback over his “sightseeing” later in his tenure, when he was once called out publicly by an inexperienced traveling journalist for taking a golf break in Hawaii on his way home from an especially grueling official mission to Asia.