Interview with George Shultz 2018 Transcript

Stanford, California

April 26, 2018

George Shultz: Ok, well I want to tell you an anecdote and draw some conclusions from it, and then draw a piece of advice from it. When I was in Marine Corps boot camp at the start of World War Two, I remember the day the sergeant handed me the rifle. He said, ‘take good care of this rifle, this is your best friend, and remember one thing: never point this rifle at anybody, unless you’re willing to pull the trigger. No empty threats.’ Now I think that has wide applicability, particularly in diplomacy. I told it to President Regan when I was Secretary of State. Very important to mean what you say, then people will pay attention. If they get the idea you don’t really mean what you say, they won’t pay attention to what you say. So you’ve lost an element of strength.

The idea has a positive aspect. You can turn it around to mean what I just said, that you have the reputation to mean what you say. And if I’m working with you, say a member of congress, on a deal of some kind, and I agree to something and you agree to something and I don’t do it, then the next time we’re dealing, you can’t deal with me because you don’t trust me. But if I carry out what I said I would, particularly if it’s hard to do, then trust develops. And I think it’s true in human relationships generally, that trust is the coin of the realm. You want to be a person who is careful about making commitments, but when you make one, you’re good for it. Then people trust you.

I think it’s also true that in the give and take- I know with my counter parts when I was in office, the soviet foreign minister, the Chinese foreign minister, we developed a relationship with trust even though we had adversary relationships because we always talked frankly and we never went to the press and said, ‘here’s what he said.’ These talks were confidential and regarded as such by both of us, so we could exchange views in a direct way, and it was very worthwhile because we got a lot done because of that. So, once again, trust is the coin of the realm.

Now, we can have a discussion and you can raise whatever questions you want.

Ward Mailliard: So, George, last year thanks to you and to Susan, we got copies of all of your book, Learning from Experience, and I thought since we have this opportunity to interview you on a number of occasions, that that book would make an excellent spring board for questions. So most of our questions, when we say ‘in your book,’ that’s the book.

Samith Lakka: Hi, I’m Samith and in Learning from Experience, you talk about life in the Marines before you started your career. At that stage of life, did you ever have any visions or dreams of what lay ahead?

George Shultz: Well, I was brought up during The Great Depression of the 1930s, and it was terrible. Huge amount of unemployment, wasted resources, we were short of things- we could produce them but we weren’t- it was a gigantic problem for everybody. So I thought, you know economics matters. If you get it right, maybe the economy will be in good shape, if you don’t, it won’t be in such great shape. So I thought, I’ll study economics, and that’ll be a basis for a career. And I also thought- and maybe serving in the Marine Corps helped do this to you- but when you serve in the armed forces and help fight for your country, particularly in combat, you say to yourself, public service is worthwhile, it’s essential. And so, I thought, I’ll study economics, I hope I can get a job in a good university and write stuff, but if I got a chance to serve in the government, I’ll take it.

So the first chance I had was to serve in President Eisenhower’s council of economic advisors. I took a leave of absence and did that. And it was very rewarding, I learned a lot about the government statistics, and how they put together. I learned a lot about the formation of economic policy, and had a chance to observe a little bit President Eisenhower. He was a fantastic leader, it almost seemed like he’d look at you and you knew what he wanted and you did it. He didn’t go around giving orders to people but everybody just did what he wanted, he was like magic. Tells you something about leadership.

Later on, when I was nominated to be secretary of labor some years later, I was told that if I wanted an appointment with him, he would see me. So naturally, I made an appointment right away. He was in Walter Reed Hospital, he died about four or five months later. I go in there and here’s this genial man in bed, we start talking about the department of labor. I was astonished at how much he knew about it. I thought it would be some little backwater- maybe he didn’t even know it existed. But no, he knew a lot about it, with ideas and so it seemed to me the message was, if you’re up here and you know what’s going on down here, you’re going to be effective. If you don’t know what’s going on down here, you’re not. And he knew.

And then we started talking about golf, and we knew a couple of places we both played, and we talked about that, then he started describing the national golf club to me. We were having a great time, enjoying it, then a doctor comes in, says time for (can’t understand). So all of a sudden, this genial man gets very serious, wags his finger in my face like this, this, this, ‘young man, you’re going to come down here, and you’re going to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week, and you’re going to think you’re doing your job, let me tell you something, if that’s what you do, there’s no way you can do your job, you’ll just burn yourself out. I can see you like golf as much as I do, you’ve got to get on some golf course at least twice a week, get your mind on something else, or you won’t be able to do your job. The press will get on you, don’t pay any attention, just do what is right.’ It was a nice lesson, that you’ve got to give your mind a rest sometimes, not just all the time, hour after hour, day after day after day. You’ve got to relax it. So I learned a lot from that.

Priyanka Bharghavan: Hi, I’m Priyanka. I’m curious, when writing about your time as Director of OMB, you made the point concerning setting economic policy saying, “you must keep your eye on the telltale, but you must set your course by the compass.” Can you talk more about this idea as it applied to the rest of your career, especially in your time as Secretary of State?

George Shultz: Well, I was very fortunate when I was Secretary of State to have a tough minded, strategy-oriented President to work with. The guy who I guess is going to get confirmed for Secretary of State called me up and asked for advice, I said, ‘I’ve got two things for you. Number one, don’t start out by traveling around; your first job is in Washington. People kept asking me about my foreign policy, and I always said, I don’t have one, the President has one and my job is to help him formulate it and carry it out, remember that, it’s the President’s foreign policy but if you work at it, you can have an influence, and then when you speak, everybody knows you’re speaking for the President.’ And the other thing he has to do is rally the state department. His predecessor has ruined it, and it’s a department with ambassadors all over the place, and assistant secretaries, and so on. And you conduct on global diplomacy, you can’t do that yourself, the department has to do that, and then you come in and do one thing or another, but you’ve got to have that department. So I hope he gets that up and running.

Now, President Regan had a strategy. The summary of it was peace through strength. We wanted to be strong, that isn’t just militarily strong- it is military but that isn’t it. You can’t be militarily strong if you’re not economically strong, you have to have that economic base to build on. Then you have to have a sense of purpose, and you have to be able to instill that in the country so that country is with you and feels that what you’re doing is good. So Regan had all those characteristics. We had a strategy with the Soviet Union, I laid it out before sent it to committee, and I had worked it up and I went over it carefully with the President, and I started the testimony by saying, ‘I went over this testimony word for word with President Regan, and he made a few suggestions which I was willing to accept, and he has signed off on it. So I’m reading this testimony, but I’m speaking for the President.’ So all over the world, people got that message. And I heard from our allies, ‘we heard your strategy and we see you’re carrying it out, that was understandable.’ So in the end, it worked.

But you’re conducting global diplomacy all the time. When I saw, in the Obama Administration, they had switched Asia, I said, ‘come on, you’re in the business of global diplomacy all the time.’ And it was ironic, they switched Asia and immediately the Middle East blew up and the Soviets, or the Russians, had invaded Ukraine and so they couldn’t switch either, because you’re conducting a global diplomacy all the time. That’s why you have embassies, that’s why you have ambassadors, and why you have an ability to work in a broad way.

Cyrus Kamkar: Hi, my name is Cyrus, and my question is, in your book, in the section ‘respect your adversaries,’ you wrote about the Soviets’ deep desire for respect, especially for their role in defeating Hitler, and then when you observed the mass graves you “stood at attention like a Marine and gave a long salute” and it had a positive impact on your credibility. Can you speak more about the significance of showing respect when due, even to your adversaries in politics?

George Shultz: Well, if you show respect for something that deserves it, then people think you’re honest. You criticize something you don’t think is good but you see something you don’t think is good and you’re willing to say, ‘hooray.’ So your credibility is enhanced by that. But the incident you referred to was a very moving one for me because had an opposite number. When I was secretary of treasury, one of my jobs was the U.S-Soviet economic relationship. And I had an opposite number and (can’t understand), he was a tough old guy, and we had fun together and he told me, ‘in World War Two, I was in charge of tank production in the Soviet Union, and one day- and we developed very good tanks- and one day I was called to Moscow, and suddenly I’m ushered in to see Stalin, and Stalin says to me, ‘we know have very good tanks, and what we want is production, don’t change them, produce them.’ So I went back home and my guys said, ‘hey we’ve got this great idea for some new things, produce a wonderful tank.’’ So very secretly they started to put together something different, he said, ‘I called Stalin (can’t understand), and Stalin says, ‘I know exactly what you’re doing, and you have done something better so ok, go ahead, but now I really mean it, no more changes.’’ So he told me that story, it was kind of fun.

But then, we went to then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg., for a weekend. And he said, ‘what do you want to see?’ And I said, ‘I want to see what everyone else wants to see, I want to see the hermitage, I want to see the Summer Palace.’ He said, ‘no, first we go to a cemetery.’ So, we go to this cemetery, it was a big platform, and then there were rows, and rows, and rows of mass graves, huge graves, probably as long as this room is wide. It’s a stunning site. And we walk down the center aisle, and I’m to lay a wreath at the end, funereal music is playing, Patolachof (unsure of spelling), this tough old guy, is telling me about the battle of Leningrad, and he’s weeping. And the woman who was our interpreter, suddenly she disappears and I look around and there, she was totally crushed. And he said, ‘every family in the Soviet Union was touched by this battle.’ And we got back to the platform- it was a very moving experience for everybody, so I said to him, ‘I feel a certain kinship with these people, because I also fought in World War Two, I also had comrades shot down beside me, and besides, these are the people who stopped Hitler.’ So I walked up to the front of the platform, and I got myself in my best Marine Corps straight up, and gave a long salute. And when I came back, he said, ‘thank you George, that shows respect.’

And, as your question suggested, it was interesting to me later on when I came back years later as Secretary of State, I found that people knew about that incident. And as I was saying earlier, if you show respect- and that certainly deserved respect- when it’s deserved, your credibility is better when you give criticism to something else. But that was a very moving experience.

Will Murphy: Hi, my name is Will and I was wondering, how important do you feel a deep understanding of culture and character are when dealing with countries around the world, and do we have enough of that kind of understanding in today’s diplomatic arena?

George Shultz: Well our foreign service people, that’s what they do, they work to understand just those things- and they’re good at it. And when they go to a place- I remember a young lady was working for me and she was assigned to Japan, and so she went to foreign service school and she learned to speak Japanese, but before she took up her post, she lived for two or three months with a Japanese family, where that’s all they spoke was Japanese. So take the trouble to be able to go to a cocktail party and be able to understand what’s going on. People go and they don’t speak the language, they don’t know what’s going on. Somebody might tell you, but you’ve got to feel it for yourself. So I think it’s essential for us and our differences. So you’ve got to do that and rely on people who’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what’s going on and why. And people are different, that’s life, and you can’t remake them. Sometimes you can make suggestions, but you can’t remake them.

One of the things I did when I was in office that helped a lot was I would try to block out an hour or something and say to my host, ‘take me to something you’re really proud of.’ So they’d take me to something and describe this great thing from their standpoint. And I learned a lot in that process. And from the standpoint of the impact of my visit, it was much better than three more meetings with government officials, because it was always televised and people in the country could see that I cared about their culture.

Ruby Bracher: Hi, I’m Ruby. In your book, you wrote about trust and accountability, do you think that what we see in the media is just spotlighting deficiencies in those important values for the sake of getting viewers, or do you think that trust and accountability are diminishing in the public sphere? If so, how do you think we can address this?

George Shultz: Well, I think accountability is essential in the good operation of any organization, if there’s no accountability, people just wonder off and you’re not accomplishing what you want to accomplish. I think that’s one reason why the American people like sports so much. Take golf: there you are on the green, you hold the putter, there’s the ball, there’s the cup, you hit the ball, when the ball stops rolling the result is unambiguous, it’s relentless accountability. And people love it in part for that reason. Same thing with any kind of sport, the accountability is there. So when you are managing an organization, you need to hold people accountable. Which means not just criticizing when something’s wrong, but also complimenting when something good happens. So constantly having that feedback. If you get sloppy on it, the organization doesn’t work nearly as well as it should and could. I’m afraid there’s a lot of sloppiness in a lot of our government operations. Too much fraud.

Sage Turner: Hi, my name is Sage and in your book, we read about the numerous jobs you held in a wide variety of fields, would you talk about skills that were universally helpful in these jobs, and did all these skills transfer easily into your different careers?

George Shultz: Well, I’m trying to think of what the skills are that you’re talking about, but I studied economics because I thought economics was applicable in many things, but economics also gives you a framework for thinking, it says, if you see a bunch of facts, organize them into something coherent so you can understand what they really mean, and then you draw all sorts of lessons.

I was at the MIT economics department; it was very unusual because we had psychiatrists in it. And we hired a guy named Joe Scanlon. Joe was a genius, he was the research director for the United Steelworkers Union, and we saw that he would go to places- little steel companies that were about to go bankrupt- and he’d get the management, ok, and he’d go around and he’d get the workers to start shaping their jobs in the ways they thought should be most effective. And it was astonishing, productivity would increase by 20-30% and save the companies from bankruptcy. And so we thought, you know, this guy knows something. So we got him on our faculty and we said, ‘if you can apply this idea to companies that are going bankrupt, why can’t you do it in profitable countries.

So we started, and he started doing that and something evolved called the Scanlon Plan. And I went with him to watch this process. And out of it, you get- you can’t help but feel, if you listen to people who are doing a job and have their comments on it, you’re going to learn something, because the person who’s actually doing it, knows something that you simply don’t know, even though you’re the formant and the boss, have a little humility, and listen to people. So if you make a point of doing that, I think you’ll be more effective as a manager, I learned that from Joe.

Here’s an example of applying that lesson. In 1970, President Nixon decided to end the segregation of schools in seven southern states- I describe this in my book, you’ve probably read about it- but this was long after the Brown decision. So these schools were operating in an unconstitutional way, but it had been going on for decades. So, I become the chairman of the group that is to manage this, because you can’t just announce it, you’ve got to do something to make it work. So I had- Pat Moynihan was in the senate, he was a great agent in the white house, and he was part of my team, I had a very good lawyer named Len Garment, and I had a former advance man named- what was his name? Marie I think. Anyway, we had a good group, and I said to the President, ‘we’re going to appoint biracial committees in each state, and we’re not even going to ask people about their politics, all we want are people who are respected and who are strong, we don’t care whether Republican or Democrats, we just want them to be people who are respected and who are strong.’

So we formed these biracial groups, and it was interesting to see the operation of them, as I had had some experience in this and had done some work before. We bring them in to the Roosevelt room in the White House, and I knew from my labor relations experience; you’ve got to let people blow off some steam, and as long as they’re arguing principally, you’re not going to get anywhere. You’ve got to get them talking about problems, because Americans are problem solvers. But so they blow off steam and the whites would all say, ‘this is a catastrophe and the blacks would say it’s essential for education.’ And after they got through a little bit of that, I would stop, call in the Attorney General and say, ‘Attorney General, what’re you going to do when the schools start?’ ‘I’m going to enforce the law, thank you.’ Now, and then I could say, ‘well, it’s been an interesting discussion this morning, but it’s irrelevant. It’s going to happen, whether you like it or not. So the only question is: what’s going to be the result? These are your children, these are your schools, these are your communities, so how’s it going to work? What’re the problems? What can you do about them?’ And then they gradually started to talk about that. And then I had the idea of taking them over to the diplomatic reception room in the State Department for lunch. These are elegant rooms, but one of the features is a desk on which Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, and the quill is there and everything, and he wrote, ‘all men are created equal.’ So I showed them the desk, the history. And then I was sitting with the two people who I thought would be the co-chairmen of this committee, and they got to the point where I could see they were getting to an agreement and I got up and left. And there was a justice department lawyer there who said, ‘what are you doing leaving? You guys are just about done.’ I said, ‘you don’t get it. If I’m there, and they make an agreement, it’s my agreement. If I’m not there and they make an agreement, it’s their agreement. And that’s very important, if it’s their agreement, they’re going to work hard to carry it out.’ So, sometimes lawyers will mislead you, don’t- they’re good but don’t pay attention to them all the time.

Anyway, it worked out and by the mid-afternoon in the Roosevelt Room, they were doing well in the problem solving routine. The Oval Office is right across the hall so I’d take them over to the Oval Office and President Nixon would say, ‘here we are in the Oval Office, think of the decisions that have been made in this office over the years about the security and welfare of our country, well now we have a very important decision to make, and I’ve made my decision, but that’s not enough in a country like ours. People in communities and states across the country need to make their decisions too to make it work. That’s why you’re here. And you have to work at it, but we’ll work with you to try to make this work.’ So, we had the various state people come in and Pat and I thought, you know, we’ve got this down, we can do it, and the last one was Louisiana. So we thought, let’s go down to Louisiana and have the meeting, and then we’ll have a meeting afterwards with all the co-chairmen of the different states and we’ll do it in the south and that’ll be kind of a kickoff.

So there’s a meeting in the Oval Office, I make my pitch, and Vice President Agnew is there, and he says, ‘Mr. President, don’t go. There you’ll be in a room where half the people will be black and half the people will be white, there’s going to be blood running through the streets of the south, don’t go, the blood will be on your hands.’ So, he turns to me and I say, ‘well, Mr. President, whatever happens, it’s on your watch. The Vice President may be right, but I don’t think so. You’ve met these people, they’ve come up here and you’ve talked to them, and you’ve inspired them, and they haven’t been idol, they haven’t been sitting on their hands, they’ve been working, and we’ve been working with them to figure out what the problems are and how to solve them.’ So, he decides to go.

Pat and I go down the night before, and was start again with Louisiana (can’t understand)– it’s not going as well as usual. And suddenly it dawns on me, it’s one thing to bring people to the White House, it’s another thing to be in a hotel room in their hometown, it’s not the same. But we got them into reasonable shape and all of a sudden I hear, ‘the President’s just landed…the President’s ten minutes out…five minutes out.’ So I have to adjourn to go out and say, ‘Mr. President, they’re in pretty good shape, but they’re not where they usually are, you’re going to have to put this over the top yourself. And he did a beautiful job of it.

Then we had the meeting of the co-chairmen. It was like a revival meeting, ‘have you thought about this problem? Have you thought about that problem? What’re you going to do about this?’ Exchanging information, it was really riveting and fun and intoxicating. So, the schools opened and to everybody’s astonishment, there was no violence. That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems still, but there was no violence, it worked.

So the lesson I always take from this is that with a difficult problem, get people together who- particularly people who are respected, and talk it through, identify the problems, say we should be a problem solver, not a problem creator. Somebody asked about our government today, one of the problems is, they’re all problem creators. And everybody can create a problem, but it takes some effort to solve one. And what you’re supposed to do in the government is identify the problems and then solve them, get something done. So that’s what we need.

Gracie Howley: Hi, I’m Gracie. How do you think the idea of working the problem rather than the principle can be applied when discussing the recent school shootings in Florida, in relationship to the second amendment?

George Shultz: Well, first of all, when the second amendment was written, what they had was muskets, they didn’t have automatic weapons, and there’s nothing about the second amendment that says that military automatic weapons are protected. I don’t personally see any reason why any civilian should have an automatic weapon. If you’re a hunter, you don’t want an automatic weapon, you’re supposed to have some pride in your marksmanship. And you don’t need an automatic weapon to protect yourself in your own home. These shootings on a mass scale could not happen with a pistol, or something. So first of all I would say, let’s get the problem straight and let’s get rid of automatic weapons.

That was done once, Senator Feinstein from California led the charge, and it operated well for I think 10 years, and then the law, it expired, and it hasn’t been possible to renew it. But I hope that will happen. I think background checks and all that are important, but they’re not going to do the job. Somehow or other, weapons are plentiful, people will find out how to get one if they really want one. So the idea is to keep these very destructive weapons out of existence as far as civilians are concerned. And then do what we can to get better control.

There was a very interesting column in today’s Wall street Journal by Dan Henninger, and he said, ‘maybe we’ve had a turn in this country, by the young man who saved the day at the waffle house, he just acted on instinct, and he saved a lot of lives because he didn’t stop and say, ‘I wonder if this poor guys got mental illness or something,’ he just charged and grabbed his gun and threw it away and he saved a lot of lives.’ And I think maybe, we’ve become to indulgent. If somebody commits a crime we say, ‘well, gee, society didn’t treat him right and so on.’ Let’s stop. You commit a crime, you’re a criminal, and treated that way. Let’s be a little tough minded.

It’s the same thing as my golf analogy, accountability. You do something wrong, you’re accountable. Not somebody who got you mad when you were three years old, get away from that kind of mentality. Let’s get back to calling our shots the way they are.

Mara Peruzzi: Hi, I’m Mara and in your book you also noted that some problems can only be worked at and not solved. My dad is a problem solver so this struck me as an interesting concept. I was wondering if you could speak more about dealing with the problems that can only be worked at and not solved.

George Shultz: Well, I think the problem of gun control is one of those things. Work at it, you’re probably not going to solve it for a long time, but you’ve got to keep working at it. I work hard on the climate issue, and I think it’s one of those issues you’re not going to say, ‘solved it, go on to the next thing.’ You’ve got to keep working at it, and finding new things. We are indeed, people are doing- they keep coming up with new stuff that’s really quite inspiring. But that’s because you keep working at it.

So there’re all kinds of issues where you will deceive yourself if you say, ‘this problem can be solved, put away, done with that.’ Many cases, many, many cases, the problems are of such a nature that you have to work at them, they’re not going to go away. You work at a friendship, you don’t just have a friend, you work at it. You see them, you talk to them. And that’s what life is about, is working at it.

Emily Villareal: Hi, I’m Emily and I was wondering, what problems remain that you most wish to solve?

George Shultz: Problems- well, I think there are two problems that can wipe out our planet, and I try to work on both of them. One is nuclear weapons, they are proliferating. And it a big nuclear exchange takes places, it’s the- it’s devastating for the whole planet. And the other is climate change. There’s a book that’s just come out, I’ll get you a copy Ward, called Beyond Destruction. And there’s a piece in it by a woman named Lucy Shapiro, Lucy’s a biologist, she’s here at Stanford, and her husband is a physicist he’d go with her. Lucy is the smartest person in any room she’s in, and she’s also fun, so everybody loves to have Lucy around. But she presented this paper in a meeting we had in this room about last September, and the book is just out. And she says, tropical diseases are coming north as the earth warms, this is predictable, we should be getting up our diagnostic and treatment capabilities, we’re not doing it. We also know a lot about editing genes, we should get some of these mosquitos and see if we can’t fix them so they don’t do as much damage. There’re things we can do. It’s also true that the oceans are warming, so the Great Barrier Reef is disappearing, and the corals in the Caribbean are disappearing, what does that mean? That means a big chunk of the food chain is being taken away, so there’s going to be a huge impact on fishing. In other words, she’s not arguing whether the climate is warming or not, she’s saying, ‘here’s what’s happening as a result of it.’ And this is happening. There’re all kinds of other things that can happen.

I don’t know how many of you live in California but you know how dry it’s been. So it created a tinder box. Up at our ranch, we do all kinds of things to try to prevent fire, but there’s only so much you can do when it’s really dry. And all it takes is a spark and a little wind and you’re in deep trouble. We had this big rain dump on Houston, the Gulf of Mexico is warmer than it’s ever been, so that means there’s a huge amount of evaporation taking place, what goes up there, comes down, and comes down in large amounts. So I think we can always see the effects of climate change, and personally, I think it’s very important to do what we can to work at it.

Here’s an example of something you can do. You can put solar panels on your house, or at the school, I don’t know if you have them.

Ward Mailliard: Yeah, we do.

George Shultz: Ok, so I have panels on my house, I’ve had them for quite a while. I’ve long since payed for them by the amount I’ve saved on my electricity bill. And I have an electric car that I drive around. The electricity that car uses is less than my solar panels produce. So the cost of my fuel is zero, what’s not to like? So these are things you can do, little things, and then of course there’re big things that can be done.

I’ve been advocating for quite a while, and it’s beginning to take on some traction, so I’m excited about it: a revenue-neutral carbon tax. I’m saying, let’s cut down on this regulatory business and the government telling you to do this, don’t do that, and put a price out there, and then let the market place react to that price. And we argue for making it revenue-neutral so there’s no fiscal drag from the tax. I even had the big tax- anti-tax guy convinced it wasn’t a tax because I said its revenue-neutral, it’s not a tax. And how do you make it revenue neutral? Well we say, let’s have it administered by the social security administration, that’s a bureaucracy that takes in money and puts it out. And let them take in the money and pay it out periodically to everybody who has a social security number. That’ll make it a progressive tax, and from a political standpoint, if you get your little carbon dividend check every three or four months, you get a couple grand, what’s not to like? Maybe it’ll generate political support.

Anyway, I’ve been advocating that and it’s catching on. I’ve got huge numbers of economists who’ve signed on, and we’ve been selling it to companies. We have a lot of the major companies whose names you’ve heard of, who’ve agreed on. A lot of companies have concluded, the climate problem’s a real problem, there’s going to be work at it, and this is a good way to go about it, and we’ll endorse it. And you look at some of their statements and you see that many of them have put into their assumptions about future investments, the assumption that carbon is going to carry a price, and I have to take that into account when I structure my investment and decide what to do. So I’m working on that and making headway.

Zac Clark: Hi, my name is Zac. You wrote about being quickly immersed in the world of foreign politics when you became secretary of state. As students on the verge of going off to college, we are about to go through what is a major change for us, I was wondering if you could speak more about that major transition in your life, and how you dealt with that.

George Shultz: Well, I’ve had a life of constant change, so I don’t feel like it’s changing when I go to something different, it’s more the same. But when you go into the Marine Corps, first you’re a boot. You get kicked around. I remember the Sergeant saying, ‘don’t sit down till I say sit down…sit down.’ And we all sat down. But it’s rigorous discipline that they teach. And then you go overseas and all of a sudden you’re in combat. I can remember the first taste of it I had, and I had a Sergeant named Patent that I relied on, a wonderful human being, very good. And I ran over, ‘where the hell is Patent?’ ‘Patent’s dead sir.’ I’ll never forget that moment. The reality of war sinks in. Wonderful people get killed. 60 million people were killed in World War Two. So I’m very pleased that there is, at the top of our government, Jim Mattis. Jim has been in war; he knows what it’s like. Some of the- Trump has never been in war personally, Bolton has never been in war, but Jim has. Pompeo, I don’t know a lot, he’s a West Point graduate, he has been in a war. I think it’s very important that people have had that experience because they say to themselves, ‘yeah, I can see the justification for this, but a lot of people are going to be killed so let’s be sure we get it right, and let’s be sure we have a good mission, and we have the mission designed so it can work,’ and work hard at that.

I imagine I’d told that Sergeant story to President Regan, we were very careful in what we said. I remember being in the situation room and something’d be described and somebody’d say, ‘well that’s not acceptable.’ And Regan would say, ‘well, what’re you going to do when it happens?’ The answer is ‘nothing,’ he said ‘then it’s not unacceptable, you accepted it. So don’t say it’s unacceptable unless you’re going to do something about it.’ And we were very- the only time we used force was in Grenada, and this was a Soviet base and we had American hostages on the island. We had a quick victory and people say it was a little thing, well it wasn’t a little thing, it was the first time the United States used force since Vietnam. So it showed in the terms of the Sergeant, the boot camp Sergeant, we would pull the trigger. But that’s the only time we did that.

I can’t imagine we would be in the mess in Afghanistan that we’re in now in the Regan period. In Afghanistan, we went there after 9/11, justifiably, because we knew where it came from, and we had a brilliant success. We worked with the northern alliance, one of the units. And then we let our mission morph into creating an Afghanistan with a capitol in Kabul, democratically elected government, with an army that would keep the peace. And I could remember saying at the time, ‘that’s not Afghanistan.’ Afghanistan is a very mountainous country, and this terrain keeps people separated; ‘you’re here, you’re here, here, here.’ And the people we called in derogatory terms, ‘war lords,’ well, they were running the things. And Kabul was not much in the eyes of the Afghan people. So we got it wrong, and we’ve been paying the price.

So, I think it’s very important as you’re thinking about what to do, to have experienced war, know that it’s very bad, people get killed and injured, so let’s be sure we get the mission right. Something that we can do and make work.

Jordan Willis: Hi, my name is Jordan, and my question is, in an interview with the Director of the Nixon Library you wrote, “I respect organized labor, and I’m going to work with organized labor. They’re not the enemy for me, and it doesn’t mean I agree with all their positions by a long shot, I don’t. But we’re going to talk to them and be friendly with them.” As a young person coming of age in such polarized times, do you have any advice to help us achieve useful conversation with people who have extreme differences?

George Shultz: Well, I wouldn’t call organized labor in those day extremists. Organized labor was very different in those days than it is now. Now it’s mostly public employee unions. In my day, it was steelworkers, autoworkers, and so on. Private bargaining groups. And I knew them in my role before I became Secretary of Labor, knew the leaders. And there was a phrase that we used that created in the workplace a sense of industrial jurisprudence. If you had a grievance, you had a place to go, take it up, get it adjudicated. It wasn’t just about wages, so it was about a system that worked pretty well for quite a while. It’s sort of disappeared by now, but it worked. So that, I knew and respected. And it came in handy, because often times, you want organized labor support. George Meany and I became friends, he was head of the AFL-CIO, he was a very short guy, and he made it very clear to everybody that ‘if you wanted to talk to me, go through Shultz.’ So if the President wanted to talk to Meany, he had to come to me. So that gave me some standing.

On one occasion, I remember in the reelection campaign, the President wanted to talk to George Meany, and George said, not a good idea for me to be seen going over to the White House in this atmosphere, and probably not a good idea for him either. So I said, ok George, how about a golf game on Wednesday afternoon at (can’t understand), we’ll t-off at one o’clock, ok? He says, ok, so we go and who shows up at the (can’t understand) but the President and Bill Rodgers, who was the Secretary of State. So we have a nice golf game, we sit around at a little place in the golf club after the game and they talk for an hour, nobody knew it, mission accomplished.

But the labor people have a lot to contribute, they’ve thought a lot about it. When I was dealing with the packing house workers, we had a guy named Jessie Preston, everybody looked to Jessie in the end for what’s going on. And people would propose what was called the union shop and check off of dues. Jessie opposed, he said, why don’t you (can’t understand) and make it easy? He said, because I go around and I collect the dues. There’s no time like when I’m asking you to pay me your money when you feel free to tell me what’s on your mind, right? You payed for it. So Jessie knew what people were thinking about and how they worked. And people believed in him. So we all looked to Jessie, he was fun, he was a communist oriented kind of guy. He looked at me once because I’d dealt a lot with Moscow, and he says to me once, ‘here I am a communist, and you’re a conservative economist, and you’ve been to Moscow and I’ve never been to Moscow, that’s a hell of a note.’

Imogen Cockrum: Hi, my name is Imogen. My mother is an immigrant to the US, and I’m curious about how you see the role of immigrants in this country today and what we can do to engage productively with people who hold negative views on the value of immigrants?

George Shultz: Well, have you seen or heard about the play Hamilton? Famous play. There’s a great line in the play, you know he was one of our greatest secretaries of the treasury, and he’s done a lot of stuff, the line is, ‘the immigrant got the job done.’ This is a country of immigrants, every person in this room is an immigrant or is descended from an immigrant. Everybody. Right? You go back, that’s a characteristic of the United States. And we have learned over the years how to handle immigration. We’ve learned to respect it.

Let me give you a couple of examples. My wife is a chief of protocol in San Francisco and California. San Francisco is probably the most diverse city anywhere, there’re people there from everywhere. There’s something like 70 consulates in San Francisco. So every country has a national day, like we have the 4^th of July. So every country’s national day, Charlotte has a ceremony in city hall, and she invites anybody that identifies with that country to come, and they show up in large numbers. They fly that country’s flag, they play a national anthem, and have a kind of reception. And she says, people come with tears in their eyes, but it says, we respect you, we respect your heritage, and we’re glad to have you in our country. We’re governing over the diversity.

I have a granddaughter, who’s sensational- everybody’s granddaughter is sensational, but this girl is fantastic. So she graduates from a public high school, she gets into Stanford, nobody can get into Stanford, she gets in. She takes engineering, girls don’t take engineering, right? She makes Phi Beta Kappa. Couple years later, she marries a young man who she met at Stanford, he’s also an engineer, gifted. And his grandmother was a refugee from Vietnam. And she sewed into the hem of her skirt as she left, some jewelry, that’s how she got it out. And the jewel on the ring he gave my granddaughter, was one of those jewels. And when they got married, they went to his family home- mind you, his parents were brought up in the United States, and they had a Vietnamese style wedding. Then they came to our place and we had an American type blow out wedding. But the message is, you come from somewhere else, and we respect that. And you don’t have to depart from your customs, and from your inheritance, in order to be an American.

And I remember an occasion, the Statue of Liberty had deteriorated. There was a big campaign to get it back into good shape. And it was back up, and there was a big ceremony in New York, President Regan was the star of course, I was there. And as the Statue started to get lighted up, he’s speaking. And it comes to the top and he says, ‘you can go to France, you’ll never become a Frenchman, you can go to Japan, you’ll never become Japanese, you can go to China, you’ll never become Chinese, you can go to Germany, you’ll never become a German, but anyone can come to America and become an American.’ And behind him was Henry Kissinger, who was an immigrant, he fought in the war against Germany, it’s so- my answer is, welcome.

Obviously, we have to have control over our borders and things like that. But if we ever get to the point where the best and brightest in the world don’t want to come here anymore, we go downhill, because we’ve attracted- one day, I was talking to Lee Kuan Yew, the famous man who created Singapore, one of the brightest, he was a great friend of mine. And he showed up in San Francisco and I said, ‘hey, why are you coming here?’ He said, ‘well, there’s something going on down here and we need to lighten up a little in Singapore, and learn about it, and the only way to learn about it is to be part of it. So we’re going to start a little venture capital firm in Singapore, venture capital, be part of this and learn about what you’re doing here in America.’ And I said, ‘well, Harry, when you get down to Silicon Valley you’re going to find out there’re people there from all over the world. All they want is somebody who’s smart and will work very hard.’ And he said, ‘I know that, but that could only happen in America.’

So, I think my message is, we want to keep that spigot open, and learn how to bring people in and recognize what they bring. Governing over diversity I think, is one of the hard things that people are having to pace up more and more. And the information and communication age makes that essential. But it’s been so a long time.

Ever looked at the painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware? You know that famous painting? It’s hanging in the Metropolitan museum. And there’s Washington with his hand on his heart, and his musket, it’s the war era, looking in the distance, and there’s (can’t understand) holding a flag, and there’re eleven other people in that boat, and how do you ever- anybody’s ever looked at those people. But if you look carefully, you’ll see that they’re all different; there’s a woman pulling an oar, there’s a black man in the bow, there’re people with different kinds of uniforms on. So you see, George Washington was governing over diversity, and the revolution was a unifying theme.

Now, it’s interesting, I’ve been reading up on our early history a little bit, and it’s been- I knew some, but I’ve learned a lot. One of the things I’ve learned is that we almost didn’t have a country, because the 13 colonies said, ‘we just threw off one ruler, why do we want to create another one?’ So there was a long period- but then in the Treaty of Paris, it ended the revolutionary war, the United States was granted all of the land east of the Mississippi, so this was a huge additional piece of land that none of the states or colonies had. And it became a kind of unifying force, what’s going to happen to this land? Who’s going to get it? How’s it going to work? And we also saw the importance of George Washington as a leader. He couldn’t write like Jefferson, but people worked for him, Jefferson worked for him, Hamilton worked for him, and he was persuaded to be the chairman of a constitutional convention. And when George Washington would come, everybody would come. So there was a constitutional convention, but it was very carefully done. The executive- The federal government consists of three branches to check each other: Congress, Executive, Judicial. And it’s interesting that in the house, it’s population oriented, the majority vote, the Senate initially was not directly elected, because they wanted to have some remove, but even now, can you imagine these proud Virginians, Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Virginia, the most populous state, agreeing that little contemptable Rhode Island would have the same number of votes in the Senate as they did? There’s got to be a sort of wisdom there. These people were very wise, we’re lucky to have had them.

Ward Mailliard: George, I know we’re just about out of time. What I’d like to do is just hear from a couple of you what struck you that you heard today from George? What caught your attention or struck you or had meaning for you?

Cyrus Kamkar: Well, I really liked when he said that with respect comes credibility, whether it’s criticizing something, or approving of something, as long as you respect the other side than you seem credible, and that will lead to people wanting to listen to you even if they disagree. And I also liked what you said that the government are not problem solvers but they’re problem creators, I like that.

Noah Kaplan: I really liked when you were talking about when you did the salute at the cemetery, and you were talking about how you could actually see those people, and you felt a connection to those people, through the like war experience that you had, even though you were on different, or different countries, and you had that connection that came from that, and that was really interesting to me. And like I’m kind of curious what other kinds of factors can build that connection. I realize we don’t have time for that…

Gracie Howley: Yeah, jumping off of that, that story really highlighted how important it is to have veterans in the government. To have that shared experience of, you know, being in war throughout the world, you have that connection to other soldiers, regardless of your policies, you still share that connection, I thought that was important.

George Shultz: Let me add something. Families are important. I’ve been very fortunate, my mother and father loved me, took care of me, and created a family atmosphere. And when I was playing sports, they always came and watched, and I knew they cared, it makes a huge difference. And I’ve been very fortunate, my first wife that died after 50 years of marriage, and she was very devoted to the family. In my life, there were Presidents and Prime Ministers, she could care less, what mattered to her was the family, and the children, and the grandchildren. And she died, I married again after a couple of years to a woman who’s very stimulating and fun. Who’s also very family oriented. She’s a Mailliard, the Mailliard family is a very strong institution, has a ranch that helps people get together. And she’s also adopted all my children, and now she’s a great-grandmother, because I have five great-grandchildren. I should say, I have five and a half because one of my granddaughters is pregnant, and so we’ll have six pretty soon.

I might say that these little kids, the oldest is seven, and you watch them, we get together periodically, unfortunately they live in the east so I don’t see them all the time, they’re in a hurry, they don’t walk anywhere, they run. They’re curious about everything, everything. And when they learn something, they know it. And they’re so pleased, ‘hey, I learned something.’ Looking at you, laughing, ‘look at me, I learned something.’ And you realize, learning is fun. They pounded it out of us, but it’s fun, you enjoy it. But you get things out of family life that are very important. So we have a little place we call a farm that my mother and father bought a long time ago, we all go there. And so we try to write that up so that these great-grandchildren will know where this place came from. And I have been promoting, and I’ve got the Mailliard family going, I’m doing the same thing. And I was up there once for lunch and there was this young girl, she was somebody’s granddaughter, and I said, ‘when your children arrive at this ranch, they won’t have any idea of what is- where it came from, unless somebody writes it down, people who know.’ So we’re in the process of doing that. I hope you’re doing your job Ward.

Ward Mailliard: Yes, sir.

George Shultz: Good, ok.

Ward Mailliard: George, thank you very much, this is a great honor and privilege for us.