When former Secretary of State George Shultz turned 100, he published a piece in the Washington Post on what he had learned over his long career. “Trust is the coin of the realm,” he wrote. “If it is present, anything is possible. If it is absent, nothing is possible.” Three U.S. presidents put their trust in Shultz’s abilities, including Ronald Reagan, who tasked him to improve Cold War relations with the Soviet Union. Shultz, who died in 2021, also achieved success in the corporate world and in academia, serving as head of San Francisco’s Bechtel Corp. and as a distinguished fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. 

A new biography, In the Nation’s Service, offers an inside look at Shultz’s legacy, from his work on Middle East peace to later efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. Author Philip Taubman,  longtime New York Times editor and reporter in Washington and Moscow, draws on Shultz’s personal papers to shed new light on how he helped shape U.S. foreign policy, and how his style of conservatism has all but vanished from today’s Republican Party.