George Schultz: Company Man
One of the books I bought at a library sale a few weeks back is “Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State,” by George P. Shultz (Macmillan; 1003). Although Shultz is among a group of corporate republicans that I believe should never have been given any political authority -- serving in the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 1 administrations -- I do try to include some books from the “dark side” in my library. More, having reached page 844 (of 1,138) since picking it up last night, I figure that I’m not wasting too much time on it.
Schultz is, like his contemporaries, a snake. It is easy to have my sense of contempt for him reinforced by reading this book. But at the same time, I do not view him as a poisonous snake -- he’s more of constrictive type, that has smothered the breath from our democracy. Several years after writing this book, for example, Schultz was one of the party elders who promoted Governor George W. Bush’s early presidential campaign.
What makes this book worth the 25 cents I paid for it is Schultz’s detailed story of the Reagan-Bush administration’s Iran-Contra Scandal activities. Numerous times throughout these pages, he describes Iran-Contra as an outgrowth of Watergate. Specifically, he writes about the severe damage done to our constitutional democracy by having a small group inside the White House that mix intelligence and policy and political action.
In the book, he freely calls out those who were most engaged in the scandal, including repeatedly documenting the knowing and purposeful lies of both President Reagan and Vice President Bush. Obviously, it would have been honorable to have done so publicly -- say while testifying before Congress -- rather than doing so years later, to sell a book. He knew that impeachable offenses were being committed, but George Schultz is a company man.
Still, for those of us who were outraged by the many illegal operations known collectively as the Iran-Contra Scandal -- and that includes a good many of this forum’s participants, who recognize that it was rooted in Watergate and blossomed into the Bush-Cheney scandals -- it’s worth a quarter.
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He groomed her, mentored her, introduced her to the connected people (including GWB). He even landed her a chair on the Chevron board. She was a quick study, easily shaped, yet void of an original idea; she was the perfect puppet.
