The Annenberg Public Policy Center community celebrates the life and mourns the passing of statesman George P. Shultz, who served as secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan and secretary of labor and treasury under President Richard Nixon, and was a close friend of Ambassadors Leonore and Walter Annenberg.
Shultz was also a longtime friend of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania and The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, where he was a frequent guest.
“Our work with Sunnylands has brought us into contact with some truly great Americans,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of APPC, professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Sunnylands program director. “We are privileged that George Shultz was among them.”
In 2007, Shultz delivered APPC’s second annual Leonore Annenberg Lecture in Public Service and Global Understanding on the subject of diplomacy for the future. To a packed auditorium, he spoke of the global economic expansion and warned against growing protectionism in the United States and abroad, saying that “when people could not get the goods they needed through normal trade, they opted for military action. … We need to learn the lessons of history.”
He said the United States needed to formulate a clear policy on its relations with Islamic nations. “There is a bit of a miscellaneous, ad hoc quality to what we are doing now,” Shultz said. “We don’t have a concept, as we did in the Cold War.”
Shultz was a speaker at the first Sunnylands retreat that APPC organized in 2003, the Bipartisan California Delegation Retreat, where he spoke with legislators and newly elected California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about the growing water and climate crisis. Shultz also served as a convener of the Sunnylands retreat on the lessons the United States could take from its experiences with Radio Free Europe.
In February 2012, at the opening of The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands to the public, Shultz took part in a panel discussion on global security along with former Secretary of Defense William Perry.
“The Annenbergs enjoyed a close relationship with George Shultz that was treasured deeply,” said Sunnylands President David J. Lane. “His passing marks the end of an era at Sunnylands.” Read more about Shultz at Sunnylands.
