Filtering History: The Re-Invention of George Shultz

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Leah Garchik’s profile of former Reagan Secretary of State, George P. Shultz, falls horribly short of historical relevance.

I don’t think that there’s anything in Leah Garchik’s Sunday, April 25, 2010, San Francisco Chronicle front-page profile of former Secretary of State George P. Shultz that is basically untrue. But the 2000+word piece left this reader with an uneasy feeling. To paraphrase the great Gertrude Stein’s characterization of Oakland, California (my home town): “The trouble with the story is that when you read it, there isn't any there there.” Or as a more recent oracle might have exclaimed:  “Where’s the beef?”

Garchik’s Shultz is a sweetheart; a devoted husband, a true gentleman, and a “solid citizen.” He’s good company, and in general, an all-around fine fellow. Over the years he has written a number of books and has received almost as many awards, medals, and prizes as New York Yankee World Series victories.

In fact, one of the reasons the piece was probably assigned is that Shultz will be receiving the San Francisco Commonwealth Club's Distinguished Citizen Award later this week, in part for his work around nuclear disarmament.

Recently, Shultz has been deeply involved “working for nuclear disarmament,” Garchik pointed out. “Since leaving the government, he has chaired numerous global conclaves and panels; six months ago, he joined the advisory board of Ploughshares, the San Francisco foundation dedicated to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; and with Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn, co-authored two Wall Street Journal essays on the subject.” These days, in addition to his work around nuclear disarmament, he is often seen about town accompanying his wife Charlotte to a myriad of Bay Area events. Shultz spends part of his non-festive time as a Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Located on the campus of Stanford University, Hoover is one of the nation’s oldest and most prominent conservative think tanks.

Shultz has a long record of government service. Probably best known as Secretary of State during the Reagan administration from July 1982 until January 20, 1989, he also served in the Nixon Administration as Secretary of Labor from 1969 to June 1970, as well as Secretary of the Treasury and chairman of the Council on Economic Policy and from May 1972 until May 1974. After leaving government in 1974, he became president and director of the San Francisco-based Bechtel Group -- an international construction and engineering firm with a controversial history -- where he remained until 1982.

During the run-up to the Iraq war, Shultz served as a Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Right Web described the short-lived organization as an “influential group of hawkish Beltway think-tankers and politicians who came together at the behest of the George W. Bush administration to support regime change in Iraq in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.” Shultz was a major proponent of the Iraq invasion. In the occupation’s aftermath, Bechtel has been, as SourceWatch points out, “a hefty beneficiary of the reconstruction process.”

Even in the puffiest of puff pieces, there probably should be some critical tension, no? Since Shultz makes no bones about being a proud Republican, might not a reader expect a question about the state of the Republican Party these days? The tea parties? The party’s anti-immigration shenanigans? Not here.

I happen to enjoy what Leah Garchik dishes on a daily basis for the Chronicle. It’s a gossip column, but a gossip column with some liberalie social relevance. Someone once called Garchik the only left-leaning gossip columnist in the country. Lowell Ponte, a right-wing columnist, once wrote that while he “masochistically read[s] Ms. Garchik’s Herb Caen-esque pieces fawning over Bay Area limousine liberals without fail, … [he’s] pretty much become numb to her, as one would be with a dominatrix after a while.” (Is this metaphoric hyperbole on Ponte’s part, or does he know more about dominatrixation than he’s letting on?)

Garchik regularly offers a collection of items about people, places and events (many of them worthy charitable endeavors) that residents of the greater Bay Area are likely to be interested in. She sits well on the back-page of the paper’s “Datebook,” just a section across from Jon Carroll -- a remarkable jack-of-all-trades daily columnist.

Her profile of George Shultz, titled “George Shultz: GOP stalwart feeling right at home in San Francisco,” is just so danged off-putting. Okay, so the man is nearly ninety years old and there’s a tendency to play nice. He is both a survivor and an anomaly -- a conservative Republican (some might argue that moderate Republican), surrounded by Bay Area liberals. And he generally gets along pretty well with the community’s liberal elite. They have accepted him, in part due to his wife, Charlotte Shultz, a Democrat with a long record of service within the community.

I can’t remember any time over the past few years when anyone has asked him serious questions about his government and corporate service and its impact on the country. Or even bothered to razz him at a public event.

Let me amend that last statement: Apparently, at the April 2008 unveiling of a monument dedicated to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade – honoring the 2,800 American volunteers who went to Spain in the late 1930s to help fight against fascism -- Charlotte Shultz was there, with her husband, George. According to a lovely Garchik accounting of the day in her column, she watched Shultz and the crowd as he and his wife “settled down on a makeshift podium along the front of the monument” … [and] I thought, ‘They're going to eat him alive.’ When the band played the Socialist-Communist anthem ‘The Internationale,’ some of the vets and audiences raised their fists in salute. I couldn't see Shultz's expression, but several readers e-mailed later that it was stony.”

Garchik went on: “When, after noting the presence of the ambassador, Mayor Gavin Newsom acknowledged the former secretary of state, there was a loud chorus of boos from one side of the crowd. ‘In San Francisco,’ he said, ‘we can always disagree, but we should never be disagreeable.’ It was a good line; it sounded as though he'd had to use it before for other occasions.”

…." There was talk about fighting for democracy and for freedom. But when the term "civil war" was mentioned, it brought me up short. The weekend's news was all about civil war in Iraq; every Bush pronouncement mentions the fight for democracy and freedom.

“We are ‘fighting against fascism for liberty,’ Shultz said when I asked him about it after the ceremonies, ‘and supporting people who are doing it.’ In the Spanish Civil War, ‘people picked up arms and fought.’ To this way of thinking, the administration's decision to join the battle is even more heroic.”

Garchik noted that “Mentioning this will probably result in a deluge of mail from people whose principles I probably share. But in later ceremonies at the Post Street Theatre, when historian Peter Glazer talked about ‘blithering Bush and his vicious comrades’ and then admiringly cited the words of a Spaniard to a vet (‘How can we hate you who come from a rich country to a poor country to give your lives for an idea?’), I found myself pondering idealism, then and now.”

So that was then. A moving column. 

Flash forward two years. What Garchik presented in her piece on Sunday was ahistorical. Granted, it probably wasn’t supposed to. It is, after all, all about now. I’m not sure you can write a piece – even a  puff piece – about such an important historical figure as George P. Shultz without throwing in a little bit of relevant history.

Reading about the Shultz of this piece is like looking at a piece about Henry Kissinger and reading only about how charming he is, and seeing no mention that Nixon’s right-hand man was the key advisor during the administration’s notorious so-called wind-down of the Vietnam War; a wind-down which cost 50,000 or more additional American lives and the deaths of hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese. Could one discuss Kissinger without recognizing the role he played in the overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected President Salvador Allende, and the installation of the murderous regime of Augusto Pinochet?

The same, I believe, is true of anything written about Shultz. Would it have been too much to mention that Shultz was Secretary of State when the Reagan administration launched its contra wars in Latin American and Africa, wars that were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people? How about a note mentioning that Shultz’s relationship with Bechtel has been a tad controversial over the years? George P. Shultz may be trying to beat swords into plowshares these days, but it is worth remembering that he advocated the overthrow of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, supported President Reagan’s Star Wars initiative, and stumped for the invasion of Iraq.

Shultz is the subject of a documentary titled "Turmoil and Triumph: The George Shultz Years," which Garchik pointed out, will be broadcast in three one-hour segments on PBS on July 12, 19 and 26.

In an email, I asked Garchik why she chose to write what she did and why she didn't get into any of the more controversial aspects of Shultz's career. Kind enough to respond, Garchik told me that “The piece speaks for itself.”

BILL BERKOWITZ FOR BUZZFLASH