After two years in the Budget Office, Mr. Shultz became Minister of Finance in June 1972. Last year, Nixon made the dollar unilaterally convertible into gold. This forced the rest of the world to move from a system of fixed exchange rates for national currencies to a flexible system. Exchange rates were no longer the way governments did monetary policy. Mr. Shultz traveled the world making sure the dollar remained all powerful.
He resigned from the Nixon administration in May 1974, three months before the president fell from grace, as the last original cabinet member of Nixon. Before his death, he was the oldest living member in Nixon’s inner circle and, along with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, one of the last.
After 25 years in science and government, Mr. Shultz joined the Bechtel Corporation (now the Bechtel Group), one of the world’s largest engineering and construction companies, which served as president from 1974 to 1982. He received nearly $ 600,000 a year (about $ 2 million in today’s money) to run his global and domestic operations, including the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the Washington Washington Subway, Riyadh King Khalid International Airport , Saudi Arabia, and much of the infrastructure of the Saudi government.
During his reign in Washington, Mr. Shultz tried to keep a secret out of print: that he had a tiger tattoo on his rump, an inheritance from his student days at Princeton University. When asked about the tattoo, Phyllis Oakley, a State Department spokeswoman, replied, “I am unable to comment.”
Princeton, then the Pacific
George Pratt Shultz was born on December 13, 1920 in Manhattan, the only child of former Margaret Lennox Pratt and Birl E. Shultz, an official of the New York Stock Exchange. He grew up in Englewood, New Jersey, and came to Princeton in the fall of 1938.
He was in his final year in economics in 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th. After graduating, he joined the Marines and witnessed combat in the Pacific. He joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after receiving a PhD in industrial relations there in 1949. His area of expertise was labor economics.
In 1955, he took a year off to serve as an officer in the Council of Economic Advisers to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, chaired by Arthur F. Burns, who later headed the Federal Reserve Board.
