In the Nation’s Service: The Life and Times of George P. Shultz

George Shultz combined years as an academic and as a successful business leader with service in four cabinet-level positions—as secretary of state, labor, and the treasury and as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Taubman covered Shultz as a reporter and had full access to the man, his family, and his papers and is the first to have seen a detailed journal kept by Shultz’s executive assistant at the State Department. The journal documents incredible infighting and sometimes humiliating end runs in the Reagan administration, producing nearly constant “chaotic conflict.” Shultz persevered, calling on a seemingly inexhaustible fund of personal loyalty to the president until he was able, in the end, to facilitate diplomacy with the Soviet Union and thereby make critical contributions toward ending the Cold War peacefully. Ultimately, he became one of the most admired public servants of the century. Taubman never lets his closeness to his subject cloud incisive judgments of an admirable career that was not without failings, including a reprehensible episode near its end involving the fraudulent biomedical company Theranos and its disgraced founder, Elizabeth Holmes.