December 17, 2003 George P. Shultz Gives Third Annual Kissinger Lecture on February 11

George P. Shultz, secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan for eight years, will deliver the 2003 Kissinger Lecture on “A Changed World” at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 11, in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First Street S.E., Washington, D.C. The lecture is free and open to the public, but space is limited. No tickets are required.

The lecture will be cybercast live on the Library’s Web site at www.loc.gov. After Feb. 11, the webcast of the lecture will be featured on the Library’s Web site at www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc and www.loc.gov/kluge.

Shultz, who is currently the Thomas W. and Susan B. Ford Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, was born on Dec.13, 1920, in New York City. He graduated from Princeton University in1942, receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics. That year he joined the U.S. Marine Corps and served through 1945. In 1949, he earned a doctorate in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Shultz taught at M.I.T. from 1948 to 1957, taking a year’s leave of absence in1955 to serve as senior staff economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower. In 1957 Shultz was appointed professor of industrial relations at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He was named dean of the Graduate School of Business in 1962. From 1968 to 1969, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.

After serving as secretary of labor for 18 months, from January 1969 to July 1970, under President Richard Nixon, he was appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Nixon named Shultz secretary of the treasury in May 1972, where he served until May 1974. During that period he also served as chairman of the Council on Economic Policy.

As chairman of the East-West Trade Policy Committee, Shultz traveled to Moscow in1973 and negotiated a series of trade protocols with the Soviet Union. He also represented the United States at the Tokyo meeting of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In1974, he left government service to become president and director of Bechtel Group, where he remained until 1982. While at Bechtel, he maintained his close ties with the academic world by joining the faculty of Stanford University on a part-time basis.

Reagan nominated Shultz to be his secretary of state, and he was sworn in on July 16, 1982, becoming the 60th U.S. secretary of state; he remained in that position throughout the Reagan administration. In January 1989, he rejoined Stanford University as the Jack Steele Parker Professor of International Economics at the Graduate School of Business and a distinguished fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Shultz was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, on Jan.19, 1989. Among his many other awards and honors are the Seoul Peace Prize (1992), the Eisenhower Medal for Leadership and Service (2001) and the Reagan Distinguished American Award (2002). He holds honorary degrees from a number of universities, including Columbia, Notre Dame, Loyola, Pennsylvania, Rochester, Princeton, Carnegie-Mellon and City University of New York. He has also been honored with degrees from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tbilisi State University in the Republic of Georgia, and Keio University in Tokyo.

Shultz has published widely in the field of economic policy throughout his career. His most recent publications include “Economic Policy Beyond the Headlines” (2nd edition), co-written with Kenneth Dam (University of Chicago Press, 1998), and his best-selling memoir, “Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State” (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993). His monograph “Economics in Action: Ideas, Institutions, Policies” was published in 1995.

The establishment of the Henry Alfred Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library of Congress in 1999 created an endowment to provide for a Kissinger Scholar and a Kissinger Lecturer. The Kissinger Scholar, a distinguished senior researcher chosen annually through an open international competition, spends a research period of 10 months at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. The current scholar is Lanxin Xiang of the Institut Universitaire des Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Kissinger Lecturer, chosen annually by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, may be of any nationality and is an individual who has achieved distinction in the field of foreign affairs. The inaugural Kissinger Lecture was delivered in October 2001 by Henry Kissinger himself and the second by Valery Giscard d’Estaing in February 2003.