A story George P. Shultz’s admirers love to tell is that when he was President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, he would call newly appointed U.S. ambassadors into his office, where he had a giant globe of the Earth. Shultz would ask the ambassadors to point to the country they represented, and when they did, Shultz would spin the globe back to the United States. “No,” Shultz would say, “this is the country you represent,” according to several accounts from former State Department officials.
“It goes to the fact that he really understood the importance of a domestic constituency” in forming foreign policy, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg said of Shultz, who died Saturday at age 100. “It’s very similar to what we’re facing today.”
