George Shultz

Born in New York City on December 13, 1920, Shultz grew up in New Jersey, served in the Marines during World War II, then earned a doctorate in industrial economics from MIT and taught there until 1957. After a stint on Eisenhower's Council of Economic Advisers and a turn as dean of the University of Chicago's business school, Nixon tapped him as Labor secretary in 1969, where he imposed the Philadelphia Plan - the federal government's first use of racial quotas to force construction contractors to hire black workers. He became the first director of the Office of Management and Budget in 1970, then Treasury secretary in 1972, presiding over the Nixon shock and the collapse of Bretton Woods. After leaving in 1974 for an executive role at Bechtel, he returned in 1982 as Reagan's secretary of state and pushed the president to engage Mikhail Gorbachev, a gambit that thawed U.S.-Soviet relations; he opposed the Iran-Contra scheme that funded Nicaraguan rebels with illegal arms-sale money. He retired in 1989 but stayed in the mix - advising George W. Bush, sitting on corporate boards, and later championing a carbon fee to address climate change. His grandson Tyler bec