THE REAGANAUTS 37the reality of a thoughtful intellectual who had taught economics at
the University of Chicago Graduate School and had expertise both
in business and in government. Shultz liked to test out his policies in
government by asking: ‘Could I defend it at a seminar at the University
of Chicago?’^12 He was a public servant of distinction; he knew the cor-
ridors of power in Washington better than most of the Californians
who had swarmed to the capital with Reagan. A former US Marine
who had seen action in the Second World War, Shultz was tough-
minded and determined. The secretaryship was offered to him at a
stage in his career when he could handle the strains of the post. He
had another advantage, one that Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig
lacked: he felt it would not be the worst thing to happen if ever
he walked out of the State Department. He held to his values and
knew his own value, and was in accord with most of the President’s
objectives.
He was almost alone in the Reagan administration in having any
experience of negotiating with the Soviet leadership – as President
Nixon’s Treasury Secretary he had gone to Moscow for financial dis-
cussions in 1973.^13 He was confident about his ability to seize the
available opportunities to pursue the President’s stated objectives. He
had a broad perspective on world politics and the global economy and
counted Milton Friedman among his friends and correspondents.^14
Friedman tended to avoid discussions about the Cold War but from an
economic angle he saw no point in indulging the USSR: he told Shultz
that the world’s big banks, notably those in West Germany, were
reducing the world’s ‘capital pool’ by lending money to the inefficient
Soviet economy. There was only a finite quantity of capital around the
globe. It was being wasted on the USSR.^15 Shultz shared the concern
about the global economy and its current prospects of expansion.^16
He also understood the need to perpetuate a degree of consensus
on foreign policy inside the Reagan administration. Haig’s State
Department had been like a gas-filled room: no one could tell when
the next explosion would occur. With this in mind, the new Secretary
of State instituted a regular Saturday group to discuss current business;
and he would invite Vice President George Bush and Ed Meese as well
as leading officials of the National Security Council, Defense Depart-
ment and CIA.^17 He had breakfast once a week with Weinberger,
whom Reagan had made his Defense Secretary.^18 With Bush, he would
have no difficulty. Reagan had selected him as his vice presidential
running mate in 1980 because he straddled a middling position in