After attending the local public school, he transferred to the Englewood School for Boys (now Dwight-Englewood School), through his second year of high school. In 1938, Shultz graduated from the private preparatory boarding high school Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut. He earned a bachelor’s degree, cum laude, at Princeton University, New Jersey, in economics with a minor in public and international affairs. His senior thesis, “The Agricultural Program of the Tennessee Valley Authority”, examined the Tennessee Valley Authority’s effect on local agriculture, for which he conducted on-site research. He graduated with honors in 1942.

From 1942 to 1945, Shultz was on active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps. He was an artillery officer, attaining the rank of captain. He was detached to the U.S. Army 81st Infantry Division during the Battle of Angaur (Battle of Peleliu).

While serving with the Marines in Hawaii, he met military nurse lieutenant Helena Maria O’Brien (1915–1995). They married on February 16, 1946, and had five children: Margaret Ann Tilsworth, Kathleen Pratt Shultz Jorgensen, Peter Milton Shultz, Barbara Lennox Shultz White, and Alexander George Shultz. Helena died in 1995 of pancreatic cancer.

In 1949, Shultz earned a Ph.D. in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1948 to 1957, he taught in the MIT Department of Economics and the MIT Sloan School of Management, with a leave of absence in 1955 to serve on President Dwight Eisenhower’s Council of Economic Advisers as a Senior Staff Economist. In 1957, Shultz left MIT and joined the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business as a professor of industrial relations, and he served as the Graduate School of Business Dean from 1962 to 1968. During his time in Chicago, he was influenced by Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and George Stigler, who reinforced Shultz’s view of the importance of a free-market economy. He left the University of Chicago to serve under President Richard Nixon in 1969.

Shultz became the first director of the Office of Management and Budget, the renamed and reorganized Bureau of the Budget, on July 1, 1970. He was the agency’s 19th director.

Domestically Shultz enacted the next phase of the NEP: lifting price controls begun in 1971. This phase was a failure, resulting in high inflation, and price freezes were reestablished five months later.

Shultz was United States Secretary of the Treasury from June 1972 to May 1974. During his tenure, he was concerned with two major issues: the continuing domestic administration of Nixon’s “New Economic Policy,” begun under Secretary John Connally (Shultz privately opposed its three elements), and a renewed dollar crisis that broke out in February 1973.

Meanwhile, Shultz’s attention was increasingly diverted from the domestic economy to the international arena. In 1973 he participated in an international monetary conference in Paris that grew out of the 1971 decision to abolish the gold standard, a decision Shultz and Paul Volcker had supported (see Nixon Shock). The conference formally abolished the Bretton Woods system, causing all currencies to float. During this period Shultz co-founded the “Library Group,” which became the G7. Shultz resigned shortly before Nixon to return to private life.

In 1974, he left government service to become executive vice president of Bechtel Group, a large engineering and services company. He was later its president and a director.

On July 16, 1982, Shultz was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as the 60th U.S. Secretary of State, replacing Alexander Haig, who had resigned. Shultz served for six and a half years, the longest tenure since Dean Rusk’s. The possibility of a conflict of interest in his position as secretary of state after being in the upper management of the Bechtel Group was raised by several senators during his confirmation hearings. Shultz briefly lost his temper in response to some questions on the subject but was nevertheless unanimously confirmed by the Senate.

Shultz inherited negotiations with China over Taiwan from his predecessor. Under the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act, the United States was obligated to assist in Taiwan’s defense, which included the sale of arms. The Administration debate on Taiwan, especially over the sale of military aircraft, resulted in a crisis in relations with China, which was alleviated only in August 1982, when, after months of arduous negotiations, the United States and China issued a joint communiqué on Taiwan in which the United States agreed to limit arms sales and China agreed to seek a “peaceful solution.”

By the summer of 1982, relations were strained not only between Washington and Moscow but also between Washington and key capitals in Western Europe. In response to the imposition of martial law in Poland the previous December, the Reagan administration had imposed sanctions on a pipeline between West Germany and the Soviet Union. European leaders vigorously protested sanctions that damaged their interests but not U.S. interests in grain sales to the Soviet Union. Shultz resolved this “poisonous problem” in December 1982, when the United States agreed to abandon sanctions against the pipeline and the Europeans agreed to adopt stricter controls on strategic trade with the Soviets.

A more controversial issue was the NATO Ministers’ 1979 “dual track” decision: if the Soviets refused to remove their SS-20 medium range ballistic missiles within four years, then the Allies would deploy a countervailing force of cruise and Pershing II missiles in Western Europe. When negotiations on these intermediate nuclear forces (INF) stalled, 1983 became a year of protest. Shultz and other Western leaders worked hard to maintain allied unity amidst popular anti-nuclear demonstrations in Europe and United States. In spite of Western protests and Soviet propaganda, the allies began deployment of the missiles as scheduled in November 1983.

US–Soviet tensions were raised by the announcement in March 1983 of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and exacerbated by the Soviet shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 near Moneron Island on September 1. Tensions reached a height with the Able Archer 83 exercises in November 1983, during which the Soviets feared a pre-emptive American attack.

Shultz was known for outspoken opposition to the “arms for hostages” scandal that would eventually become known as the Iran-Contra Affair. In 1983 testimony before Congress, he said that the Sandinista government in Nicaragua was “a cancer in our own land mass” that must be “cut out”. He was also opposed to any negotiation with the government of Daniel Ortega: “Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table.”

When President Mikhail Gorbachev of Russia came to power in 1985, Shultz advocated that Reagan pursue a personal dialogue with him. Reagan gradually changed his perception of Gorbachev’s strategic intentions in 1987, when the two leaders signed the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The treaty, which eliminated an entire class of missiles in Europe, was a milestone in the history of the Cold War. Although Gorbachev took the initiative, Reagan was well prepared by the State Department to negotiate.

In response to the escalating violence of the Lebanese civil war, Reagan sent a Marine contingent to protect the Palestinian refugee camps and support the Lebanese Government. The October 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut killed 241 U.S. servicemen, after which the deployment came to an ignominious end. Shultz subsequently negotiated an agreement between Israel and Lebanon and convinced Israel to begin partial withdrawal of its troops in January 1985 despite Lebanon’s contravention of the settlement.

Two more events in 1988 persuaded Shultz that Soviet intentions were changing. First, the Soviet Union’s initial withdrawal from Afghanistan indicated that the Brezhnev Doctrine was dead. “If the Soviets left Afghanistan, the Brezhnev Doctrine would be breached, and the principle of ‘never letting go’ would be violated”, Shultz reasoned. The second event, according to Keren Yarhi-Milo of Princeton University, happened during the 19th Communist Party Conference, “at which Gorbachev proposed major domestic reforms such as the establishment of competitive elections with secret ballots; term limits for elected officials; separation of powers with an independent judiciary; and provisions for freedom of speech, assembly, conscience, and the press.” The proposals indicated that Gorbachev was making revolutionary and irreversible changes.

During the First Intifada (see Arab–Israeli conflict), Shultz “proposed … an international convention in April 1988 … on an interim autonomy agreement for the West Bank and Gaza Strip, to be implemented as of October for a three-year period”. By December 1988, after six months of shuttle diplomacy, Shultz had established a diplomatic dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was picked up by the next Administration.

In 1997, Shultz married Charlotte Mailliard Swig, a prominent San Francisco philanthropist and socialite.

After leaving public office, Shultz became the first prominent Republican to call for the legalization of recreational drugs. He went on to add his signature to an advertisement, published in The New York Times on June 8, 1998, headlined “We believe the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself.” In 2011, he was part of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which called for a public health and harm reduction approach towards drug use, alongside other luminaries such as Kofi Annan, Paul Volcker, and George Papandreou.

Shultz was an early advocate of the presidential candidacy of George W. Bush, whose father, George H. W. Bush, was Reagan’s vice president. In April 1998, Shultz hosted a meeting at which George W. Bush discussed his views with policy experts including Michael Boskin, John Taylor and Condoleezza Rice, who were evaluating possible Republican candidates to run for president in 2000. At the end of the meeting, the group felt they could support Bush’s candidacy, and Shultz encouraged him to enter the race.

In 2003, Shultz served as co-chair (along with Warren Buffett) of California’s Economic Recovery Council, an advisory group to the campaign of California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In 2005, Shultz spoke out against the Cuban embargo, calling the policy “insane”. He argued that free trade would help bring down Fidel Castro’s regime and that the embargo led only to continued repression.

On January 15, 2008, Shultz co-authored (with William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn) an opinion paper in The Wall Street Journal that called on governments to embrace the vision of a world free of nuclear weapons. The four have created the Nuclear Threat Initiative to advance this agenda. Nunn reinforced that agenda during a speech at the Harvard Kennedy School on October 21, 2008, saying, “I’m much more concerned about a terrorist without a return address that cannot be deterred than I am about deliberate war between nuclear powers. You can’t deter a group who is willing to commit suicide. We are in a different era. You have to understand the world has changed.” In 2010, the four were featured in the documentary film Nuclear Tipping Point, which discussed their agenda.

On January 11, 2011, Shultz wrote a letter to President Barack Obama urging him to pardon Jonathan Pollard. He stated, “I am impressed that the people who are best informed about the classified material Pollard passed to Israel, former CIA Director James Woolsey and former Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Dennis DeConcini, favor his release”.

From 2011 to 2015 Shultz was a member of the board of directors of Theranos, a health technology company that became known for its false claims to have devised revolutionary blood tests. He was a prominent figure in the ensuing scandal. After joining the company’s board in November 2011, he recruited other luminaries, including former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, former secretary of defense William Perry, and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn. Shultz also promoted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes at major forums, including Stanford University’s Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), and was on record supporting her in major media publications. This helped Holmes in her efforts to raise money from investors.

Shultz favors a revenue-neutral carbon tax as the most economically efficient means of mitigating anthropogenic climate change. In April 2013, he co-wrote, with economist Gary Becker, an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal that concluded that “a revenue-neutral carbon tax would benefit all Americans by eliminating the need for costly energy subsidies while promoting a level playing field for energy producers.” He repeated this call in a September 2014 talk at MIT. In March 2015, Shultz wrote in The Washington Post that he recommended “level[ing] the playing field for competing sources of energy so that costs imposed on the community are borne by the sources of energy that create them, most particularly carbon dioxide”, and doing so through a carbon tax that is “revenue-neutral, returning all net funds generated to the taxpayers so that no fiscal drag results and the revenue would not be available for politicians to spend on pet projects.” In 2017, Shultz cofounded the Climate Leadership Council, along with Reagan Secretary of State James Baker and George W. Bush Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson. In 2017, this group of “Republican elder statesmen” proposed that conservatives embrace a fee and dividend form of carbon tax (in which all revenue generated by the tax is rebated to the populace in the form of lump-sum dividends), as a policy to deal with anthropogenic climate change. The group also included Martin S. Feldstein and N. Gregory Mankiw.

Shultz’s grandson, Tyler Shultz, joined Theranos in September 2013 after graduating from Stanford University with a degree in biology. Tyler was forced to leave the company in 2014 after raising concerns about its testing practices with Holmes and his grandfather. George Shultz initially did not believe Tyler’s warnings, pressured him to keep quiet, and continued to advocate for Holmes and Theranos. Tyler eventually contacted reporter John Carreyrou (who went on to expose the scandal in The Wall Street Journal), but as summarized by ABC Nightline, “it wasn’t long before Theranos got wind of it and attempted to use George Shultz to silence his grandson.” Tyler went to his grandfather’s house to discuss the allegations, but was surprised to encounter Theranos attorneys there, who pressured him to sign a document. As recounted in the documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley, they questioned Tyler in a manner that George described on April 4, 2017, as verbal assault. Tyler did not sign any agreements, even though George pressured him to: “My grandfather would say, like, things like ‘your career would be ruined if [Carreyrou’s] article comes out.'” Tyler and his parents spent nearly $500,000 on legal fees, selling their house to raise the funds, in fighting Theranos’s accusations of violating the NDA and divulging trade secrets.

When media reports exposed controversial practices there in 2015, George Shultz moved to Theranos’s board of counselors. Theranos was shut down on September 4, 2018. In a 2019 media statement, Shultz praised his grandson for not having shrunk “from what he saw as his responsibility to the truth and patient safety, even when he felt personally threatened and believed that I had placed allegiance to the company over allegiance to higher values and our family. … Tyler navigated a very complex situation in ways that made me proud.”

In April 2016, he was one of eight former Treasury secretaries who called on the United Kingdom to remain a member of the European Union ahead of the “Brexit” referendum in June.

Shultz is the chairman of JPMorgan Chase’s international advisory council and an honorary director of the Institute for International Economics. He is a member of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) board of advisors, the New Atlantic Initiative, the prestigious Mandalay Camp at the Bohemian Grove, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, and the Committee on the Present Danger. He serves as an advisory board member for the Partnership for a Secure America and Citizens’ Climate Lobby. He is honorary chairman of the Israel Democracy Institute. Shultz is an advisory board member of Spirit of America, a 501(c)(3) organization that supports the safety and success of Americans serving abroad and the local people and partners they seek to help. At the Hoover Institution he participates in discussions on campus and in the Hoover Virtual Policy Briefing series, giving a talk, “Learning From Experience”, on July 21, 2020.