It’s 1982 and President Ronald Reagan has selected George Shultz to replace Alexander Haig as Secretary of State. “Ronald Reagan could not stand personal confrontation and Haig lived on personal confrontation,” says author and historian Richard Reeves. “So it’s a miracle he lasted even a year and a little more. George Shultz had the most impressive resume in the country when Reagan called him.”

Episode One introduces the new Secretary through the details of his early life, his service as a U.S. Marine, his academic career as a free market economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as Dean of the Business School at the University of Chicago and his early cabinet posts as Secretary of Labor and Treasury under President Nixon. Following his resignation from the Nixon cabinet, his experience as President of worldwide engineering and construction firm Bechtel gives Shultz extensive international contacts and diplomacy skills, critical experience for what lay ahead. © 2010 / 1 hr.