John M Shalikashvili

Director since August 1998. Member of the Compensation and Nominating/Corporate Governance Committees. General Shalikashvili (U.S. Army—Ret.) is an independent consultant and a Visiting Professor at Stanford University. General Shalikashvili was the senior officer of the United States military and principal military advisor to the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council when he served as the thirteenth Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Department of Defense, for two terms from 1993 to 1997. Prior to his tenure as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he served as the Commander in Chief of all United States forces in Europe and as NATO’s tenth Supreme Allied Commander, Europe (SACEUR). He has also served in a variety of command and staff positions in the continental United States, Alaska, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Korea, Turkey and Vietnam. Shalikashvili was born June 27, 1936, in Warsaw, the grandson of a czarist general and the son of an army officer from Soviet Georgia. He lived through the German occupation of Poland during World War II and immigrated with his family in 1952, settling in Peoria, Ill. He learned English from watching John Wayne movies, according to his official Pentagon biography, and he retained a distinctive Eastern European accent. Shalikashvili, who studied engineering at Bradley University in Peoria, enrolled in the Air Force Reserve ROTC, but his eyes were not good enough to be a pilot, according to a Defense Department biography. He became a U.S. citizen in 1958 and was drafted months later. In addition to being the first foreign-born Joint Chiefs chairman, he was the first draftee to rise to the top military job at the Pentagon, the Defense Department said. Shalikashvili is survived by his wife Joan, their son, Brant, and other family members.