Rex Tillerson and the Unraveling of the State Department

With an isolated leader, a demoralized diplomatic corps and a president dismantling international relations one tweet at a time, American foreign policy is adrift in the world.

One afternoon in late September, I sat down with Rex Tillerson on what, in hindsight, may well have been his last comparatively normal day as secretary of state. It was a little more than 72 hours before President Donald Trump would take to Twitter to declare that Tillerson, his top diplomat, was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” as the president now refers to the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, and admonish Tillerson: “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!” Which was a few days before NBC News would report that Tillerson, after a July meeting with Trump, called the president a “moron” and wanted to resign until Vice President Mike Pence talked him out of it. Which was just a couple hours before Tillerson would hold an extraordinary news conference in the State Department’s Treaty Room — the magisterial, blue-walled chamber where secretaries of state typically greet foreign dignitaries — in order to tell reporters that Trump “is smart”; deny that he ever considered resigning; and refuse to answer a question about whether he had indeed called the president a moron.

But even before all that, sitting in a silk-upholstered chair in front of a fireplace in his office, his State Department-seal cuff links peeking out from the sleeves of his navy blue suit, the impossibility of Tillerson’s assignment was apparent. He was about to embark on his third trip to Asia as secretary of state, part of his efforts to bring about a peaceful resolution to the North Korean nuclear crisis, so I asked him if Trump’s tweets on the topic — threatening in August that “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded,” and in September that if the United States “is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy #NoKo” — were in any way helpful to what he was trying to accomplish.

Tillerson let out a short sigh. “Look, on the president’s tweets,” he said, “I take what the president tweets out as his form of communicating, and I build it into my strategies and my tactics. How can I use that? How do I want to use that? And in a dynamic situation, like we deal with here all the time — and you can go walk around the world, they’re all dynamic — things happen. You wake up the next morning, something’s happened. I wake up the next morning, the president’s got a tweet out there. So I think about, O.K., that’s a new condition. How do I want to use that?” Tillerson continued: “Our strategies and the tactics we’re using to advance the policies have to be resilient enough to accommodate unknowns, O.K.? So if you want to put that in an unknown category, you can. It certainly kind of comes out that even I would say, ‘I wasn’t expecting that.’ But it doesn’t mean our strategies are not resilient enough to accommodate it.”

Accommodating the president, rather than working with him, is not a normal mission for a secretary of state — and for Tillerson, it seems to be an increasingly doomed one. “The president’s always saying, ‘Rex’s not tough,’ and ‘I didn’t know he was so establishment,’ ” says one Trump adviser. After Tillerson’s “moron” gibe became public, the president, while dismissing the report as “fake news, ” also told Forbes, “if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare I.Q. tests. And I can tell you who is going to win.” The question among many people inside and outside the Trump administration is not necessarily what’s keeping Tillerson from resigning; it’s what’s stopping Trump from firing him. One Trump-administration official offered me a tentative theory: “Losing a chief of staff in the first year is a big deal, but losing a secretary of state is an even bigger one.”


On the afternoon I saw Tillerson at the State Department, he’d just returned from several hours at the White House. This was hardly unusual. When he’s in Washington, he often spends part of his workday at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in formal and informal meetings with Trump. Tillerson, a former Eagle Scout who years later served as the Boy Scouts of America’s national president, always comes prepared for those encounters, keeping a 2-inch-by-8-inch notecard in the inside pocket of his suit jacket with a handwritten list of matters he wants to discuss with the president. After meeting with Trump, he’ll then add to the list the things Trump wants him to take care of.

‘You can’t have a secretary of state going around the world who’s not seen as representing the president’s foreign policy.’
Many political eminences, including Tillerson’s hunting buddy, the former Secretary of State James Baker, had advised Tillerson that his relationship with Trump would be the most important factor in determining his success in his new job. And this was an area in which Tillerson, in his previous job as chief executive of Exxon Mobil, had excelled. “I have over my life had to build relationships with heads of state, not just this one, but heads of states all over the world,” he reminded me. At Exxon Mobil, he did business with a rogue’s gallery of world leaders, from Vladimir Putin (who in 2013 awarded Tillerson Russia’s Order of Friendship) to Hugo Chavez (who in 2007 seized Exxon Mobil’s assets, prompting the oil giant to leave Venezuela). I asked Tillerson if Trump had any similarities to the heads of state he dealt with as an oil executive. “Yeah, there are other leaders that share the qualities that he has,” Tillerson replied, before adding, “and I’m not gonna name names, because then you’ll go — everybody will go dissect that.”

But building a good rapport with the head of state of his own country has, so far, proved to be beyond Tillerson’s formidable abilities. According to some people who are close to Trump, his disappointment with Tillerson is as much personal as it is professional. “Trump originally thought he could have a relationship with Tillerson that’s almost social,” says one Trump adviser, “the way his relationships are with Wilbur Ross and Steve Mnuchin.” But unlike Trump’s commerce and Treasury secretaries — plutocrats who, like Trump, are on their third, younger wives — Tillerson, who is 65 and has been married to the same woman for 31 years, has shown little interest in being the president’s running buddy; instead of Saturday-night dinners with Trump at his Washington hotel, Tillerson favors trips home to Texas to see his grandchildren or to Colorado to visit his nonagenarian parents.

(The White House, provided a detailed list of questions relating to Tillerson and his relationship with Trump as described in this article, responded with the following official statement: “The president has assembled the most talented cabinet in history and everyone continues to be dedicated towards advancing the president’s America First agenda. Anything to the contrary is simply false and comes from unnamed sources who are either out of the loop or unwilling to turn the country around.”)

In his office, Tillerson contemplated what has turned out to be his most difficult diplomatic mission. “I’ve had to build a relationship with President Trump because he didn’t know me — I mean he certainly knew of me, just as I knew of him — but to understand how my thought processes work, for me to understand how his work, for me to understand how he makes decisions, because he makes decisions in a very different way than I do,” Tillerson said, spinning his fingers around his head to indicate cognition. “I’m an engineer by training. I’m a very systems, process, methodical decision maker. He’s an entrepreneur. Different mind-set. He makes decisions differently. Doesn’t mean one is better than the other, but I’ve had to learn how he processes information and how I can help him process the information and how I can give him good advice that makes sense to him. So for both of us there’s a communication to be worked out.”

Although the State Department is no longer quite the ivied redoubt it was a half-century ago, when men like George Kennan and Paul Nitze roamed the halls of Foggy Bottom and its global outposts, its employees still tend to be a bit tweedier than your ordinary government bureaucrat. This is especially true of the nearly 14,000 members of the Foreign Service, with their rigorous entrance exam and a strict up-or-out promotions system, not to mention their cosmopolitan ethos and fluency in multiple languages. They consider themselves elite.

This elite might have been more simpatico with President Barack Obama, given his appreciation of diplomacy and soft power, than with Trump, but neither of Obama’s secretaries of state was particularly beloved by the department’s rank and file. There were complaints that Hillary Clinton subordinated the department’s needs to those of her political ambitions, creating a new and unwieldy cadre of special envoys and ambassadors at large that seemed designed to appeal to Democratic constituencies. Clinton’s successor, John Kerry, was viewed by some as an imperious boss who treated the department as a kind of playground, bringing his yellow Labrador retriever to work and letting the dog roam the building’s seventh-floor suite of executive offices known as Mahogany Row.

But after Trump’s election, many State Department officials braced for much worse. Some of the initially rumored potential secretaries — John Bolton, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani — often seemed more inclined to blow up Foggy Bottom than to run it. When Trump picked Tillerson, the news was greeted not only with relief but even with optimism.

It was true that Tillerson was never going to be a conventional secretary of state, especially not working for Trump. “His idea for the job when he took it was that he and Trump can be negotiators, the best negotiators, for America,” says a Trump adviser. “His idea of foreign policy isn’t one that would make sense to people who read Foreign Policy.” But his combed-back silver hair and Texas-inflected baritone — in which a Foggy Bottom commonplace like “partner” becomes a mellifluous “pardner” — radiated the kind of authority admired by Trump, who asked Tillerson to be his secretary of state during their first meeting at Trump Tower in December. “He’s much more than a business executive,” Trump told Fox News shortly before announcing Tillerson’s nomination. “He’s a world-class player.” Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House adviser who attended that first Trump-Tillerson meeting, says: “The president puts a ton of weight on first impressions. As soon as Rex walked in the room, I knew the job was his.”

To external appearances, the work Tillerson did at Exxon Mobil seemed to reflect the zero-sum negotiator’s view of foreign policy that Trump has espoused ever since “The Art of the Deal.” “He’s led this charmed life,” Trump said of Tillerson at a black-tie dinner in January. “He goes into a country, takes the oil, goes into another country.” Tillerson’s future employees took a different comfort in Tillerson’s résumé. As chief executive of Exxon Mobil, where he worked for 41 years, Tillerson led a nearly 75,000-person corporate behemoth with a global footprint that rivaled that of the United States itself, requiring it to have, in effect, its own foreign policy. In fact, Exxon Mobil operated its own sort of mini-State Department, a division called the International Government Relations Group, staffed with foreign-policy experts, including a number who previously served in high-ranking positions in Foggy Bottom. As Tillerson traveled the world cutting deals for Exxon Mobil in Russia and Africa and the Middle East, he relied on the I.G.R.G. for expertise and advice much the same way secretaries of state typically rely on the Foreign Service.

Tillerson was originally recommended to the Trump team by the former Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, both mandarins of the Republican foreign-policy establishment who had consulted for Exxon Mobil, on the grounds that his vast knowledge of foreign governments and their leaders made him a perfect fit for the job. “The expectation was that Tillerson would be a grown-up and provide ballast,” says a 30-year veteran of the Foreign Service, “that he was someone who believed in America being the glue that created global stability and would be interested in upholding the world order as we have it.”

Before their Senate confirmations, secretary-of-state nominees are customarily provided a suite of offices on the first floor of the State Department’s eight-story, limestone-and-steel headquarters. There, just off the international-flag-draped lobby on C Street, they prepare for their new job, receiving briefings from and meeting with some of the people they will soon be leading.

Trump transition officials had sent a small beachhead team, led by Charles Glazer, a former Wall Street executive and Republican donor who served as President George W. Bush’s ambassador to El Salvador, to use the office. Few saw Tillerson set foot in it. A space that could accommodate 50 people wound up being filled by not even a dozen. What’s more, some State Department officials were told by the Trump transition team that they were not to contact Tillerson at all. “The attitude was that anyone who worked with Obama must be suspect,” one Trump transition official says.

In December, Nikki Haley, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, set up a conference call with two senior State Department officials: Kristie Kenney, the State Department counselor, and Patrick Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management. Haley wanted to ask them questions about the logistics of her new job: basic matters like what her salary and benefits would be and where her family would live in New York City. Kenney and Kennedy told her about the federal employee health insurance plan and offered to send her floor plans of the U.N. ambassador’s apartment. When word of the call got back to Trump’s transition team, the two department officials were reprimanded by Glazer and told never to speak with Haley again.

Kenney and Kennedy were among the small cohort of foreign-policy professionals who held the Foreign Service’s equivalent of a three- or four-star general rank in the military. These senior diplomats were responsible for handling America’s most vexing global challenges, everything from Russia’s annexation of Crimea to North Korea’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction to the Iran nuclear deal. Members of this elite group, who served under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, had submitted their pro forma letters of resignation upon the end of the Obama administration, as was the custom during presidential transitions. The letters typically occasion a conversation with the incoming secretary and his or her team about whether these diplomats should remain in their current jobs or, if not, what other senior positions inside the department they might be moved to. In a worst-case situation, they would usually be rotated into a sleepy ambassadorship.

But this time around, every letter was greeted with silence. Not only did the officials not know how Tillerson intended to use them; they didn’t know if, come the Monday after Trump’s Friday inauguration, they would even have jobs. As one of them later recalled, “Every conversation would end with, ‘Have you heard anything from Tillerson?’ ”

Finally, with only a few days until the inauguration and still no word from Tillerson, one of the senior officials, Victoria Nuland — who once was Hillary Clinton’s State Department spokeswoman but had also been a foreign-policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and was at the time the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs — opted to retire. The others chose to make a go of it. On the Monday after the inauguration, they showed up for work, as usual, at Foggy Bottom.

Two days later, Kennedy was told to retire and given three days to clean out his office. Kennedy had spent 44 years in the Foreign Service and was not particularly political, focusing instead on management and operations; he’d been appointed to his under-secretary position by President George W. Bush. But he had become a central figure in conservative conspiracy theories about Benghazi and Clinton’s private email server. Tillerson aides later joked that Kennedy’s defenestration was like something out of the Soviet Union, dragging a political foe out into the street and shooting him in the head so as to send a message to others.

A few weeks later, Kenney, who as counselor was the State Department’s No. 5 policy official, was told that her services were no longer needed, and she retired. And in the weeks after that, half a dozen other top diplomats were shown the door — fired, forced into retirement or warehoused at a university fellowship. “If you took the entire three-star and four-star corps of the military and said, ‘Leave!’ Congress would go crazy,” one of the recently departed said.

In a few short months, Tillerson had rid the State Department of much of its last several decades of diplomatic experience, though it was not really clear to what end. The new secretary of state, it soon became evident, had an easier time firing people than hiring them — a consequence of the election that delivered him to Foggy Bottom.

During the campaign, the “Never Trump” movement gathered many of its most devoted adherents from Republican foreign-policy circles, with scores of G.O.P. national-security professionals signing open letters declaring their opposition to the eventual Republican nominee. Although internecine foreign-policy squabbles were hardly unusual, they typically ended when the primaries did, with the losers rallying around the victor. But in 2016, representatives of all the various factions of the Republican foreign-policy world — realists and neoconservatives, hawks and isolationists — were united in their opposition to Trump, not only on ideological grounds but because they viewed him as personally unfit for office. And, given the personal nature of the criticism, Trump and those around him didn’t forgive it.

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