Before
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was abruptly fired, he oversaw a State
Department that appeared to be plunged into chaos at every level.
Photograph by Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty
Rex Tillerson’s
team was fighting again. “So, who’s going to go in with him?” Margaret
Peterlin, his chief of staff, was saying. She looked me up and down with
an expression that suggested she’d discovered a pest in the house. We
were standing at the wide double doors into the Secretary of State’s
office on Mahogany Row, the opulent, wood-panelled corridor on the
seventh floor of the State Department’s Washington, D.C., headquarters,
which houses the most powerful offices in American foreign policy.
Steven Goldstein, the Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and
Public Affairs, folded his arms and stared daggers at Peterlin. “Well, I
guess I won’t be,” he told her. “Heather can go.” Goldstein tilted his
head toward Tillerson’s spokesperson, the former Fox News anchor Heather
Nauert. Peterlin narrowed her eyes at Goldstein. “Are you sure?”
she said, with theatrical displeasure. Goldstein didn’t reply.
Tillerson strode up to the door, cutting the tension. Nauert and
Peterlin joined the interview, along with Tillerson’s director of policy
planning, Brian Hook. Goldstein remained outside. (Peterlin said that
she was following a rule enacted by Secretary Tillerson that only one
communications officer be allowed in his interviews.)
Such discord
often simmered just under the surface in the year before Tillerson’s
unceremonious firing, in March, according to multiple members of his
embattled inner circle. Often, it emanated from Peterlin, a formidable
attorney, U.S. Navy veteran, and former congressional staffer who helped
draft the Patriot Act after the September 11th attacks and guided
Tillerson through his confirmation process. When she was passed a note
indicating I’d arrived that day, she’d given the rest of the team an
ultimatum: from the public-relations staff, only Goldstein would be
permitted in the interview. Goldstein had pointed out that Nauert, as
spokesperson, would be responsible for answering ensuing public
questions. Peterlin insisted that there was simply no room. One staffer
present said that there was another motivation: Peterlin had been
lobbying to get Nauert fired. (Peterlin said that she did not lobby to
fire Nauert, and pointed out that Nauert still holds her position as
spokesperson today.) The standoff hadn’t been resolved by the time I was
ushered in to see Tillerson, nor as I left, when a second contretemps
erupted over who would stay behind with the Secretary. (Goldstein again
insisted on Nauert, visibly vexing Peterlin.) This squabbling barely
qualified as drama, but displaying it so openly in front of a reporter
was at odds with the kind of tightly organized messaging prized by most
of Tillerson’s predecessors. It provided a small window into a State
Department that appeared to be plunged into chaos at every level.
In
that meeting, in January, Tillerson was wearing a charcoal suit and a
canary-yellow tie, patterned with horseshoes. He was sitting, legs
crossed, in one of the blue-and-gold upholstered chairs in the
Secretary’s office. Tillerson had redecorated, replacing the portraits
of dead diplomats with scenes of the American West. He got compared to a
cowboy a lot, and, between the décor and the horseshoes, he appeared to
be leaning into it. The name helped: Rex Wayne Tillerson, after Rex
Allen and John Wayne, the actors behind some of Hollywood’s most
indelible swaggering cowboys.
Tillerson was born in Wichita Falls,
Texas, and was raised there and in neighboring Oklahoma, by parents of
modest means. His parents met through the Boy Scouts, when his mother
visited her brother at the camp where Tillerson’s father worked.
Tillerson honored that legacy by remaining active in Boy Scouts
leadership for much of his career. His biography is marked by earnest
overachievement: he was an Eagle Scout, and then a member of his
high-school band, in which he played the kettle and snare drums, and
which yielded a marching-band scholarship to the University of Texas at
Austin. In the course of more than forty years at ExxonMobil,
culminating in his decade-long tenure as the company’s C.E.O., he
amassed a personal fortune of at least three hundred million dollars—not
including the roughly hundred-and-eighty-million-dollar retirement
package he received when he departed the firm to enter government. The
call to serve in the Trump Administration had thrown into disarray his
plans for retirement, which he had intended to spend with his wife,
Renda, on their two horse and cattle ranches in Texas. When I asked if, a
year in, he thought he'd made the right call taking the job, he
laughed. Peterlin shot him a warning look. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s been”
—he furrowed his brow, appearing to search for the word— “interesting.”
When
President Trump nominated Tillerson to be the Secretary of State, his
experience running one of the largest corporations in the world inspired
optimism among career officials. Maybe, several said, he’d bring to the
job a private-sector knack for institutional growth—or at least savvy,
targeted trimming. “Things were blue skies” when Tillerson was
nominated, Erin Clancy, a foreign-service officer, recalled. “His
business record was promising.”
But the problems mounted quickly.
Gossip began to make the rounds in D.C., portraying Tillerson as aloof
and insulated from the Department. After brief remarks on his first day,
he didn’t speak to the workforce again until a town hall in May of last
year, unusually late into the Administration for a new Secretary of
State. Another time, he gave employees an overview of the basics of
world conflicts. Some found it condescending. “It was an exercise in ‘I
can read a map,’ ” one foreign-service
officer in attendance recalled. When Tillerson then told a story about
attending a Model U.N. session and telling a twelve-year-old participant
how much the Foreign Service inspired him, a middle-aged officer
audibly muttered, “You don’t fucking know us.”
Several staffers
said Tillerson’s inaccessibility extended to his foreign counterparts.
“He is not a proactive seeker of conversations,” an officer in the State
Department’s Operations Center, who spent months connecting Tillerson’s
calls, told me. When new Secretaries are sworn in, they typically
receive a flood of courtesy calls from foreign ministers. More than
sixty came into the Operations Center for Tillerson. He declined to take
more than three a day. In April of last year, when the United States
initiated strikes on Syria, the Administration skipped the conventional
step of notifying its NATO allies. “When news
broke, alarmed allies . . . were calling” the operations officer told
me. It was early on a Sunday afternoon, and Tillerson was in Washington
and unoccupied. “We were told that the Secretary had a long weekend, so
he was going to go home and have dinner with his wife and call it a
night.” No calls. “That floored me,” the operations officer recalled.
One
source close to the White House struggled to reconcile Tillerson’s
peerless track record of private-sector management with his approach at
the State Department. “Forty years at Exxon, in the God Pod, telling
people to jump based on how high the price of oil is up,” the source
said, using the pet term for Tillerson’s office suite within ExxonMobil.
“I’m not trying to be shitty, but, you know, there’s a way to run that
company.” Government, where no man is God (except the President), was
something else. “At first, I thought, Uh-oh, this is growing pains; a
private-sector guy, realizing how hard Washington is,” the source close
to the White House continued. “And just, what I started to see, week
after week, month after month, was someone who not only didn’t get it
but there was just no self-reflection, only self-mutilation.”
Until
Tillerson was finally fired, in March, rumors of his demise were
relentless. Mike Pompeo, the former C.I.A. director, whom President
Trump nominated to replace Tillerson, was one popularly cited successor.
Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, was another. The
perception that Tillerson had a rivalry with Haley appeared to be a
source of particular vexation for the Secretary and his team. The day I
met with him, they were still reeling from an announcement Haley had
made about plans to withhold U.S. funding for U.N.R.W.A., the U.N.
agency for Palestinian refugees. Tillerson hadn’t been consulted. In a
series of tense e-mails, Haley’s press office told Tillerson staffers
that it had checked with the White House instead. Tensions between
Secretaries of State and U.S. Ambassadors to the United Nations were
nothing new, but this enmity seemed to run deeper. “Holy shit,” the
source close to the White House said, “I’ve never seen anything like the
way he’s treated her . . . it’s shocking.” Tillerson’s “rage” toward
Haley had drawn the disapproval of even the President, the source added.
Goldstein, the former Under-Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy,
attributed unflattering accounts from White House sources to disgruntled
rivals. “What is said is the furthest from the truth,” he said.
“The
only person that I have to worry about is the President of the United
States,” Tillerson told me. But that relationship was, likewise,
fraught. Tillerson’s Texas swagger, the source close to the White House
said, irked Trump. “You just can’t be an arrogant alpha male all the
time with Trump. You have to do what Mattis does, which is, ‘Mr.
President, you’re the President, you’re smarter than me, you won, your
instincts are always right, but let me just give you the other view,
sir.’ Then you have this guy coming in,” the source said, referring to
Tillerson, “going, ‘Well, I guess because I worked for so many years in
the oil business, I have something to say. You don’t know much about the
region, so let me start with that.’ I mean, honestly, condescending.”
When
I mentioned the White House’s role in escalating rumors of his demise,
Tillerson appeared to have been waiting for the question. “Mm-hmm,” he
said, nodding. “When you say ‘the White House,’ who are you talking
about?” he asked. “The White House is comprised of how many people?”
Hook, the director of policy planning, chimed in that the answer was
perhaps in the thousands. Tillerson waved him off. “But people that matter,
people that might have an interest in whether I stay or leave, there’s
about one hundred and sixty of them.” Tillerson leaned in and, for a
moment, I realized that it must be unpleasant to be fired by him. “I
know who it is. I know who it is. And they know I know.”
According
to multiple individuals who had heard Tillerson speak of the matter
behind closed doors, this was a reference to Trump’s son-in-law and
adviser, Jared Kushner. Before Tillerson’s departure, tensions between
the two men had been flaring regularly, often in the form of a
public-relations proxy war. When Tillerson prevailed in reinstating some
of the humanitarian funds for U.N.R.W.A. that Haley had sought to
withhold, press items discussing potential negative repercussions for
Kushner’s Middle East peace efforts began appearing. A State
Department official with knowledge of the situation accused Kushner of
planting them. The source close to the White House said that Kushner had
attempted to work with Tillerson and met with resistance. “Here’s what I
saw: a President who surprised [Kushner] on the spot and said, ‘You’re
doing Mideast peace,’ after the campaign. A guy who tried to brief Rex
every single week but could never even get a call back or a meeting. . .
. And it wasn’t just Jared. It was many people across the government,
including fellow Cabinet members, who complained.”
When I asked
Tillerson whether he had been frustrated when responsibilities were
handed to Kushner, he was surprisingly passive. “Uh, no,” he said. “It
was pretty clear in the beginning the President wanted him to work on
the Middle East peace process, and so we carved that out.” He shrugged.
“That’s what the President wanted to do.” As Tillerson recalled, Kushner
would “come over” periodically to update him, “so at least we had full
connectivity between that and all the other issues that we’re managing
with the same countries and same leaders. We would give them input and
suggestions: ‘Probably want to think about this.’ ‘That’s going to be a
non-starter.’ ” To the bitter end, Tillerson seemed passionate about
fighting stories of his ouster. Surrendering Middle East peace he
greeted with a shrug. (After his abrupt firing, Tillerson declined
requests for further comment.)
The messy division of labor between
Tillerson and Kushner had policy consequences. When Tillerson began to
work as a mediator in a dispute that saw Saudi Arabia and a number of
Gulf states cut off relations with Qatar, an important military ally,
Trump veered off course, issuing a vociferous, off-the-cuff takedown of
Qatar. It was a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn from the narrative
Tillerson had been pushing on the Sunday shows just a day before.
Kushner, according to White House sources, had sided with the Saudis
based on his close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,
whom Kushner considered a promising reformer. Middle East policy had
been given to both men, and it appeared that Kushner, with a background
in real estate and in being the President’s son-in-law, was winning the
tug-of-war.
The former Secretary of State Colin Powell recalled
having similar turf wars with Vice-President Dick Cheney. “I’ve been in
similar situations, where I suddenly discovered we’ve created military
commissions: ‘Wait a minute—that’s a legal matter and a legal matter the
State Department has primacy on.’ ” But Powell was one of several
former Secretaries to express bafflement at Tillerson’s approach to his
shrinking mandate. “I can’t tell. He may love it,” Powell said, with a
shrug. “I can’t tell that he objects.” And then, with a wry smile,
“Maybe if we had ambassadors there, they’d pick it up—that’s what they
do.”
Powell
was poking at the most far-reaching consequence of Tillerson’s brief
tenure: a State Department unmanned and downsized. The first budget the
Administration floated to Congress proposed a twenty-eight-per-cent
slash to the Department’s funding. The White House wanted to eliminate
all funding for the United States Institute of Peace and its mission to
“guide peace talks and advise governments; train police and religious
leaders; and support community groups opposing extremism.” It would gut
health programs on H.I.V., malaria, and polio, and halve U.S.
contributions to United Nations peacekeeping missions. (The Trump
Administration maintains that its budget preserves current commitments
for PEPFAR and the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria).
The
planned decimation of the workforce was more sweeping than that of the
programs. More than thirteen hundred diplomats would get pink slips.
Initially, it was announced that there would be no new classes of
foreign-service officers—the so-called A 100 recruits who file off for
training at a sort of Hogwarts for diplomats in the Virginia suburbs
before becoming full-fledged officers. The State Department also
abruptly suspended its participation in the Presidential Management
Fellows program, a prestigious apprenticeship long used to draw talent
to the profession. The number of new recruits taking the foreign-service
entrance exam plummeted by twenty-six per cent from the year before. It
was the lowest level of interest in nearly a decade.
There seemed
to be just as little interest in filling the core leadership roles that
had been left intact. Hundreds of senior positions sat empty. The
building was being run almost entirely by deputies elevated to “acting”
assistant-secretary status, many of whom had decades less experience
than their unceremoniously removed predecessors. When I asked Tillerson
whether the unfilled posts were a source of anxiety, he puffed his chest
and smirked. “I don’t have anxiety,” he said. It was, however, “a point of concern. . . . It’s not something I’m happy about.”
Tillerson
blamed the White House. “They’ve not been easy,” he recalled, of his
year of conversations with Trump officials about filling the open jobs.
“The process over there has not been the most efficient, and they’ve
changed personnel trying to improve it, I mean, many, many
times. . . . It was very slow, it was very cumbersome, it was
frustrating, at times, because you couldn’t get a sense of ‘What’s the
issue?’ Someone seems to be kind of sitting in idle over there,” he
said, sighing. “I would tell ’em, ‘Just give me a no. At least with a
no, I’ll go get another name.’ ”
It was only through a bizarre set of circumstances, in
which Congress essentially went to war with both Tillerson and the
budget, that the cuts were ultimately rendered less extensive. Early
last year, in an Art Deco, wood-panelled hearing room in the Dirksen
Senate Office Building, Tillerson faced off against grandstanding from
both sides of the aisle when he presented the Administration’s first
budget proposal. Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chair of the Foreign
Relations Committee, recalled during that hearing that “after about
five minutes” of reviewing the proposal, “I said, ‘This is a total waste
of time. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ ”
But Tillerson gamely
defended the cuts through hours of drubbing and during the ensuing
year, as Congress essentially tried to throw money at the Department. On
one occasion, he refused to accept eighty million dollars in
congressional funding earmarked for State to counter Russian propaganda,
which raised eyebrows following the discovery of Russian efforts to
interfere with the 2016 election. Tillerson’s relationships on the Hill
frayed. One prominent Republican senator called the White House and
threatened to subpoena Tillerson if he wasn’t more coöperative,
according to a source at the White House with knowledge of the
conversation. Several former Secretaries of State expressed astonishment
at Tillerson’s approach to budget advocacy. “Tillerson didn’t want the
money,” Madeleine Albright, who served as the Secretary of State under
President Bill Clinton, recalled. “For me, I’ve never heard about
anything like that.”
When I pressed him on his defense of the
budget, Tillerson admitted, for the first time, that he had pushed back
behind closed doors. “In fact, I had people around here who said, ‘You
know, you need to leak your passback letter, you need to leak your
appeals letter.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s not how I do things.’ ”
Tillerson said he’d looked at the numbers proposed by the White House
Office of Management and Budget and assumed he could count on “plus ten,
plus twenty per cent, because we figure the Congress is going to give
us something there.” He conceded he may have simply lacked experience.
“Having been here one month” when he mounted his initial defense, “I
didn’t have a real basis to do more than work with O.M.B. to understand
what were their objectives.”
While some former Secretaries of
State agreed with the premise of expansive cuts, virtually all, spanning
generations, took issue with the extent and execution of the ones
championed by Tillerson. George P. Shultz, who served in the Nixon and
Reagan Administrations and had, like Tillerson, spent years in the
private sector, told me that, stepping into the job, “You don’t start
out with the idea that you’re going to cut everything before you even
know what’s going on.” The fact that Tillerson had moved so swiftly
toward downsizing was “astonishing,” Shultz said. “Whether he was told
to do that by the President, that was part of a condition of taking the
job, I don’t know. On the other hand, if the President insists on
something like that, I think it’s unacceptable. You can turn a job
down.”
In the months before his firing, Tillerson attempted to soften his messaging, praising the value of the foreign service in a Times
Op-Ed and a “60 Minutes” interview. The guillotine finally descending
suggested that the warmer embrace was unwelcome. Last month, Tillerson
himself became the latest diplomat to receive a pink slip. “Mike Pompeo,
Director of the CIA, will become your new Secretary of State,” Trump tweeted.
“He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his
service!” As was increasingly the norm, the State Department was the
last to know. “The Secretary did not speak to the President and is
unaware of the reason,” a statement from Goldstein read.
Pompeo, a
former Republican congressman from Kansas, has little by way of
diplomatic experience, and is more of a hawk than Tillerson. He backed
Trump’s sabre-rattling calls to dismantle the Iran deal with his own,
equally hard-line statements and tweets. And he appears to have
internalized some of the lessons cited by White House officials about
managing Trump’s ego. The President, he said, during his tenure as the
C.I.A. director, “asks good, hard questions. Make[s] us go make sure
we’re doing our work in the right way.” Trump, likewise, has said that
he and Pompeo are “always on the same wavelength. The relationship has
been very good, and that’s what I need as Secretary of State.” The
Department would be downsized, and the President’s selection of a
Secretary with views more in lockstep with his own suggested that there
would be less dissent as it happened.
After Tillerson’s brief and
chaotic ride as America’s top diplomat, Pompeo will face a Department
with an uncertain future, in which the evisceration of American
diplomacy is well under way, if not complete. Should he be confirmed, he
will face decisions with profound implications, potentially for
generations of American foreign policy. “In a couple years, if we get a
Presidency of either party that values diplomacy, you can fix a budget,
you can invest again in the State Department,” the former Secretary of
State John Kerry told me. “But it takes years to undo what’s happening,
because it takes years to build up expertise and capacity.” Powell
offered a similarly blunt assessment. The Trump Administration has been
“ripping the guts out of the organization,” he said. “When you stop
bringing people in or when you make [the State Department] an undesirable place to be, then you are mortgaging your future.” This piece was drawn from “War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence,” by Ronan Farrow, which is out April 24th from Norton.
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