By the time you read this, it is entirely possible that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will have resigned his office in despair and frustration. He finds himself, after all, at “the breaking point” (New Yorker) in relations with his mercurial boss, President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, over at PBS NewsHour the other evening, Mark Shields and David Brooks, shaking their heads more in sorrow than anger, agreed that Tillerson’s effectiveness as the nation’s top diplomat is finished. Not long before, their broadcast colleagues at NBC had reported that Tillerson, in a Pentagon meeting in July, had referred to Trump as a “moron”—and Trump, in his signature manner, had taken note of this on Twitter.
To be sure, Tillerson hastily informed the press that he had “never considered leaving this post” and, as might be expected, he declined to address the “moron” issue: “I’m not going to deal with petty stuff like that,” he said. So it fell to a State Department spokeswoman to explain that Tillerson “did not use that type of language to speak about the president”—which, like most attempts at clarification, merely affirmed suspicions.
For what it’s worth, my own view is that it is theoretically possible that Tillerson expressed annoyance in such fashion in the company of colleagues, but unlikely: He surely would have known that such a story would leak, thereby alerting Trump’s sensitive antennae. He would also know—or would have learned by now—that respectable people in Washington, including journalists, are not above distorting or inventing quotes and incidents for malicious purposes. Tillerson might regard such things as “petty stuff,” but they can be lethal.
Part of the problem here is that both Trump and Tillerson come to their high offices with no previous experience in public life. This is by no means a disqualification and in some respects can be an asset; but the tribal rites and habits of political Washington are very different from the realms of New York real estate and the ExxonMobil boardroom. There’s a learning curve. And historically, at any rate, most of the important secretaries of state in the 20th century were not business executives but lawyer-politicians with an interest in foreign affairs: Elihu Root, Charles Evans Hughes, Henry Stimson, Dean Acheson, John Foster Dulles. But not all of them: Cordell Hull was a Tennessee congressman with an abiding interest in free trade; Henry Kissinger was an academic and adviser to Nelson Rockefeller.
Washington being a political capital, however, the Texas oilman Tillerson is regarded, especially in the press, as an earnest novice—and as a onetime CEO accustomed to getting his way, destined to clash with a volatile president. There may be some element of truth in this—is there anyone in the administration who hasn’t clashed with POTUS?—but there’s local mythology as well. Harry Truman, a veteran pol and master of partisan condescension, was amused at the prospect of Dwight Eisenhower in the Oval Office.
But of course the joke was on Truman. Having served in Panama, Washington, and Paris during the 1920s and ’30s, supervised the Allied “crusade in Europe,” been Army chief of staff, president of Columbia, and adviser to the newly unified Department of Defense, as well as first uniformed head of NATO, Ike arrived at the White House considerably more experienced, and probably wiser, than most presidents. Of course, Tillerson is not Eisenhower, but neither is he destined, by background or present circumstances, to fail.
Indeed, in order to assume that Tillerson faces an insurmountable challenge in working for Trump or has reached some breaking point, you would have to assume that Foggy Bottom-Pennsylvania Avenue relations are always harmonious, which they are not. The aforementioned Cordell Hull served longer than anyone else as secretary of state (11 years) and even won the Nobel Peace Prize (1945). But you need only wade through Hull’s voluminous diaries or read the memoirs of sympathetic colleagues to grasp the seething anger and deep frustration he continually felt, coupled with periodic threats to quit, at Franklin Roosevelt’s delight in being his own top diplomat. Not to mention the irritating presence of FDR’s favorite, under secretary Sumner Welles, at Hull’s elbow as his nominal subordinate.
In more recent times, as well, the postwar invention of the National Security Council has led to continuous discord and conflict. Younger readers might be surprised to learn, for example, that the secretary of state when Richard Nixon flew to China, signed the ABM and SALT I treaties with the Soviet Union, and withdrew American troops from Indochina was not Henry Kissinger but William Rogers, whose capacity for bureaucratic intrigue and guile across town was no match for Kissinger’s in the White House. During my own brief, and inglorious, tenure (1978-79) as a speechwriter for Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, a shocking amount of departmental time and energy was wasted in an endless, and duel-to-the-death, rivalry between Vance and Jimmy Carter’s skulking NSC director, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Tillerson’s problems are not trivial, of course. Apart from Iran and the Middle East, Kim Jong-un, an unsteady Europe, fractured society, and hostile culture, his patron in the White House is our most impulsive commander in chief since Theodore Roosevelt. Yet even, perhaps especially, a businessman knows that the vagaries of politics and static of the media tend to exaggerate the gravity of the moment. Assuming that the secretary says what he means and did arrive in Washington with purposes in mind, their steady pursuit, and infinite patience, may yet produce dividends.
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
