Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s ouster last Tuesday by President Trump was the fastest firing of a secretary of State in U.S. history, according to an in depth report on the swift action.
Tillerson lasted just 412 days, though technically he is on the payroll until the end of the month.
By comparison, former Secretary of State John Sherman, who served under former President William McKinley, resigned in April 1898 after 418 days in office. They split over the Spanish-American War.
And Elihu Washburne, who served under former President Ulysses Grant, had the job for 12 days, but he accepted the position with the understanding that he was a placeholder for eventual top U.S. diplomat Hamilton Fish.
The review of all secretaries of State is from Eric J. Ostermeier’s Smart Politics political site he founded at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Secrets regularly turns to Smart Politics for historical background to big current events.
Ostermeier said, “Trump’s firing of Rex Tillerson last week goes down in the books as one of the quickest endings of a relationship between a president and his first secretary of state in U.S. history.”
His report gives some perspective with notes that two other presidents did have shorter relationships with their State Department chiefs, but only because they died:
- William Harrison and Daniel Webster in 1841 (29 days) and James Garfield and James Blaine in 1881 (6 months, 16 days).
- The average tenure of a president serving alongside his first secretary of state is 3 years, 4 months, 8 days (including presidents who died in office) – or 2.9 times longer than Trump/Tillerson.
