The Reorganization Man

Tillerson confidently performed what he called a “walk around the world,” a recital of American engagement points abroad, from China to Yemen. His Texas baritone filled the far spaces of the auditorium, and he followed up with a PowerPoint presentation of his plans to redesign the department and took a few questions from the audience. He carried on like a man whose first year as America’s top diplomat had set the stage for the successes of his second.

But Tillerson concluded the event on an unusually personal note, slipping into a reverie about the “Code of the West.” This unwritten set of cowboy virtues, such as trust, loyalty, and straight dealing, had “served me well for many, many years,” he said. That this was not an ethos normally associated with Washington, D.C., was the secretary’s unspoken point.

The common wisdom in Washington is that Rex Tillerson is a failed secretary of state—disliked by his department, disregarded by the president, and discounted by foreign leaders. There is broad expectation that he will be out of a job early in the new year. The current certainty of an imminent “Rexit” is partly owing to a White House leak to the New York Times in late November, which was itself a reflection of the sometimes bizarre management style of the Trump administration.

The Times’s front-page story reported that the White House had a detailed plan, developed by chief of staff John Kelly, to replace Tillerson with the current head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, “perhaps within the next several weeks.” Pompeo, in turn, would be replaced at the CIA by Arkansas senator Tom Cotton. The story’s detail—and, especially, the reference to the hand of Kelly, widely perceived as the “grown-up” in the White House—signaled to the cognoscenti that Rexit was real. The Times noted the plan had not been approved by the president, who subsequently denied that Tillerson would soon be leaving (“FAKE NEWS!”). But this denial only led to speculation that the ouster plan, while real, was meant to unsettle Tillerson enough to coax him toward resigning.

Few in Washington believe that Tillerson will be secretary of state when the warm weather returns. One Tillerson ally, who just a few months ago was confidently predicting that Tillerson would serve through Trump’s first term, now guesses the secretary may just last into a second year. “But if the president says, ‘I can’t stand this anymore, I want you to leave,’ he’ll leave,” the friend says.

Tillerson himself calls reports of his imminent departure “ridiculous,” but his wistful turn at the end of the town hall offered a hint as to where his heart is inclined—far from a mercurial president, the nattering press, and a restive, self-regarding bureaucracy. When asked his holiday plans, Tillerson said he was heading for his 83-acre ranch in Denton County, Texas, a place where the Code of the West obtains. “I look forward to being back in Texas to be with people who have that value shared with me,” he said. “And I’m going to saddle up my favorite pony, Blue, and I’m going to go out and check on some cows.”

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Rex Tillerson is said to have been a casting-call hire as secretary of state, a man whose bearing and tone in a meeting with the president-elect convinced Trump that he’d found his man. He had no government experience, but that wasn’t a negative with Trump. And the people who’d recommended Tillerson to the Trump team, Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice, had good reason to believe that the CEO of ExxonMobil would succeed.

As the head of the largest American-based oil company, Tillerson had effectively been in charge of his own foreign service, negotiating deals with some of the nastiest people of the world and in some of the most difficult reaches. ExxonMobil is said, for instance, to have won a far more advantageous deal from Russia than its competitors, and Tillerson emerged with the Russian Order of Friendship.

“In the conversations that I had with him, when I would mention a foreign leader, he knew almost all of them,” says Elliott Abrams, a diplomat and policy adviser who served Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. “There are a lot of Americans who would not be comfortable sitting down with the president of France or the king of Saudi Arabia. He’s very comfortable. And he knows what a meeting with the head of state is like. He’s had a million of those.”

The take on Tillerson was that he’d be a pragmatist in the James Baker mode. But any Trump secretary of state was going to face daunting challenges from within his own department. Tillerson took over an agency that had been among the most overt in its opposition to Trump during the presidential campaign and transition. The State Department, and its vast outer boroughs of former diplomats in the press corps, universities, and think tanks, was deeply suspicious of Trump, not only because his vow to “drain the swamp” held particular implications for an institution located in a place called Foggy Bottom but, especially, because of his America First posture.

Trump spent much of the campaign excoriating the deals America had made abroad in recent years, to which State had been central, and demeaning the officials responsible for them as “very, very stupid people.” State Department employees donated to Hillary Clinton’s campaign over Donald Trump’s by a margin of 91-1. The diplomatic bureaucrats were the centurions of a global order that Donald Trump had promised to topple.

A State Department in the service of Trump’s agenda would be in no rush to appoint special envoys on climate change, the closure of the Guantánamo detention facility, or for the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex persons (and indeed, many of the 60 or so special envoy slots at State inherited by Tillerson are targeted for elimination). For the permanent diplomatic bureaucracy, America First was a naked abandonment of its values, a surrender of the decades-old claim of the centrality of human rights and the spread of freedom in foreign-policy calculations.

Tillerson, though, had a nuanced interpretation of Trump’s America First imperative, which he hoped to sell as a harmonizing of American values and American interests. His background suggested he just might succeed in serving a president and a department so deeply at odds.

An Eagle Scout and a lifelong supporter of the scouting movement, Tillerson had been president of the Boy Scouts of America when the group admitted gay members and had skillfully managed the organization through this momentous decision. His tenure at Exxon had also demonstrated a talent for image polishing through public diplomacy. His predecessor at ExxonMobil, Lee Raymond, was known as a two-fisted oil-patch guy, unapologetic about the profits-monster that emerged from the Exxon-Mobil merger (which he oversaw). He laughed in the face of what he saw as politically correct and scientifically unproved global warming, and financed contrarian research on the subject. When Tillerson assumed the helm, he set out to improve ExxonMobil’s corporate reputation; the climate-change oppo-research spending stopped and the idea of a carbon tax was embraced.

In Washington, Tillerson told ExxonMobil’s lobbying team to expand the company’s presence in the capital—and worked to enhance his own. He joined the board of Ford’s Theatre at a time when a capital campaign was underway to raise $20 million for an expansion. “We ended up with $50 million,” says Paul Tetreault, the theater’s director. “Rex had no interest in getting involved in the organization without getting engaged. He was connected in one way or another to 75-80 percent of that money.”

Lee Raymond was a member of the board of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Tillerson preferred the centrist Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), home to the great totems of American foreign policy, including Henry Kissinger. “He said he wanted to have a footprint in Washington that wasn’t just the oil company,” recalls John Hamre, president and CEO of CSIS. “I have some CEOs that have come to the first meeting and have never come back. But Rex Tillerson was the most faithful CEO we’ve ever had. He was actively involved.”

Hamre was delighted by Trump’s pick of Tillerson, and he expected it to be a great success. But before Tillerson had even taken up residence in the secretary’s seventh-floor office, he was caught off guard by a surprise White House action and State’s emphatic reaction.

Seven days into his presidency, Trump ordered a ban on citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries entering the United States. Within 48 hours, a dissent cable began to circulate within the State Department, including some of its most far-flung outposts, declaring the Trump move bad policy that would have the effect of making America less safe. Such cables on a contested topic usually attract a few dozen signatures; this one gathered 1,000. And dissent cables usually stay private. This one was quickly leaked to the Lawfare blog. The New York Times and Washington Post followed with stories, and the dissent from State became an early Trump controversy. It was plainly meant to embarrass the president.

Instead, it angered him. “These career bureaucrats have a problem with it?” Sean Spicer, then the White House press secretary, asked of the travel ban. “They should either get with the program or they can go.”

Hamre believes that the controversy did lasting damage to Tillerson. “It had a much bigger impact than people realize,” he says. “Rex, from the beginning, has had an insurgency going on within the White House that made it much harder for him. There are people who wanted to pull out of alliances, wanted to revert to an American nationalism agenda, et cetera, and all of a sudden, this story’s out, and those people had this strong argument to use against State with the president.”

Tillerson, who had no relationship with Trump, had to devote his energy to developing one—personal resources not spent stroking the rattled department he now ran. He then made things even harder on himself when he made reorganizing the State Department—a “redesign,” he called it—a top priority and brought in two outside consulting companies to plan it. That effort dovetailed with an announced White House goal of a 37 percent budget cut for State. It all seemed like an assault on the State Department, and though Tillerson argued the cuts down to 30 percent (and Congress delayed them altogether), he was seen as the enemy inside the walls.

The open feud between Trump and the foreign-policy establishment never died down. There were showy resignations in the department’s top tier and many retirements. Former diplomats took to the op-ed battlements, decrying the gutting of the State Department. The clamor reached a climax in November, when Barbara Stephenson, head of the American Foreign Service Association, issued a scorecard showing State’s losses. In a letter to her members, she accused the Trump administration of “decapitating leadership” at State and choosing to “forfeit the game to our adversaries.”

Her numbers were striking. The foreign service officer corps had lost 60 percent of its career ambassadors under Trump, career ministers were down by nearly a third, and the entry-level ranks were badly depleted. Young people, Stephenson said, were avoiding the foreign service in droves—fewer than half the number applied to take the Foreign Service Officer Test this year than last.

Tillerson admits that he knew no one at State when he became the boss and knew nothing of its culture. But he says he is puzzled by the perception that he has presided over a hollowing out of the State Department. “It’s interesting to me that some people seem to want to observe that there’s nothing happening at the State Department because I’m walking through this hollowed-out building and listening to the echoes of the heels of my shoes as I walk down the halls,” he recently told a gathering at the Atlantic Council. “Yes, I have a lot of open positions. I have nominees for them, I would love to get ’em in place. It makes a big difference. But I wanna tell you, the quality of the individuals in the career people at the State Department, the career foreign service officers, the people who are serving in ambassadorial roles, they’re dedicated to the mission. And they’re stepping up into these roles.”

Tillerson might have benefited from a strong deputy with diplomatic experience and deep ties at State, and in the early weeks of his tenure, he thought he had found one. Trump had at first seemed inclined to approve Tillerson’s choice of Elliott Abrams as deputy secretary of state, until someone in the White House pointed out that Abrams had written an article (in these pages) during the campaign that was headlined “When You Can’t Stand Your Candidate.” Abrams was nixed.

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After the controversy of the dissent memo, Tillerson cultivated Trump and was soon getting as much face time with the president as any cabinet member. But the secretary of state never became a Trump guy in the way that Pompeo and Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, did. Pompeo and Pruitt had Trump’s trust. They not only understood Trump’s agenda, they agreed with it.

Tillerson’s views diverged from Trump’s on key policy matters, including the North Korean crisis, with the secretary insisting on the pursuit of every diplomatic option. In October, Trump tweeted that Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” adding: “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”

On Iran, Trump had promised to pull out of the “very bad deal” reached by the Obama administration to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Tillerson’s State Department, to Trump’s annoyance, wanted to recertify Iranian compliance with the treaty. When Saudi Arabia led a trade and transport boycott of Qatar, citing the latter’s financial accommodation of suspected terror networks and ties to Iran, Trump took the Saudi side. Tillerson objected, citing the vital American interests in Qatar, and successfully urged an American role in trying to broker a resolution.

The tensions between Trump and his secretary of state gradually edged toward the personal, with Trump cutting Tillerson out of key decisions and, reportedly, disparaging him to those in his inner circle. For his part, Tillerson did little to defend Trump. When he was asked in August by Fox News’s Chris Wallace whether Trump’s comments on the violence in Charlottesville reflected American values, Tillerson responded: “The president speaks for himself.”

The most famous breach in the Trump-Tillerson relationship came last summer, after the president told his national security team that he wanted a 10-fold increase in America’s nuclear arsenal. At a meeting at the Pentagon, Tillerson reportedly declared Trump a “f—ing moron.” The comment leaked to NBC News, and when the president was asked about it, he urged a Trump-Tillerson IQ contest. “And I can tell you who is going to win,” he said.

The bitter irony for Tillerson is that inside State, he is considered Trump’s guy.

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When people familiar with the planning for a post-Tillerson State Department speak of the advantages of a Secretary Pompeo, it is not only because of Pompeo’s closeness to Trump. What recommends him from an institutional view is his success in managing the CIA, where he has picked up on the cues from within, avoided imposing his own team at the top level, and—most of all—not tried to launch any sort of reorganization.

One former diplomat says that change, if it comes at State, will be a tonic no matter who Trump chooses. “It will be the end of a period of enormous unhappiness,” the former official says, “and a sense of a secretary who has failed.”

As for Tillerson, his friends uniformly say that he is no quitter. He didn’t ask for the job and didn’t really want it, but accepted Trump’s offer out of a sense of duty. Tillerson himself has said that he serves at the pleasure of the president. Signs suggest that sufferance is nearing an end.

If so, Tillerson may bow out with a version of what he told his department as he prepared to return to Texas for the holidays. “I hope I’m going to see most of my cowboys on the ranch,” he said. “Those are the guys I like to hang out with.”

The vast realm of interested parties comprising the “diplomatic community” also know who they like to hang out with. When Rexit arrives, the next secretary of state will have no shortage of advice from them. Atop that list of recommendations will be: Ditch the Redesign.

Peter J. Boyer is national correspondent at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.