Pompeo energizes demoralized State Department
WASHINGTON — He didn’t mention Rex Tillerson by name. But the contrast was clear as new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrived at the State Department on Tuesday vowing to reinvigorate American diplomacy and help the United States get “back our swagger.”
Pompeo was greeted with cheers and applause as he entered the marbled lobby of the Harry S. Truman Building for the first time as America’s top diplomat and addressed a diplomatic corps left deeply dispirited by a tumultuous year under Tillerson, President Donald Trump’s first secretary of state.
Pompeo described his mission as leading diplomats to execute Trump’s foreign policy “with incredible vigor and incredible energy.”
“The United States diplomatic corps needs to be in every corner, every stretch of the world, executing missions on behalf of this country,” Pompeo said. “It is my humble, noble undertaking to help you achieve that.”
He said he would spend “as little time” as possible cloistered in the secretary’s seventh-floor suite of offices, preferring to “get out” and interact directly with diplomats around the world, including humanitarian workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Trump planned to come to the State Department on Wednesday for a formal swearing-in ceremony for Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas who ran the CIA under Trump until being named as Tillerson’s replacement.