Secretary of state didn’t see his firing coming WASHINGTON
Rex Tillerson spent a tumultuous year at the helm of the State Department, frequently undercut by the president he disagreed with on key foreign policy issues and derided by many of his employees who blamed him for marginalizing their role and diplomacy itself.
But after months of denying he intended to resign, Tillerson was ousted Tuesday just as he seemed to be hitting his diplomatic stride. In recent weeks, he grew even more outspoken in his criticism of Russia, more confident that his patient pressure on North Korea was bearing fruit and seemingly more comfortable that he would outlast his many critics in the West Wing.
In the end, no one was more surprised that Tillerson was fired than Tillerson himself. As recently as Monday night, while he was in the air flying back from a weeklong trip to Africa, an aide said Tillerson was staying put.
In a statement from a top aide about five hours after his plane landed at Joint Base Andrews around 4 a.m., Tillerson made clear that the gulf between the methodical former corporate executive and the mercurial president was as wide as ever.
“The secretary had every intention of staying because of the critical progress made in national security and other areas,” said Steve Goldstein, undersecretary of public diplomacy for the State Department.
“The secretary did not speak to the president, and is unaware of the reason,” he added.
Tillerson’s firing caps a rough couple of weeks. His father died Feb. 25. Two days after returning to Washington from the funeral, he departed on a week-long trip to Africa, where he was sidelined for a day by illness.
His departure followed months of disagreements with the White House over staffing and administrative matters at the State Department, which has a large backlog of unfilled jobs. But what may have done him in was a fatal disconnect over what Trump saw as Tillerson’s conventional approach to policy matters.
In picking Rex Wayne Tillerson to head the State Department, Trump told associates he wanted a secretary of state who looked the part. He liked Tillerson’s camera-ready image and acerbic Texas drawl, real as barbed wire from a man who was named after two 1950s Western movie stars, Rex Allen and John Wayne. He also liked Tillerson’s résumé as chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil.
But the two men, who did not know each other before Trump’s election, never clicked. For Tillerson, despite weekly lunches and frequent phone calls, Trump remained unpredictable and sometimes inscrutable.
Tillerson has no singular foreign policy cause or achievement to his credit, but he had worked to open the door to talks with North Korea. Although Trump dismissively said last year that Tillerson was wasting his time trying to talk to “Little Rocket Man,” as he dubbed North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the summit that Trump agreed to last week is partly born of Tillerson’s efforts.
The perceived put-down of Tillerson’s diplomacy marked one of several times when Trump had undercut his top diplomat. And several major foreign policy endeavors, such as Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, were taken away from the State Department and handed to Trump adviser and sonin-law Jared Kushner. That further undermined Tillerson’s influence, both with his own employees and with foreign governments uncertain whether Tillerson truly spoke for the president.
A part of his legacy is in his pushback on Trump policies that Tillerson considered unwise, battles he did not often win. In private meetings with Trump, he told him he thought the United States should stay in the Paris climate agreement and should not break away from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, as Trump has threatened to do this spring.