Inside Rex Tillerson's Ouster

By Ronan Farrow, The New Yorker

19 April 18

The last days of his brief and chaotic tenure as Secretary of State.

ex Tillerson’s team was fighting again. “So, who’s going to go in with him?” Margaret Peterlin, his chief of staff, was saying. She looked me up and down with an expression that suggested she’d discovered a pest in the house. We were standing at the wide double doors into the Secretary of State’s office on Mahogany Row, the opulent, wood-panelled corridor on the seventh floor of the State Department’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, which houses the most powerful offices in American foreign policy. Steven Goldstein, the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, folded his arms and stared daggers at Peterlin. “Well, I guess I won’t be,” he told her. “Heather can go.” Goldstein tilted his head toward Tillerson’s spokesperson, the former Fox News anchor Heather Nauert. Peterlin narrowed her eyes at Goldstein. “Are you sure?” she said, with theatrical displeasure. Goldstein didn’t reply. Tillerson strode up to the door, cutting the tension. Nauert and Peterlin joined the interview, along with Tillerson’s director of policy planning, Brian Hook. Goldstein remained outside. (Peterlin said that she was following a rule enacted by Secretary Tillerson that only one communications officer be allowed in his interviews.)

Such discord often simmered just under the surface in the year before Tillerson’s unceremonious firing in March, according to multiple members of his embattled inner circle. Often, it emanated from Peterlin, a formidable attorney, U.S. Navy veteran, and former congressional staffer who helped draft the Patriot Act after the September 11th attacks and guided Tillerson through his confirmation process. When she was passed a note indicating I’d arrived that day, she’d given the rest of the team an ultimatum: from the public-relations staff, only Goldstein would be permitted in the interview. Goldstein had pointed out that Nauert, as spokesperson, would be responsible for answering ensuing public questions. Peterlin insisted that there was simply no room. One staffer present said that there was another motivation: Peterlin had been lobbying to get Nauert fired. (Peterlin said that she did not lobby to fire Nauert, and pointed out that Nauert still holds her position as spokesperson, today.) The standoff hadn’t been resolved by the time I was ushered in to see Tillerson, nor as I left, when a second contretemps erupted over who would stay behind with the Secretary. (Goldstein again insisted on Nauert, visibly vexing Peterlin.) This squabbling barely qualified as drama, but displaying it so openly in front of a reporter was at odds with the kind of tightly organized messaging prized by most of Tillerson’s predecessors. It provided a small window into a State Department that appeared to be plunged into chaos at every level.

In that meeting, in January, Tillerson was wearing a charcoal suit and a canary-yellow tie, patterned with horseshoes. He was sitting, legs crossed, in one of the blue-and-gold upholstered chairs in the Secretary’s office. Tillerson had redecorated, replacing the portraits of dead diplomats with scenes of the American West. He got compared to a cowboy a lot, and, between the décor and the horseshoes, he appeared to be leaning into it. The name helped: Rex Wayne Tillerson, after Rex Allen and John Wayne, the actors behind some of Hollywood’s most indelible swaggering cowboys.

Tillerson was born in Wichita Falls, Texas, and was raised there and in neighboring Oklahoma, by parents of modest means. His parents met through the Boy Scouts, when his mother visited her brother at the camp where Tillerson’s father worked. Tillerson honored that legacy by remaining active in Boy Scouts leadership for much of his career. His biography is marked by earnest overachievement: he was an Eagle Scout, and then a member of his high-school band, in which he played the kettle and snare drums, and which yielded a marching-band scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin. In the course of more than forty years at ExxonMobil, culminating in his decade-long tenure as the company’s C.E.O., he amassed a personal fortune of at least three hundred million dollars—not including the roughly hundred-and-eighty-million-dollar retirement package he received when he departed the firm to enter government. The call to serve in the Trump Administration had thrown into disarray his plans for retirement, which he had intended to spend with his wife, Renda, on their two horse and cattle ranches in Texas. Peterlin shot him a warning look. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s been” —he furrowed his brow, appearing to search for the word— “interesting.”

When President Trump nominated Tillerson to be the Secretary of State, his experience running one of the largest corporations in the world inspired optimism among career officials. Maybe, several said, he’d bring to the job a private-sector knack for institutional growth—or at least savvy, targeted trimming. “Things were blue skies” when Tillerson was nominated, Erin Clancy, a foreign-service officer, recalled. “His business record was promising.”

But the problems mounted quickly. Gossip began to make the rounds in D.C., portraying Tillerson as aloof and insulated from the Department. After brief remarks on his first day, he didn’t speak to the workforce again until a town hall in May of last year, unusually late into the Administration for a new Secretary of State. Another time, he gave employees an overview of the basics of world conflicts. Some found it condescending. “It was an exercise in ‘I can read a map,’ ” one foreign-service officer in attendance recalled. When Tillerson then told a story about attending a Model U.N. session and telling a twelve-year-old participant how much the Foreign Service inspired him, a middle-aged officer audibly muttered, “You don’t fucking know us.”

Several staffers said Tillerson’s inaccessibility extended to his foreign counterparts. “He is not a proactive seeker of conversations,” an officer in the State Department’s Operations Center, who spent months connecting Tillerson’s calls, told me. When new Secretaries are sworn in, they typically receive a flood of courtesy calls from foreign ministers. More than sixty came into the Operations Center for Tillerson. He declined to take more than three a day. In April of last year, when the United States initiated strikes on Syria, the Administration skipped the conventional step of notifying its NATO allies. “When news broke, alarmed allies . . . were calling’” the operations officer told me. It was early on a Sunday afternoon, and Tillerson was in Washington and unoccupied. “We were told that the Secretary had a long weekend so he was going to go home and have dinner with his wife and call it a night.” No calls. “That floored me,” the operations officer recalled.

One source close to the White House struggled to reconcile Tillerson’s peerless track record of private-sector management with his approach at the State Department. “Forty years at Exxon, in the God Pod, telling people to jump based on how high the price of oil is up,” the source said, using the pet term for Tillerson’s office suite within ExxonMobil. “I’m not trying to be shitty, but, you know, there’s a way to run that company.” Government, where no man is God (except the President), was something else. “At first, I thought, Uh-oh, this is growing pains; a private-sector guy, realizing how hard Washington is,” the source close to the White House continued. “And just, what I started to see, week after week, month after month, was someone who not only didn’t get it but there was just no self-reflection, only self-mutilation.”

Until Tillerson was finally fired, in March, rumors of his demise were relentless. Mike Pompeo, the former C.I.A. director, whom President Trump nominated to replace Tillerson, was one popularly cited successor. Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, was another. The perception that Tillerson had a rivalry with Haley appeared to be a source of particular vexation for the Secretary and his team. The day I met with him, they were still reeling from an announcement Haley had made about plans to withhold U.S. funding for U.N.R.W.A., the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. Tillerson hadn’t been consulted. In a series of tense e-mails, Haley’s press office told Tillerson staffers that it had checked with the White House instead. Tensions between Secretaries of State and U.S. Ambassadors to the United Nations were nothing new, but this enmity seemed to run deeper. “Holy shit,” the source close to the White House said, “I’ve never seen anything like the way he’s treated her . . . it’s shocking.” Tillerson’s “rage” toward Haley had drawn the disapproval of even the President, the source added. Goldstein, the former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, attributed unflattering accounts from White House sources to disgruntled rivals. “What is said is the furthest from the truth,” he said.

“The only person that I have to worry about is the President of the United States,” Tillerson told me. But that relationship was, likewise, fraught. Tillerson’s Texas swagger, the source close to the White House said, irked Trump. “You just can’t be an arrogant alpha male all the time with Trump. You have to do what Mattis does, which is, ‘Mr. President, you’re the President, you’re smarter than me, you won, your instincts are always right, but let me just give you the other view, sir.’ Then you have this guy coming in,” the source said, referring to Tillerson, “going ‘Well, I guess because I worked for so many years in the oil business, I have something to say. You don’t know much about the region, so let me start with that.’ I mean, honestly, condescending.”

When I mentioned the White House’s role in escalating rumors of his demise, Tillerson appeared to have been waiting for the question. “Mm-hmm,” he said, nodding. “When you say ‘the White House,’ who are you talking about?” he asked. “The White House is comprised of how many people?” Hook, the director of policy planning, chimed in that the answer was perhaps in the thousands. Tillerson waved him off. “But people that matter, people that might have an interest in whether I stay or leave, there’s about one hundred and sixty of them.” Tillerson leaned in and, for a moment, I realized that it must be unpleasant to be fired by him. “I know who it is. I know who it is. And they know I know.”

According to multiple individuals who had heard Tillerson speak of the matter behind closed doors, this was a reference to Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner. Before Tillerson’s departure, tensions between the two men had been flaring regularly, often in the form of a public-relations proxy war. When Tillerson prevailed in reinstating some of the humanitarian funds for U.N.R.W.A. that Haley had sought to withhold, press items discussing potential negative repercussions for Kushner’s Middle East peace efforts began appearing. A State Department official with knowledge of the situation accused Kushner of planting them. The source close to the White House said that Kushner had attempted to work with Tillerson and met with resistance. “Here’s what I saw: a President who surprised [Kushner] on the spot and said, ‘You’re doing Mideast peace,’ after the campaign. A guy who tried to brief Rex every single week but could never even get a call back or a meeting. . . . And it wasn’t just Jared. It was many people across the government, including fellow Cabinet members, who complained.”

When I asked Tillerson whether he had been frustrated when responsibilities were handed to Kushner, he was surprisingly passive. “Uh, no,” he said. “It was pretty clear in the beginning the President wanted him to work on the Middle East peace process, and so we carved that out.” He shrugged. “That’s what the President wanted to do.” As Tillerson recalled, Kushner would “come over” periodically to update him, “so at least we had full connectivity between that and all the other issues that we’re managing with the same countries and same leaders. We would give them input and suggestions: ‘Probably want to think about this.’ ‘That’s going to be a non-starter.’ ” To the bitter end, Tillerson seemed passionate about fighting stories of his ouster. Surrendering Middle East peace he greeted with a shrug. (After his abrupt firing, Tillerson declined requests for further comment.)

The messy division of labor between Tillerson and Kushner had policy consequences. When Tillerson began to work as a mediator in a dispute that saw Saudi Arabia and a number of Gulf states cut off relations with Qatar, an important military ally, Trump veered off course, issuing a vociferous, off-the-cuff takedown of Qatar. It was a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn from the narrative Tillerson had been pushing on the Sunday shows just a day before. Kushner, according to White House sources, had sided with the Saudis based on his close relationship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whom Kushner considered a promising reformer. Middle East policy had been given to both men, and it appeared that Kushner, with a background in real estate and in being the President’s son-in-law, was winning the tug-of-war.

The former Secretary of State Colin Powell recalled having similar turf wars with Vice-President Dick Cheney. “I’ve been in similar situations, where I suddenly discovered we’ve created military commissions. ‘Wait a minute—that’s a legal matter and a legal matter the State Department has primacy on.’ ” But Powell was one of several former Secretaries to express bafflement at Tillerson’s approach to his shrinking mandate. “I can’t tell. He may love it,” Powell said, with a shrug. “I can’t tell that he objects.” And then, with a wry smile, “Maybe if we had ambassadors there, they’d pick it up—that’s what they do.”

Powell was poking at the most far-reaching consequence of Tillerson’s brief tenure: a State Department unmanned and downsized. The first budget the Administration floated to Congress proposed a twenty-eight-per-cent slash to the Department’s funding. The White House wanted to eliminate all funding for the United States Institute of Peace and its mission to “guide peace talks and advise governments; train police and religious leaders; and support community groups opposing extremism.” It would gut health programs on H.I.V., malaria, and polio, and halve U.S. contributions to United Nations peacekeeping missions. (The Trump Administration maintains that its budget preserves current commitments for PEPFAR and the Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria).

The planned decimation of the workforce was more sweeping than that of the programs. More than thirteen hundred diplomats would get pink slips. Initially, it was announced that there would be no new classes of foreign-service officers—the so-called A 100 recruits who file off for training at a sort of Hogwarts for diplomats in the Virginia suburbs before becoming full-fledged officers. The State Department also abruptly suspended its participation in the Presidential Management Fellows program, a prestigious apprenticeship long used to draw talent to the profession. The number of new recruits taking the foreign-service entrance exam plummeted by twenty-six per cent from the year before. It was the lowest level of interest in nearly a decade.

There seemed to be just as little interest in filling the core leadership roles that had been left intact. Hundreds of senior positions sat empty. The building was being run almost entirely by deputies elevated to “acting” assistant-secretary status, many of whom had decades less experience than their unceremoniously removed predecessors. When I asked Tillerson whether the unfilled posts were a source of anxiety, he puffed his chest and smirked. “I don’t have anxiety,” he said. It was, however, “a point of concern.?.?.?.  It’s not something I’m happy about.”

Tillerson blamed the White House. “They’ve not been easy,” he recalled, of his year of conversations with the Trump Administration about filling the open jobs. “The process over there has not been the most efficient, and they’ve changed personnel trying to improve it, I mean, many, many times.?.?.?. It was very slow, it was very cumbersome, it was frustrating, at times, because you couldn’t get a sense of ‘What’s the issue?’ Someone seems to be kind of sitting in idle over there,” he said, sighing. “I would tell ’em, ‘Just give me a no. At least with a no, I’ll go get another name.’ ”

It was only through a bizarre set of circumstances, in which Congress essentially went to war with both Tillerson and the budget, that the cuts were ultimately rendered less extensive. Early last year, in an Art Deco, wood-panelled hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, Tillerson faced off against grandstanding from both sides of the aisle when he presented the Administration’s first budget proposal. Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, recalled during that hearing that “after about five minutes” of reviewing the proposal, “I said, ‘This is a total waste of time. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ ”

But Tillerson gamely defended the cuts through hours of drubbing and during the ensuing year, as Congress essentially tried to throw money at the Department. On one occasion, he refused to accept eighty million dollars in congressional funding earmarked for State to counter Russian propaganda, which raised eyebrows following the discovery of Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 election. Tillerson’s relationships on the Hill frayed. One prominent Republican senator called the White House and threatened to subpoena Tillerson if he wasn’t more coöperative, according to a source at the White House with knowledge of the conversation. Several former Secretaries of State expressed astonishment at Tillerson’s approach to budget advocacy. “Tillerson didn’t want the money,” Madeleine Albright, who served as the Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, recalled. “For me, I’ve never heard about anything like that.”

When I pressed him on his defense of the budget, Tillerson admitted, for the first time, that he had pushed back behind closed doors. “In fact, I had people around here who said, ‘You know, you need to leak your passback letter, you need to leak your appeals letter.’ And I said, ‘No, that’s not how I do things.’ ” Tillerson said he’d looked at the numbers proposed by the White House Office of Management and Budget and assumed he could count on “plus ten, plus twenty per cent, because we figure the Congress is going to give us something there.” He conceded he may have simply lacked experience. “Having been here one month” when he mounted his initial defense, “I didn’t have a real basis to do more than work with O.M.B. to understand what were their objectives.”

While some former Secretaries of State agreed with the premise of expansive cuts, virtually all, spanning generations, took issue with the extent and execution of the ones championed by Tillerson. George P. Shultz, who served in the Nixon and Reagan Administrations and had, like Tillerson, spent years in the private sector, told me that, stepping into the job, “You don’t start out with the idea that you’re going to cut everything before you even know what’s going on.” The fact that Tillerson had moved so swiftly toward downsizing was “astonishing,” Shultz said. “Whether he was told to do that by the President, that was part of a condition of taking the job, I don’t know. On the other hand, if the President insists on something like that, I think it’s unacceptable. You can turn a job down.”

In the months before his firing, Tillerson attempted to soften his messaging, praising the value of the Foreign Service in a Times Op-Ed and a “60 Minutes” interview. The guillotine finally descending suggested that the warmer embrace was unwelcome. Last month, Tillerson himself became the latest diplomat to receive a pink slip. “Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become your new Secretary of State,” Trump tweeted. “He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service!” As was increasingly the norm, the State Department was the last to know. “The Secretary did not speak to the President and is unaware of the reason,” a statement from Goldstein read.

Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, has little by way of diplomatic experience, and is more of a hawk than Tillerson. He backed Trump's sabre-rattling calls to dismantle the Iran deal with his own, equally hard-line statements and tweets. And he appears to have internalized some of the lessons cited by White House officials about managing Trump’s ego. The President, he said, during his tenure as the C.I.A. director, “asks good, hard questions. Make[s] us go make sure we’re doing our work in the right way.” Trump, likewise, has said that he and Pompeo are “always on the same wavelength. The relationship has been very good, and that’s what I need as Secretary of State.” The Department would be downsized, and the President’s selection of a Secretary with views more in lockstep with his own suggested that there would be less dissent as it happened.

After Tillerson’s brief and chaotic ride as America’s top diplomat, Pompeo will face a Department with an uncertain future, in which the evisceration of American diplomacy is well under way, if not complete. Should he be confirmed, he will face decisions with profound implications, potentially for generations of American foreign policy. “In a couple years, if we get a Presidency of either party that values diplomacy, you can fix a budget, you can invest again in the State Department,” the former Secretary of State John Kerry told me. “But it takes years to undo what’s happening, because it takes years to build up expertise and capacity.” Powell offered a similarly blunt assessment. The Trump Administration has been “ripping the guts out of the organization,” he said. “When you stop bringing people in or when you make [the State Department] an undesirable place to be, then you are mortgaging your future.”