by Glen Johnson
Our efforts were rebuffed.
Not only did Tillerson spur three attempted meetings offered by Kerry, but virtually his entire incoming team did the same.
A whole wing of transition offices set up on the first floor of Main State went largely unused, except for a few coordinators dispatched from Trump transition headquarters near the White House.
The incoming chief of staff and other senior aides didn’t meet with their existing counterparts, whether they be policy experts, the Department spokesperson, or the staffers who helped organize a secretary’s trips.
I was alarmed as I walked down the 7th Floor hallway for the final time—at 11:40 a.m. on January 20, 2017, just twenty minutes before my presidential appointment expired—and prepared to turn in my BlackBerry.
I was doing so without having made any kind of hand-off to the person who would replace me after Trump was sworn in as president at the stroke of noon.
I certainly didn’t have the most vital role in the Department, but I’d been by the outgoing secretary’s side for his entire four-year term. I was willing to offer the benefits of my experience to any of the newcomers. And I felt this way despite them coming from a different political party than the administration I served.
Most of my colleagues felt exactly the same. I think the reason we did was the gravity of what we’d learned during the prior four years.
I had little appreciation for it as I entered the federal government, but national security jobs have a unique pressure and responsibility.
Momentous news could come at any time, day or night, and from any time zone in the world, and equally momentous decisions might have to be made in response. You learn to live with a low-grade sense of concern at all times—even as you sleep. You might turn off the ringer on your phone, but not the vibrator. Mine would shimmy across the nightstand as emails arrived while I intermittently dozed and awakened.
Meanwhile, the work is so intertwined with the safety of our country you never want to be off the clock without knowing for sure who’s standing watch for you. Even then, you’re never beyond the reach of the Ops Center, the State Department version of the White House Situation Room. It’s staffed with workers who had every possible phone number for Department employees and government outsiders alike.
Vacations are short and infrequent and subject to world events.
When I handed over my smartphone at the IT office and took the elevator down to an empty C Street Lobby that final day, I was relieved to no longer have the responsibility that had followed me everywhere I went.
It had been a long, stressful, and tiring four years.
But I also was alarmed as my taxi drove away from Main State. I knew there was a gap in The Building’s leadership, and it would take time for our replacements to get up to speed on the demands of their new jobs.
Our country was vulnerable, at the very least.
I found this especially churlish, because even if the Trump administration wanted to do everything the opposite of the Obama administration, it was a stretch to believe there wasn’t anything the incoming State Department team could learn from their predecessors.
There was nothing insightful John Kerry could tell Rex Tillerson about dealing with the Russian foreign minister? There was no low-hanging diplomatic fruit anywhere in the world that could help the new team establish itself? There was no issue best discussed face-to-face rather than written on a piece of paper that might never be routed to the right eyes or read?
My personal lament only foreshadowed the feelings that would permeate the State Department and its workforce in the coming weeks.
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THE NEWS THAT PRESIDENT-ELECT Trump had tapped Tillerson to be secretary of State was, initially, a relief for many at Foggy Bottom and posts around the world.
In the preceding weeks, there’d been speculation the job would go to former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, or former UN ambassador John Bolton.
While Giuliani openly pined to be secretary of State, he had a series of business connections that would have jeopardized his Senate confirmation. Bolton reportedly suffered from a different problem amid talk he was under consideration for secretary or national security adviser: his mustache was too bushy for the president-elect’s tastes.471
“Trump doesn’t think he looks the part,” Michael Wolff quoted former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon saying in his book Fire and Fury.472 Ultimately, the president warmed to Bolton enough to make him his third national security adviser.
Romney, meanwhile, had called Donald Trump a “phony” and “fraud” during the election campaign, even delivering a speech warning against his election.473 The two met after Election Day to settle their differences, but the president-elect later decided against picking a man who’d been the Republican Party’s presidential nominee just four years earlier.
Tillerson was endorsed by former secretaries of State James A. Baker III and Condoleezza Rice, both still extremely popular within the Department. He also kept a low profile throughout an application process resembling a casting call. He had his initial meeting with the president-elect after slipping into Trump Tower through a back door; he didn’t parade through the main lobby—and past the waiting media pool—like so many other candidates.
In fact, there wasn’t a single photograph or public sighting of Tillerson until after the president-elect formally nominated him on December 13, 2016. He later said he hadn’t been looking for work but planning to retire the coming March to spend more time with his grandchildren.
He said his wife convinced him he should serve the nation.474
“His tenacity, broad experience and deep understanding of geopolitics make him an excellent choice for secretary of State,” President-elect Trump said in a statement announcing Tillerson’s appointment.475
In his opening remarks to the staff, Tillerson strummed all the right chords. He told everyone in the State Department lobby they were “among the finest public servants in the world.”476 He was careful to praise not just the Foreign Service officers but the civil servants as well. He said the safety of everyone in every job would be his top priority, every single day.
He also showed deference to the entire seventy-thousand-plus person workforce, which had an average tenure of eleven years.
“I have 25 minutes,” he said, prompting laughter. “Hi, I’m the new guy.”477
But Tillerson equally acknowledged the “hotly contested” campaign that resulted in Donald Trump’s beating Hillary Clinton, who’d formerly led the very same people as secretary of State.
Many in the Department had expected to serve her again as president of the United States, and that isn’t a subjective statement.
Clinton arrived and departed from the State Department as a political celebrity, having already been first lady, lived in the White House, and elected a US senator. She’d run for president immediately before serving as secretary, and she left the Department with the clear expectation she’d mount a second campaign for the presidency.
When we got the news in New Zealand that Hillary Clinton had lost and Donald Trump had been elected president, I saw a career diplomat at our hotel begin to cry. The Department grew demoralized in the coming weeks as a cold reality set in.
They were all professionals trained to soldier on no matter which political party held the White House; but what many lamented was losing the prospect of serving a president who respected the State Department for the reality of working for one who didn’t.
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WARFARE BETWEEN THE ADMINISTRATION and the Department broke out even before Tillerson was confirmed in the Senate by a 56–42 vote—the most votes in US history against a nominee to be secretary of State.478
First, the incoming administration made clear it wasn’t going to carry over any of the Obama-era political appointees as ambassadors. This was normal, as each president has the right to tap whoever he wants to represent him abroad.
But within the Department, some political appointees resented having to leave their jobs immediately.
Many had expected a grace period. Without one, some had to pull their kids out of schools midyear instead of being given the option to continue serving until summer vacation. Despite the personal inconvenience, the decision shouldn’t have surprised them. Elections have consequences.
Second, Team Trump riled up the career employees by firing or driving out a wave of top-level Foreign Service officers who provided broad Department leadership.
In any presidential transition, political appointees on the State Department staff are expected to submit a resignation letter so the incoming president can fill any and all slots desired. Then White House chief of staff Denis McDonough sent all of us a memo immediately after Trump was elected, stating we had to submit our resignations to him by the first week of December 2016.
Within the federal bureaucracy, however, there also is an understanding certain people offer continuity within a department. They are a bridge of knowledge and experience that can serve an incoming administration—or at least help it launch smoothly. Incumbents are usually retained until their successors can be appointed, or nominated and confirmed by the Senate.
The Trump administration didn’t share that sentiment or follow that practice.
In a single afternoon, Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy, Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond, and Director of the Office of Foreign Missions Gentry O. Smith simultaneously submitted their resignations.479
Kennedy reportedly had been told he would be reassigned, and the other three considered themselves doomed even though they were career Foreign Service officers who would have been eligible for other postings.
Those resignations followed a pair on Inauguration Day by Greg Starr, the assistant secretary of Diplomatic Security, and Lydia Muniz, the director of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations.480
“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” David Wade, who’d served as Secretary Kerry’s first chief of staff, was quoted as saying in The Washington Post.481
The American Foreign Service Association issued a statement saying such changes were “nothing unusual. It added, “Given the talent available in our diplomatic corps, we expect that the new secretary will have no trouble finding the right people at State to fill out his senior leadership team.”482
The comment proved optimistic, especially after the president instituted a federal hiring freeze on January 23. He’d later go on to propose a 31 percent cut in the State Department and USAID budgets, and Tillerson would suspend two incoming A-100 classes supposed to include minority students already promised spots in the Foreign Service.483
The perception was that the Department was being cut off and hollowed out.
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AT THE SAME TIME, President Trump issued a ban on Muslims entering the United States from select Middle East and African nations. It triggered not only international concern and domestic political debate but also a “dissent cable” from State Department employees.
Over nine hundred of them declared they didn’t support the administration’s policy.
Such cables were created in the 1970s to provide an outlet for employee grievances, but the scale of the one about the Muslim ban made clear the Trump administration wasn’t just facing a small disagreement but a large-scale revolt against its policies.
The public airing prompted White House press secretary Sean Spicer to say, just two days before Tillerson was sworn in, that “career bureaucrats” at the Department could “get with the program or they can go.”484
Tillerson himself acknowledged the election dispute and its outgrowths during his arrival remarks.
“We do not all feel the same way about the outcome,” the new secretary said. “Each of us is entitled to the expression of our political beliefs, but we cannot let our personal convictions overwhelm our ability to work as one team.”485
He said his goal would be to focus the Department in the most efficient way possible.
“That may entail making some changes to how things are traditionally done in this department,” said Tillerson. “But we cannot sustain ineffective traditions over optimal outcomes.”486
He’d go on to launch a pair of management reviews aimed at generating the data he needed to reorganize the Department, but his own transition got off to an inauspicious start. President Trump rejected Tillerson’s choice for his top deputy, Elliott Abrams, after learning Abrams criticized him during the 2016 campaign.487
The White House rejection of Abrams, coupled with the slow rollout of more junior staffers and new ambassadors, forced Tillerson to rely on existing State Department staffers to fill vital roles on an acting basis. It also left numerous US embassies under the control of veteran Foreign Service officers who otherwise would have been the No. 2 official below one of the new president’s political appointees.
In a sense, the efforts to sideline or eliminate some diplomats ended up empowering those left behind.
Tillerson also proved to be press-shy, which took his diplomatic efforts out of the public spotlight.
The Department didn’t hold its usual Daily Press Briefing for almost two months after the new secretary took office. It was sporadic in giving readouts of his calls with foreign leaders. When Tillerson traveled, he did so on a smaller government plane than his predecessors. That sharply reduced or even eliminated the traveling press corps typically accompanying a secretary of State.
“I’m not a big media press access person. I personally don’t need it,” he told the lone reporter he took with him on his first trip to Asia.488
Just three weeks after Tillerson was sworn in, The Washington Post published a story headlined “In first month of Trump presidency, State Department has been sidelined.”489
“The biggest factor is the confusing lines of communication and authority to the White House, and Trump’s inclination to farm out elements of foreign policy to a kitchen cabinet of close advisers,” wrote veteran Post diplomatic correspondents Carol Morello and Anne Gearan.490
A month later, another Post headline read, “Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spends his first weeks isolated from an anxious bureaucracy.”491 A complaint both within the Department and at the White House was that Tillerson’s chief of staff, Navy veteran and former US Patent official Margaret Peterlin, was distrustful of the bureaucracy and kept a chokehold on the information flow to her boss.
Gearan and Morello wrote:
Eight weeks into his tenure as President Trump’s top diplomat, the former ExxonMobil chief executive is isolated, walled off from the State Department’s corps of bureaucrats in Washington and around the world. His distant management style has created growing bewilderment among foreign officials who are struggling to understand where the United States stands on key issues. It has sown mistrust among career employees at State, who swap paranoid stories about Tillerson that often turn out to be untrue. And it threatens to undermine the power and reach of the State Department, which has been targeted for a 30-percent funding cut in Trump’s budget.492
Fueling concern was a management survey sent out by Insigniam, one of the two private consulting firms hired by the secretary. It asked questions like, “To optimally support the future mission of the Department, what one or two things should your work unit totally stop doing or providing?”493
Employees considered the process a Trojan horse for slashing their ranks.
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SECRETARY TILLERSON SOUGHT TO counter that narrative by holding an employee town hall meeting the first week of May. Rather than the give-and-take typical of such sessions, he took no questions. Instead, the secretary recapped the administration’s policies by outlining how President Trump’s “America First” policy was being implemente
d around the world.
Near the end of his forty-minute remarks, he touched on his reorganization efforts. He reiterated they were necessary to pull the Department into the twenty-first century, but he conceded the angst he was creating in the process:
There’s nothing easy about it, and I don’t want to diminish in any way the challenges I know this presents for individuals, it presents to families, it presents to organizations. I’m very well aware of all of that. All I can offer you on the other side of that equation is an opportunity to shape the future way in which we will deliver on mission, and I can almost promise you—because I have never been through one of these exercises where it wasn’t true—that I can promise you that when this is all done, you’re going to have a much more satisfying, fulfilling career, because you’re going to feel better about what you’re doing.494
The outreach didn’t help much, either with employees or the media.
In June 2017, The New York Times published a story headlined, “Where Trump Zigs, Tillerson Zags, Putting Him at Odds with White House.”495
It noted how Tillerson had engaged in seven days of shuttle diplomacy to try to resolve a dispute between Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf neighbor, Qatar, only to have President Trump undo it with a single tweet siding with the Saudis.
“I’m not involved in how the president constructs his tweets, when he tweets, why he tweets, what he tweets,” the secretary later told reporters.496 The Times story went on to say, “Foreign governments do not know whether to believe Mr. Tillerson’s reassuring words or Mr. Trump’s incendiary statements.”497
By the end of July, Foreign Policy published a feature story headlined “How the Trump Administration Broke the State Department.” It opened with an anecdote about cubicles being added to the Department’s Policy Planning staff, which the widely read diplomatic magazine said was part of an effort to create a parallel staff of loyalists that wouldn’t have to interact with the rank and file.