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Thursday March 28, 2024

Stubborn, reserved Tillerson a bad fit in chaotic Trump admin

By AFP
March 14, 2018

WASHINGTON: When President Donald Trump decided last year to hire Texas oilman Rex Tillerson as his secretary of state, the Washington foreign policy establishment thought it knew what to expect.

After all, the then 64-year-old engineer had been chief executive of ExxonMobil, the US oil giant, and so close to Russia’s Vladimir Putin that he had received a medal of friendship.

He was expected to share Trump’s affection for Moscow and hostility to the Paris climate change accord, and thought capable of cutting costs and streamlining his unwieldy department.

The perfect Trump man, in other words, a player from the world of business brought in to shake up or smash the Washington bureaucracy and the international order under an “America First” banner.

What Trump got, to his evident frustration, was a stubborn diplomat in a more orthodox conservative tradition, keen to reassure allies, work with the US military and hold Russia at arm’s length.Tillerson was almost immediately drawn into conflict with the White House even as he attempted to staff his department.

When he tried to enlist Republican veterans of previous State Departments, the White House barred all those suspected of having opposed Trump during his seizure of the party.But when Tillerson sought to promote from inside the department among career officials whose work he respected, that too was vetoed for fear “holdovers” from Barack Obama’s administration would be disloyal.

Now, a year on, the man who managed the world’s biggest oil company has failed to staff his department, with more than 70 senior posts and ambassadorships unfilled.Tillerson, an Eagle Scout and former national president of the Boy Scouts movement, had a very different personal and moral persona to that of his flamboyant and unrestrained boss.

Last week, he described his motivation for joining public service when he could have retired with several hundred million dollars and rode the range on his beloved Texas ranch.Before an audience at George Mason University, Tillerson described how when he was 18 he registered for the draft to fight in Vietnam but his number in the lottery system was 89 and the recruiters only got to 86.

“And so I stayed in college, got a great education, got hired by a great company, had 41-and-a-half wonderful years,” he said.“My father is a veteran, World War II, fought in the war in the Pacific. My uncle is a retired major in the Army, did three tours of duty in Vietnam,” he said.

“And as I reflected on things at that point, I said I hadn’t really done anything yet. It’s my time to serve, and that’s why I’m doing it.”But if his motives were admirable, his results were not what he hoped for.

State Department employees were initially relieved not to have been placed under an inexperienced nationalist from the wilder shores of Trump’s insurgent campaign, but were soon disappointed.