Rex Tillerson and the Unraveling of the State Department<br />“His idea of foreign policy isn’t one that would make sense to people who read Foreign Policy.”<br />But his combed-back silver hair and Texas-inflected baritone — in which a Foggy Bottom commonplace like “partner” becomes a mellifluous “pardner” — radiated the kind of authority admired by Trump, who asked Tillerson to be his secretary of state during their first meeting at Trump Tower in December.<br />As one of them later recalled, “Every conversation would end with, ‘Have you heard anything from Tillerson?’ ”<br />Finally, with only a few days until the inauguration and still no word from Tillerson, one of the senior officials, Victoria Nuland — who once was Hillary Clinton’s State Department spokeswoman<br />but had also been a foreign-policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and was at the time the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs — opted to retire.<br />“It’s the random thoughts of Donald J. Trump and a very weak State Department and a secretary of state who hasn’t thought deeply about these things.”<br />When I recently met with Hook in his seventh-floor office at the State Department, he seemed wary of any implication that, in light of his establishment pedigree<br />and association with Cohen and Edelman, he wasn’t sufficiently pro-Trump.<br />In December, Nikki Haley, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, set up a conference call with two senior State Department officials: Kristie Kenney, the State Department counselor,<br />and Patrick Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management.
