did anybody see the New York Times on Tillerson?
Rex Tillerson and the Unraveling of the State Department
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/...d-the-unraveling-of-the-state-department.html
it's long, so, some excerpts:
"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, and Patrick Kennedy, the under secretary of state for management. Haley wanted to ask them questions about the logistics of her new job: basic matters like what her salary and benefits would be and where her family would live in New York City. Kenney and Kennedy told her about the federal employee health insurance plan and offered to send her floor plans of the U.N. ambassador’s apartment. When word of the call got back to Trump’s transition team, the two department officials were reprimanded by Glazer and told never to speak with Haley again... Two days later, Kennedy was told to retire and given three days to clean out his office. Kennedy had spent 44 years in the Foreign Service and was not particularly political, focusing instead on management and operations; he’d been appointed to his under-secretary position by President George W. Bush. But he had become a central figure in conservative conspiracy theories about Benghazi and Clinton’s private email server. Tillerson aides later joked that Kennedy’s defenestration was like something out of the Soviet Union, dragging a political foe out into the street and shooting him in the head so as to send a message to others.
A few weeks later, Kenney, who as counselor was the State Department’s No. 5 policy official, was told that her services were no longer needed, and she retired. And in the weeks after that, half a dozen other top diplomats were shown the door — fired, forced into retirement or warehoused at a university fellowship. “If you took the entire three-star and four-star corps of the military and said, ‘Leave!’ Congress would go crazy,” one of the recently departed said."
"The person on whose shoulders the fallout from the staffing shortage rests most heavily is Brian Hook, the head of the department’s office of policy planning. A former adviser to Mitt Romney, Hook was a founder of the John Hay Initiative, a hawkish foreign-policy think tank whose other two founders, Eliot A. Cohen and Eric Edelman, were (and still are) among Trump’s most vociferous critics. Cohen and Edelman put their names on anti-Trump letters during the 2016 election; Hook didn’t.
With so many crucial assistant-secretary positions — including some responsible for Asia, the Middle East, and South America — still either vacant or filled with acting officials, Hook has had to pick up the slack. “He’s trying to do the job of 30 people,” a 25-year veteran Foreign Service officer says. “He’s just knee-walking.”
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 and association with Cohen and Edelman, he wasn’t sufficiently pro-Trump. I noted that on his conference table he had a book by Daniel W. Drezner, an international-politics professor at Tufts University who writes regularly for The Washington Post website and is a frequent critic of Trump and of Tillerson. In fact, just that morning, Drezner had
published a column calling on Tillerson to resign. I jokingly told Hook that he might want to hide the book. Instead, R.C. Hammond, Tillerson’s communications director, who was sitting in on the interview, immediately seized it.
“This is the guy who has the thing at The Post?” Hammond asked Hook. “Where’s your trash can?” He made as if he was going to throw the book across Hook’s office. Hook raised his hand to block Hammond.
“No!” Hook said. “It’s a book on policy planning! This was written before Rex Tillerson was even considered.”
“Trash can,” Hammond reiterated. Hook kept his hand up. The fifth of Bombay gin and the liter bottle of tonic water on his desk suddenly made more sense."
"After Tillerson’s punishing turn in the media glare in recent weeks, the assumption among many that I spoke to in Foggy Bottom (outside Tillerson’s closest advisers) was that his departure was now a question of when, not if. Some believed that the only holdup was that Trump had not yet decided on Tillerson’s replacement, with Haley and the C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, being the most frequently mentioned candidates. Others speculated that Tillerson had asked to delay his exit until he’d been in his position for a year, in order to avoid a huge capital-gains tax hit on the stocks he had to divest from in order to take the job.
The “moron” remark had actually elevated Tillerson in the estimation of some in Foggy Bottom — “I feel like it’s curiously redemptive,” the 25-year veteran Foreign Service officer told me — but even these people conceded that they believed he could no longer do his job effectively. “This just isn’t sustainable,” a senior State Department official said. “You can’t have a secretary of state going around the world who’s not seen as representing the president’s foreign policy.”
"All of which can lead to some dark thoughts. More than one State Department official told me that they believed all of this wasn’t a case of simple mismanagement but of something more sinister. “I’ve lived in a lot of countries where conspiracy theories abound because people feel like they lack self-determination,” Nancy McEldowney, a 30-year career Foreign Service officer who retired in June, says. “And a great many people inside State are now hypothesizing about what the goal of all this is. Why are they firing people and shrinking the department down? It can’t simply be a budget-cutting exercise. If it were purely for reform, they would have done it differently.”
Whatever his intentions, Tillerson’s true legacy may well be to have transformed a venerable American institution into the caricature of its most fevered, irrational critics. In Foggy Bottom, anguish is increasingly giving way to bitterness. “I’ve jokingly said to friends that I’m going to be executive director of the Deep State,” the Foreign Service veteran of 25 years, who is currently in the process of “separating” from the organization, told me. “There was never a Deep State before, but these idiots have managed to create one.”
