by Bob Woodward
Tillerson turned to Asia. “China is a different challenge for you. On the one hand, China’s rise, their economy, the lifting of 500 million people out of poverty to middle-class status, all of the economic benefits to the rest of the world—those are all good things.
“But China has gone too far in the South China Sea with the island building.” For years, the Chinese had been building military bases on the islands. They had vastly expanded their footprint by dumping sand and muck dredged from the ocean on top of the rock and reef formations, building man-made islands in order to set up more bases with an alarming array of military installations in the highly valuable international trade passage that threatened the U.S. Navy’s Pacific domination. Other countries in the region, most notably Japan, lay claim to part of the sea.
“That’s going to be your problem,” Tillerson said. Also, Hong Kong and Taiwan, he said. “You’re going to have to deal with a conflict with China over those.
“Russia is an immediate challenge to you. China is a long-term challenge.”
Tillerson continued his round-the-world tour. He talked extensively about the Middle East, where he also knew the leaders. He told Trump how some fifteen years ago he had been talking to Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the powerful crown prince of the Emirates. “He was a pretty young guy. We were talking in his house. And he says, we don’t need nuclear weapons. As long as we have friends who have them.” The protective nuclear American umbrella was crucial.
The United States still had a dominant role in the world, Tillerson told Trump. “All the aces are still in the cards on the table.” In his view the four aces were military strength, economic strength, democracy and freedom, but Trump did not ask what they were.
“Your job is to draw every one of them out with the right politics and tactics,” he said, adding confidently, “Those aces belong to the United States of America.”
Ivanka Trump came into the room and Trump introduced her. She sat down and Trump stood up theatrically behind his desk.
“I really like everything you said,” Trump declared to Tillerson. “You clearly are a guy that knows the world. You’ve got these relationships. I’m sure you’ve been following the press. I’ve been talking to a lot of people about serving in my cabinet. I’ve got a lot of people that want some of these high-profile jobs.”
Uh-oh, Tillerson thought, here it comes, perhaps secretary of energy, a job that would be real easy to decline.
“You’re the perfect guy to be my secretary of state,” the president-elect said.
Tillerson lurched back.
“You’re surprised?” said Bannon.
“Yes, I am surprised,” Tillerson said, though he had—perhaps even intentionally—pushed all the buttons on Trump’s console, especially on the pathway to Putin. Tillerson then took a breath. “I’ve got a job,” he told Trump.
“But you’re going to retire pretty soon,” Trump said. He apparently had been prepped that Tillerson was three months away from Exxon’s mandatory retirement age of 65. His successor had already been picked and the transition was under way. “This is just three months early,” Trump added.
“This will be really hard to do,” Tillerson said. “It will be really hard for you. I would not be an easy person to get confirmed, you know. Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil. We’re not exactly the most loved corporation in the world,” adding defensively, “undeservedly.”
“I really need you,” Trump said. “You’re the guy.”
Now Tillerson, like so many before him, was experiencing the almost irresistible call to presidential service.
“I’ve got to think this over. I would need to talk to my board, obviously. Look, it’s not a simple matter for me. Just personally and financially and my obligations to the ExxonMobil corporation”—40 years. “I don’t know if it’s doable.” He was worth hundreds of millions of dollars and was looking forward to retiring to the horse ranch he and his wife ran.
“When do you think you could give me an answer?” Trump asked.
It was now Tuesday, December 6. “I will commit to give you an answer by Friday.”
“I can hold off that long.”
* * *
Tillerson called his wife, Renda, from the car and said, “You’re not going to believe what just happened.”
“He asked you to be secretary of state,” she said.
“Well, how’d you know?”
“I told you God’s not through with you.”
In the car, Tillerson took stock and settled in for a little introspection. Had he failed to conceal a yearning from Renda? This was the job held by Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Marshall. Fourth in line to the presidency. Had he hid his ambition even from himself? What did he really want? Whose interests should he serve? Could he find the proper version of all his obligations? To Renda, Exxon, the country and now, of all things, Donald Trump?
Back home, Renda had some answers. As you’ve approached retirement you’ve become irritable, she said. Subconsciously, she believed, he was worried about that terrible question: What am I going to do?
“Look,” she told him, “you’ve been in training for this for the last twenty years. You are supposed to help this man. He needs your help. You need to go help him.”
Tillerson thought he had every reason in the world not to take the job. If Renda had not said all that to him, he believed he would have talked himself out of it.
He had not served in the military and always felt uneasy about that. Was this his time to serve his country? For the moment, he had the upper hand. Trump was waiting for his answer. So he called Reince Priebus.
“I’ve got three questions for the president-elect,” he said.
“Okay, shoot. What are they?”
“Reince, I’m not going to give them to you. I’ve got to ask them of the president face-to-face. I have to see his answers.”
Priebus arranged for Tillerson to see Trump at his residence in New York on Saturday.
Tillerson meanwhile talked to longtime Republican friends who had served as secretary of state—Condoleezza Rice (four years for George W. Bush), James A. Baker III (three years for George H. W. Bush) and George Shultz (six years for Ronald Reagan). He reminded them he was coming from Big Oil and he did not want to cause a problem for himself or the newly elected president. They were public service mavens. The advice was unanimous: You must do it. When the president asks, if it is in the realm of the possible and if it is legal, you respond with a yes.
Tillerson visited Trump at his residence in private.
“I want the freedom to pick my own people,” he asked the president-elect. “I understand if there’s somebody that’s just highly objectionable to you,” Tillerson said. In the end, it was the president’s decision and responsibility to nominate someone. “But I hope I’ll have the freedom to put the team together that I feel I’ll need to help you.”
“Done,” Trump said.
“The second question, I want your assurance that when we get into this, you will never withdraw my nomination. Because I’m going to be a very difficult confirmation.” He was aware that presidents often folded when controversy hit. The Big Oil executive would inevitably draw fire. “And I don’t want you spending any of your political capital on me. I’ll get this done myself, or I won’t get it done. And if they vote me down, it’s not the end of my life. I’ll go home and pick up where I left off. You’ve got to assure me you won’t give up and give in.”
“Okay,” Trump said. “They’re going to confirm you. It’s not going to be a big deal. Don’t even worry about that.”
Third, Tillerson said, “I want you to promise me that we are never going to have a public dispute, because that doesn’t serve anyone.”
In the New York real estate world, Trump had built a decades-long reputation for disparaging former business and romantic partners in the tabloid press after relationships turned sour.
“If you’re unhappy with me, call me and ream my ass out,” Tillerson said
. “It’s all behind closed doors. Because when I walk out that door, I serve you and the American people. I will not disparage anybody. It’s just not in my nature.”
“Don’t worry,” Trump said, “we’re going to get along splendidly.”
THREE
On December 1, in Cincinnati at his first rally on his election “thank you” tour, Trump announced, “We are going to appoint Mad Dog Mattis as our secretary of Defense.” The name Mad Dog was going to stick.
For his second “thank you” rally, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the following week, the president-elect asked Mattis to join him as he formally introduced him as his nominee for secretary of defense on December 6. The event was being held near Fort Bragg, the home of the Army Special Operations Command and the famed 82nd Airborne Division. Bad weather kept them from flying in, so Mattis joined Trump for the long car ride in the rain through the North Carolina woods.
At one point, Trump confided he had chosen Rex Tillerson to be his secretary of state.
Tillerson will be great, perfect, Trump said, gushing about the Exxon CEO. This man has presence. He’d run one of the world’s largest, most successful organizations. Not part of the Washington establishment, untainted by the swamp. He was a dealmaker who negotiated oil contracts all over the world, including billions with Russia. For years he has negotiated with Putin, who awarded him the Russian Order of Friendship. Trump spoke as if he had hired the Michael Jordan of diplomacy. He loved that the Tillerson pick would defy all the conventional wisdom.
Mattis had never heard Trump talk about anyone with such admiration and respect.
God, Mattis thought, this is going to be great.
* * *
Since his retirement from the Marines three years earlier, Mattis had spent a good deal of time as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a conservative public policy think tank at Stanford University. Hoover had begun as a library started by President Herbert Hoover and was a comfortable perch for Mattis, who had 7,000 books in his personal library and was often referred to as the “Warrior Monk.”
At Hoover, he had befriended George Shultz, treasury secretary under Nixon and secretary of state under Reagan. Mattis was struck by an admonition in Shultz’s memoir about the necessity of having a stiff spine. When you disagreed with the president you served, you had to preserve your independence and hold your ground.
“To do the job well, you can’t want it too much,” Shultz told Mattis as he left Hoover.
After spending Christmas with his mother in Richland, Washington, Mattis flew to Washington, D.C. He heard Tillerson was in town too, and called him at his hotel on December 28.
“This is Jim Mattis,” he said. They hadn’t met, but “we might be working together.”
“Let me buy you dinner,” Tillerson said. “I’m living at the Jefferson Hotel. Why don’t you come on over tonight?”
Mattis, habitually early, was the first to arrive at the hotel’s Michelin-starred Plume restaurant. He slid into his seat at a special table set aside by staff in a discreet alcove in the back to give them privacy.
When Tillerson arrived and was shown to the alcove, he noticed Mattis was wearing a white shirt and a tie but no jacket. When Mattis stood, Tillerson glanced at his blue jeans and tennis shoes. “You and I are going to get along,” Tillerson said.
Tillerson believed you needed to know someone’s life story, their early years, to really understand who they were. He shared his. Raised in a lower-middle-class family in Texas, Tillerson had worked as a busboy and a janitor and had picked cotton on the weekends. His father delivered milk in a truck. Central to his life, Tillerson said, were the Boy Scouts. He had been an Eagle Scout and most recently president of the national Boy Scouts.
“Have you got family that are coming back to Washington with you?” Tillerson asked.
“Never been married,” Mattis said. “I was married to the Marine Corps.” He gave a summary of his 40-year career from the very bottom to four stars.
In some ways, Tillerson had also been wed to one institution. “At Exxon, I was always just so pleased to get a paycheck every two weeks,” Tillerson said. “They moved me around so much. By the time that I’d started figuring what I was doing, they’d move me to something I knew nothing about. And I’d have to start all over.”
They turned to their international experience. Mattis had served in the Gulf War and in Afghanistan and Iraq before rising to CentCom commander. Tillerson said he knew the world, having lived in Yemen, where he had run Exxon operations. “It’s almost like I’ve been on a 40-year listening tour.”
On Russia, Tillerson told Mattis about his longtime relationship with Putin, providing a shorter version than the one he had given Trump. But his bottom line was the same: The new president would have an opening with Putin and could perhaps even develop a constructive relationship.
Mattis did not agree with Tillerson. For him Russia, especially when it aligned with China, remained an ongoing threat and was not to be trusted.
Mattis and Tillerson were on a path neither could have possibly imagined six weeks earlier. They gingerly acknowledged that Trump might be a difficult boss. The new president was a student of Roy Cohn’s epic counterattacks, a bankrupt casino owner, a womanizer and a reality television star of The Apprentice who clearly relished bestowing the trademark “You’re fired!” on contestants.
Mattis proposed an idea born of experience.
Over the last 40 years, Mattis said, there had been some years when relations between the secretary of state and secretary of defense had been so bad they did not speak to each other or even so much as cross the Potomac River and shake hands.
“Jim,” Tillerson said, “how can that be? I understand they might not like each other,” but a collapsed working relationship seemed impossible and counterproductive.
Mattis explained there was nearly always tension between State and Defense.
For example, Secretary of State George Shultz complained privately that Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was wary and reluctant to use the military other than to deter the Soviet Union and prevent World War III. Even as the leader of the Defense Department he wanted diplomacy to solve all other problems around the world.
Shultz, in contrast, believed power and diplomacy needed to work in tandem. He characterized his difference with Weinberger as “a battle royal.”
Mattis said the one exception he had witnessed to State-Defense combat occurred when he was a colonel and military assistant to Secretaries of Defense William Perry and William Cohen during the later Bill Clinton years from 1996 to 1998. At the time, Madeleine Albright was secretary of state and Sandy Berger was national security adviser. The trio of Albright, Cohen and Berger had regular lunches and meetings. “Every week they settled things,” Mattis said.
Because President Clinton was focused on domestic matters and then later consumed by the Whitewater investigation and his eventual impeachment for lying about an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, foreign and defense policy received little presidential attention. If the three—Cohen, Albright and Berger—presented a united front with a recommended course of action, Clinton would approve.
“The issues were probably appropriate that they be settled that way,” Mattis told Tillerson. The process served the interests, Mattis believed, of both Clinton and the foreign policy team.
A vivid example occurred in the middle of the impeachment of Clinton in December 1998. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had repeatedly refused to admit weapons inspectors into facilities suspected of making weapons of mass destruction as required by a United Nations resolution. Cohen and the others told Clinton he had to bomb Iraq to establish his credibility and prove the United States was serious. The secretary of defense proposed an operation called Desert Fox, consisting of 650 bomber or missile sorties against 100 targets. This was no pinprick like Reagan’s 11-minute bombing of Libya by 30 Air Force and Navy bombers.
Clintonites in the White House wer
e worried such a military action would be seen as a “wag the dog” tactic to distract from impeachment.
Cohen, backed by Albright and Berger, argued the opposite. “A failure to take action now will undercut our credibility,” Secretary Cohen told Clinton at a National Security Council meeting. “Our word is at stake. If we don’t carry it out, we’re going to be tested in the future. If you don’t act here, the next argument will be that you’re paralyzed” by the impeachment proceedings.
Clinton acquiesced. “I can’t consider anything else,” he said. “I have no choice.”
Desert Fox lasted three days. The operation killed or wounded 1,400 Iraqi military personnel, according to U.S. estimates. Saddam’s ambitions were tamed for several years.
We should work together in a similar way, Mattis said. “I think our foreign policy has been militarized over the last twenty years.” Too many wars, too many military actions. “I have seen too many boys die.”
Mattis had a startling proposal for Tillerson. “I want you in the lead on foreign policy. I’ll tell you what we can do, what I can’t do. I’ll tell you the risks. But when we get done, I don’t want the White House sorting it out between the two of us. You and I will sort it all out. And so let’s meet weekly. Let’s talk as often as necessary. When we walk in the White House, we’re joined at the hip.” Mattis held two fingers together to illustrate the unity. “That’s the way it is.”
Tillerson loved the plan. “I promise,” he said. “I don’t know how to even begin to formulate solutions to some of our foreign policy challenges if I don’t have the military standing right up against my back.” He arched his back and placed his hand on his spine for support. “Otherwise the guys”—the foreign diplomats—“I’m talking to aren’t going to pay a bit of attention to me.”
“You’re going to be in the driver’s seat for foreign policy,” Mattis said. “The bus would be driven by State Department diplomats.” Mattis would enhance the power of the diplomats by pressuring the military side, being tough. “Any country dealing with us would listen to their diplomats, because they didn’t want to deal with me”—Mattis and the powerful U.S. military.
