Tillerson Says Wife Told Him to Take State Sec. Job: 'God's Not Through With You'
In his first interview since taking office, former ExxonMobil CEO turned Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, revealed that he didn't want the job which President Donald Trump offered him at the end of their very first meeting.
"I didn't want this job. I didn't seek this job," Tillerson confessed in an interview with the Independent Journal Review published Tuesday.
"When he asked me at the end of that conversation to be secretary of state, I was stunned," he added.
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Tillerson, 65, said he had plans to retire from his private sector job in March and relax with his grandchildren on his ranch. His wife, Renda St. Clair, however saw Trump's offer as a divine call and told him to take it.
"I was supposed to retire in March, this month. I was going to go to the ranch to be with my grandkids," he said of his plans.
On hearing about Trump's offer to her husband however, Renda reportedly shook her finger in his face and said, "I told you God's not through with you."
"My wife told me I'm supposed to do this," Tillerson said.
In his short time in the job, some critics have dismissed Tillerson as out of his depth as secretary of state and accused him already of showing favoritism to Russia.
"Alternatively, Tillerson's remarks could be read as an altogether less confident statement: a coded admission that he knows he is not qualified to be secretary of state, that he's in way over his head – but we shouldn't blame him, because it wasn't his idea," wrote the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland. "On this reading, the secretary of state is, if anything, pointing an accusing finger at his boss: I know I'm rubbish at this, but it's Trump's fault for picking me."
Just this week he announced plans to skip a meeting with NATO foreign ministers in April in order to stay home for a visit by China's president and will go to Russia later in April.
Representative Eliot Engel, the senior Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives foreign affairs committee, said that Tillerson was making a mistake by skipping the Brussels talks, according to Reuters.
"Donald Trump's Administration is making a grave error that will shake the confidence of America's most important alliance and feed the concern that this Administration simply too cozy with (Russian President) Vladimir Putin," Engel said in a statement. "I cannot fathom why the Administration would pursue this course except to signal a change in American foreign policy that draws our country away from western democracy's most important institutions and aligns the United States more closely with the autocratic regime in the Kremlin," he added.
Others like Daniel W. Drezner a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University said in an op-ed in The Washington Post that he was shocked that Tillerson would agree to serve in the Trump administration after just one meeting with the president.
"The scary part ... is not that Tillerson's wife talked him into being secretary of state. The scary part is that Tillerson said he had never met Trump before being asked to be secretary of state. The history of modern foreign policy principals who agreed to serve in an administration after just meeting the president is short but undistinguished," Drezner wrote. "The other scary part is Tillerson's narrow vision of what the State Department is supposed to do."
Drezner who previously criticized Tillerson for not speaking enough to the media said after reading the Review's interview: "Tillerson should shut the heck up until he demonstrates that he knows what he's talking about."
The new secretary of state is asking however for patience as he gets into the job and finds his way around the complexities of managing Trump's "America First" foreign policy.
"I would hope that people can maintain their patience in these early days and recognize I've only been at it six weeks," he said.
