Rex Tillerson joins the pantheon of emasculated secretaries of State Given Tillerson's poisonous relationship with Trump and irrelevance in the job, it's a miracle he lasted until now.

William Doyle | Opinion contributor

The evisceration and ejection of Rex Tillerson by President Trump is the most extreme example of a modern secretary of State being humiliated by the boss.

But Tillerson is only the latest in a parade of foreign policy chiefs who have been fired, humiliated or otherwise emasculated by their presidents.

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For my book Inside the Oval Office, I interviewed three former secretaries of State — Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig and James Baker. Each one was a heavyweight in his own right.

Kissinger was among the most consequential of the modern secretaries, but his relationship with former president Richard Nixon often resembled that of a tormented subordinate suffering the whims of an abusive, dysfunctional boss. Nixon was the kind of guy who would flatter you in person, then badmouth you behind your back the minute you walked out of the Oval Office — then cook up some impeachable felony that his staff didn’t know whether to implement or ignore.

“With Nixon,” Kissinger told me, “you never knew how many games were being played simultaneously.” Nixon seemed chronically jealous of Kissinger’s press clippings and Ivy League pedigree, and his improbable status as a swinging global sex symbol.

Even weirder was Nixon’s treatment of his first secretary of State William Rogers, a pleasant New York lawyer and cocktail buddy. Nixon seemed to delight in tormenting him by withholding information and cutting him out of key decisions. When Nixon and then-national security adviser Kissinger sped off to meet Chairman Mao Zedong, they left a clueless Rogers behind on the other side of Bejing, cruelly shutting him out of one of the most epic summit encounters in post-war history. The China breakthrough, Nixon would be the first to tell you, was Nixon’s idea, not Kissinger’s. He was right.

Franklin D. Roosevelt served as his own secretary of State, treating the man who technically held the job, Cordell Hull, as a glorified errand boy. FDR didn’t take Hull to any of his epic wartime allied summit meetings. Harry S. Truman inherited FDR’s Cabinet, a bunch that he dismissed as “crackpots and the lunatic fringe.” He pushed out Hull’s successor, the handsome, silver-haired Secretary of State Edmund Stettinius, less than three months after becoming president.

Privately, John F. Kennedy was frustrated by the plodding long-windedness of his secretary of State Dean Rusk, and in foreign affairs he preferred to deal with younger, action-man officials like Attorney General Robert Kennedy (his brother), national security adviser McGeorge Bundy and Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara. Like many presidents, JFK was irritated by how long it took the State Department to prepare reports. Rusk played only a bit part in JFK’s triumph in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and followed Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson into the blood-soaked oblivion of the Vietnam War.

Jimmy Carter’s secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, managed to avoid playing a decisive role in Carter’s single major foreign policy achievement, the Camp David Accords, which was a half-achievement at best anyway, as it fudged the Palestinian issue and only codified a cessation of Israeli-Egyptian hostilities that had already been already brokered by Nixon, Gerald Ford and Kissinger.

Vance spent most of his three-year tenure serving as a bureaucratic punching bag for Carter’s swifter, more nimble national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. He ended up quitting in anger over the failed Iran hostage rescue operation, which Carter had barely bothered to consult him on.

Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of State, former Army General Alexander Haig, managed to humiliate himself during the 1981 Reagan assassination attempt. He sweatily gripped the White House press room lectern and tried to project authority, but conveyed only panic. A year later, Haig badly fumbled America’s attempt to manage the Falklands War crisis, and Reagan summarily canned him. His successor, the formidable George Shultz, fared much better.

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James Baker, the smooth bureaucratic operator who served as George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State from 1989 to 1992, was the anti-Tillerson. He was a respected friend and full collaborator with his president in overseeing the closing days of the Cold War, an effective manager of the behemoth State Department bureaucracy — and even of long-winded Cabinet colleagues.

In his 1995 book Call the Briefing, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, described how football hero Jack Kemp, a notorious chatterbox who was then Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, followed Bush and Baker into the Oval Office one day to pester them about recognizing Lithuania. An aggravated Baker snapped “F--- you, Kemp!” Kemp lunged at Baker, seemingly for a tackle, and chased him around the historic office until national security adviser Brent Scowcroft heroically threw his body between the two Cabinet officers to prevent a fistfight.

Rex Tillerson accomplished nothing but bad vibes during his sorry tenure, but that’s nothing new, either. The last secretary of State to leave a major positive mark on history was George Marshall, who rescued and reshaped Europe, and that was 70 years ago. It’s an impossible job: You’re supposed to manage the world for the president, but the world rarely does what you want it to.

Given Tillerson’s poisoned relationship with Trump and his supreme irrelevance in the job, it’s a miracle he lasted as long as he did.

Trump’s management by utter chaos is getting more chaotic by the hour — and there are about 25,000 hours left in his first term.

William Doyle, a Fulbright Scholar and Rockefeller Foundation Resident Fellow, is author of Inside the Oval Office, PT 109 and many others books. Follow him on Twitter: @williamdoylenyc