Rex Tillerson’s No Good, Very Bad, Final Week

Rex Tillerson was asleep on March 9 in the luxurious Sheraton Resort in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, when President Donald Trump woke him with a 2 a.m. phone call to say he’d already decided, without consulting or warning his top diplomat, to accept a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

It was the last real bit of sleep Tillerson would get in three days. The week before had been hard: Tillerson’s father had died, and he’d taken a few days off for the funeral. Now he had to deal with Trump’s latest “breakthrough.” On his first trip to Africa as secretary of state and several time zones ahead of his boss, Tillerson launched into a succession of phone calls with foreign leaders to inform them that, yes, Trump had just decided to blow up decades of foreign policy convention for what could be the most momentous handshake between a U.S. president and a foreign counterpart since Richard Nixon went to China.