Little Marco

Quick, answer this trivia question:  Who was the U.S. Secretary of State on August 9, 1974, the day Gerald Ford became President of the United States upon the resignation of President Richard Nixon?

If you answered "Henry Kissinger," you're correct.

Now answer this trivia question: "Who did Richard Nixon appoint as Secretary of State when he became President in January 1969?"

If you answered "Henry Kissinger," nice try, but guess again.

President Nixon, upon taking office in 1969, named Henry Kissinger as his national security adviser but he named former Attorney General William P. Rogers as Secretary of State.  There was just one problem: Rogers had no foreign-policy experience.  He was well-liked in Washington, he was respected, and he was a loyal Republican insider - and, he looked the part.  But Rogers was no diplomat.  That was precisely why Nixon appointed him to head the State Department; Nixon and Kissinger pretty much put themselves in charge of American diplomacy, while Rogers did no more than administer to the State Department's mundane operations.  he was little more than a figurehead.  

Marco Rubio (above) is the William P. Rogers of our time.    

The former two-term-and-change U.S. Senator from Florida has the chops for the job, and after having called Donald Trump a con man in the 2016 Republican presidential primary campaign, he had to suck up to the Donald big time to become a serious presidential possibility or, maybe, Secretary of State.  When Rubio was named Antony Blinken's successor at the State Department, many in the diplomatic corps breathed a sigh of relief.  Rubio, a Cuban-American, was a staunch anti-Communist, he was skeptical of Vladimir Putin, and he believed in international alliances.  Certainly he would be a strong foil to Trump's worst impulses.

I used past tense to describe Rubio's qualities for a reason; that Marco Rubio is gone.  He demonstrated that in that awful meeting between Trump, James David Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, being able to only watch as Trump and Vance berated Zelensky and scolded him for acting in bad faith while the United States was trying to get the war between Russia, the aggressor, and Ukraine, the victim, to end.  Oh, and slump in into his seat at the sight of such a spectacle.

Perhaps we expected to much from Rubio.  bear in mind that Trump signed executive orders withdrawing the United States from international agreements and institutions as soon as he was back in office, before Rubio was even confirmed as Secretary of State.  And once so installed, Rubio was clearly made to understand in no uncertain terms that he was to be an errand boy for the real foreign-policy team in the White House - Trump and Elon Musk.  Small wonder that Rubio and Musk ended up having a shouting match with each other in the White House just recently. 

William Rogers was no more than a pencil pusher at State Department headquarters.  Rubio doesn't appear to be even that.  And unlike Rogers or the avuncular Rex Tillerson, Trump's first Secretary of State, Rubio doesn't even look the part.  He is indeed . . . Little Marco.  

When Marco Rubio sank into his seat in that fateful- Trump-Vance-Zelensky Oval Office meeting and watched his soul escape, he was no longer Secretary of State.  He was a diplomatic . . . corpse.