Rex Tillerson: ‘I didn’t want this job … my wife told me I’m supposed to do this’, by Julian Borger.

“I didn’t want this job. I didn’t seek this job,” Tillerson told the Independent Journal Review (IJR), in an interview conducted on his official plane during the three-nation Asia trip. “My wife told me I’m supposed to do this.”

He said he had not met Donald Trump before being summoned to Trump Tower after the surprise election victory, ostensibly to talk to the president-elect “about the world” and his experiences as an oil company CEO.

“When he asked me at the end of that conversation to be secretary of state, I was stunned,” he said, adding that at 65 years old, at the end of a four-decade career at ExxonMobil, he had expected to retire: “I was going to go to the ranch to be with my grandkids.”

However, he said that when he returned to his Texas home after meeting Trump in New York, his wife, Renda St Clair, shook her finger in his face and said: “I told you God’s not through with you.”

He said he now feels his wife had been right: “I’m supposed to do this.”

hat-tip Stephen Neil