Hook is the co-founder of the John Hay Initiative, a group of former Mitt Romney foreign policy advisers whose leaders organized a prominent letter signed by 121 GOP national security luminaries refusing to support Trump last March because he would “act in ways that make America less safe.”
Hook did not sign that letter, but in previous interviews declared that he personally disagreed with the president on a range of policy issues, and noted his wife was firmly in the “never Trump” camp.
“My wife said ‘never,’” Hook told Politico in May. “Even if you say you support him as the nominee, you go down the list of his positions and you see you disagree on every one.”
Appointing Hook to director of policy planning would give him a direct line to Tillerson and put him in charge of a staff of specialists and academics in the department. Previous secretaries of state have used the policy planning director for tasks ranging from short-term crisis management to long-term strategic planning to outside-the-box thinking. Jake Sullivan, who held the post under Hillary Clinton, used the perch to help hatch the Iran nuclear deal among other things.
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