When Rex Tillerson, the chairman and chief executive of ExxonMobil, arrived at university he struck his peers as a likeable, hardworking but unremarkable small-town boy who did nothing to stand out from the crowd.
Then one night a group of senior boys tried to throw him in the fountain at the University of Texas campus in Austin and discovered that there was more to the first-year civil engineering student than met the eye.
“Little did we know Rex was a wrestler in high school,” James Flodine, now a lawyer in Houston, told The Times. “He was a match for the five or six of us. It was kind of startling.
“He didn’t get angry about it but he was determined he wasn’t going in there and he was right. That left a big impression on me: here was a guy who not only knows what he wants to do but also has the physical and mental ability to get it done. Some guys get like a bunch of wet wildcats and get crazy but he just walked off and didn’t hold it against us. I think that’s a microcosm of how he is.”
This week that same combination of strength of character and coolness under pressure convinced Donald Trump to pick Mr Tillerson, 64, as his secretary of state, placing foreign policy in the hands of a man with a stellar business reputation but no diplomatic experience, and whose warm relationship with the Kremlin guarantees a confirmation struggle in Congress.
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After decades spent wrangling with some of the world’s most unpredictable leaders, including President Putin and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, it is a struggle that is unlikely to faze him.
He has been described by one former colleague as “the Texas oil man from central casting” and, with a commanding presence and a pronounced twang to his accent, Mr Tillerson is regarded as a cool but formidable negotiator.
“He’s very calm. He can tell you what his position is and he can support it,” said Jack Randall, a friend from the oil industry who has struck big deals with Mr Tillerson as a partner and as an opposing party. “I’ve never seen him get angry in a negotiation. I have seen him be very hard-nosed. He will say, ‘I hear what you are saying but we can’t do that and we are not going to do that’. He would draw the oxygen in the room towards him,” he added.
His appointment as secretary of state has attracted criticism, partly because Mr Tillerson’s views on most of the challenges facing the United States and the world, from how to deal with North Korea to Nato’s future role, are still unclear.
Since fighting off his assailants on campus almost half a century ago the father of four has spent his entire career inside the cocoon of the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, earning him the distrust of human rights campaigners and environmentalists who see ExxonMobil’s global business interests as damaging to those causes. Others question whether he can adapt after spending so long viewing geopolitics through the prism of shareholder interests, including one occasion in 2011 when he took the company into Iraqi Kurdistan in defiance of the State Department. He has never exhibited any previous interest in high political office.
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According to those who know him, the closest guide there is to his outlook is his dedication to the values of the Scout movement, which emphasises duty to God and country, personal integrity and kindness.
Mr Tillerson did not volunteer to be secretary of state. When Mr Trump began the search for America’s next top diplomat, the boss of ExxonMobil was said by friends to have been planning his retirement with his wife, Renda, an “unpretentious” former rodeo rider who now breeds competition horses on their Texas ranch.
Mr Tillerson was considered only after the president-elect concluded that none of the others in the running — including Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, and Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee who has been a fierce critic of Mr Trump — fitted the bill.
As the transition team struggled to find a suitable candidate, it was Condoleezza Rice, a former secretary of state, and Robert Gates, former defence secretary, who suggested Mr Tillerson. He met the president-elect for the first time on December 6 and Mr Trump was “blown away”, one official told The Wall Street Journal. His selection was formally announced seven days later.
In Moscow the appointment was greeted with delight. Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin political commentator, called it “a sort of Christmas gift from the American people”.
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Mr Tillerson has spoken out against US sanctions imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, restrictions that have shelved ExxonMobil’s lucrative partnerships with Russia’s state oil company, Rosneft. In 2013 he received the Order of Friendship from Mr Putin, whom he first met before he became president in 1999.
However Mr Randall, who met Mr Tillerson as a student, bristles at the “ridiculous” suggestions that one of his oldest and closest friends would ever act against America’s best interests.
“I think I know him just about as well as anybody from both a personal and professional perspective,” he said. “He’s extremely trustworthy. He does what he says he’s going to do.”
Mr Tillerson was born in Wichita Falls, south Texas, in 1952 and raised in the Scout movement — his parents had met at a Scout camp and his father was a scoutmaster.
At university he joined a fraternity of Scouts who were more interested in doing good work for the community than alcohol-fuelled debauchery. He played drums in a country and western group and in the Longhorn Band, which plays at the university’s American football games.
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“I’ve heard him on several occasions say that there were two formative things in his life beyond his family: one is the Scouts and the other is the Longhorn Band,” Mr Randall, who was also in the band, said. “To be a drummer in that band was brutal. Those guys’ fingers used to bleed. I still have nightmares about the guy that ran it, Vincent DiNino, because he was a very, very disciplined perfectionist and he wasn’t at all hesitant to let you know if he didn’t think you were producing. For Rex it was the discipline and the striving for excellence.”
Graduating soon after the Opec oil embargo of the 1970s, Mr Tillerson began his climb through the ranks at Exxon. His success owed much to his skills in negotiating. In 1995 the prime minister of Yemen woke him up at 3am, hours before a flight back to the US, to try to renegotiate a deal that they had only finally sealed the night before. The young country manager refused.
He was sent next to Russia to “pick up the relationship and repair it”, he later recalled. Before beginning his assignment he spent his three-week holiday reading everything that he could find about the country’s history and politics. He came chief executive of Exxon in 2006, but his appointment was followed by a series of crises. The following year, Chávez tried to rewrite contract terms for companies operating in a resource-rich area. Only Exxon and one other company stood up to him. Mr Tillerson abandoned 2 per cent of the company’s worldwide reserves and went to court, later winning an international settlement that was worth a fraction of what the company lost.
His biggest projects have been in Russia, however, where his response to Chávez earned respect in Moscow.
“Russians admire strength and they despise weakness,” Edward Verona, a former ExxonMobil vice-president for the country, said. Critical to the company’s success in the country has been its close relationship with Rosneft, the state oil giant that Mr Tillerson has played off against Gazprom, the state gas company that has threatened ExxonMobil’s position.
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Rosneft is run by Igor Sechin, a suspected hardline former KGB officer who is often described as the second most powerful person in the country and who is banned from travelling to the US. That has not dimmed a dream that indicates the warmth of the bond he has formed with his fellow energy baron.
One day, Mr Sechin has said, he hopes “to ride the roads in the United States on motorcycles with Tillerson”. That day may now be a little nearer.
