Free Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

or mean to them personally, even these exceptional people acknowledged that he was often unpleasant to large numbers of others. Some of those who knew Raymond well, and liked him overall, felt he badgered colleagues in part to keep people away from him. If this was his strategy, it worked. He won the nickname “Iron Ass” among some employees. Behind his desk in the God Pod hung a painting of a fierce tiger.
    He calculated that in a corporation as large and diverse as Exxon, with tens of thousands of employees scattered in offices, refineries, and oil production compounds worldwide, the only way a chief executive could hope to extract disciplined results was to overdo it—that is, unless Raymond used his bully pulpit at Irving to pound hard and even intimidate his employees, the natural drift and compromising tendencies of such a large workforce would produce mediocre results.
    In a small group or a social setting, Raymond could be relaxed and pleasant company. There was a South Dakota–bred reticence about him that could be confused with coldness. His manner masked a streak of sentimentality. He could be fiercely loyal to ExxonMobil colleagues and sometimes wept openly when subordinates faced illnesses or other personal struggles. At a retirement party for his longtime assistant Adrienne Hurtt, Raymond recounted that he had been on a business trip when his mother died, and that Adrienne had called and imparted the news with perfect grace. As he told the story, Raymond broke down and cried before his colleagues. 4
    He worked hard. When in Dallas, he typically left the Irving headquarters around 5:30 p.m. with a bulging, battered-looking, soft Hartmann briefcase and a pair of plastic legal binders full of memos and reports. At home, he and Charlene kept separate bedrooms, in part because Raymond snored, but mainly because he stayed up until about midnight to read and mark up his files. “His life was the company,” said a former member of the board of directors. Beyond Charlene, Raymond’s friendships were mainly drawn from a small clan of retired and serving chief executives of international oil companies. Traveling in Europe, Raymond would take Charlene to dinner with Lodewijk van Wachem, a retired chairman of Royal Dutch Shell, and his wife. Long dinners where the men could trade stories about the global industry were often Raymond’s idea of evening entertainment. As to hobbies, “Golf was about it,” the former director said.
    Before larger audiences and workplace groups, Raymond often seemed to go looking for a fight. It seemed the worst thing an Exxon manager could be in Raymond’s eyes was dishonest, but the second-worst thing was to be stupid. He could be withering with senior executives, Wall Street analysts, journalists, and dissident shareholders who asked what he considered to be a dumb question or who disappointed him with the quality of their analyses. “Stupid shits” was one of the direct phrases by which he conveyed his judgments.
    Raymond “definitely had a sense of humor,” a subordinate recalled, and he “didn’t bother belittling people below a certain level. You had to be up to where you had significant responsibility before you could get both barrels.” In those cases Raymond did not hold back. He had been a champion debater in high school in South Dakota and he took transparent pride in his ability to knock down an opposing speaker. During his rise, Raymond ran Esso Inter-America, the corporation’s Latin American division. There he reshaped an Aruban refinery losing $10 million a month into a $25-million-a-month profit center. He did not fashion this turnaround timidly. In front of the subsidiary’s senior managers and board of directors he once turned on a subordinate whose comment had underwhelmed him: “And what little birdie flew in the window and whispered that dumb-shit idea in your ear?” Later, when he reigned over all of Exxon, he would preside over company town hall