Free Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll Page A

meetings and question sessions. Sensitive employees in the amphitheater cringed when, as inevitably happened, some incautious manager stood to ask Raymond an impertinent question about when one or another employee benefit might be granted. Raymond “would look at the person who asked as if he could will death,” another former manager recalled. Raymond believed he had never belittled a colleague in front of others, but belittlement is an experience usually defined by the victim. Raymond admitted, “I’m not known to suffer fools gladly.”
    His physical appearance did nothing to soften the impression he made. He wore square wire-framed glasses and kept his straight, side-parted light brown hair closely cropped. He had large ears. He had grown into a fleshy man and the jowls beneath his chin could billow like a bullfrog’s neck. A childhood cleft palate had left him with a prominent harelip. Exxon employees who found themselves on the receiving end of Raymond’s ridicule sometimes referred to him darkly as “the Lip.” The amateur psychologists among them speculated that it might have required a certain learned toughness and even meanness, an ability to tune out taunts, to grow up in a small midwestern town with such a visible defacement: “I can envision [him] as a child being absolutely persecuted by other kids,” recalled a former employee. Raymond obviously got through it, the in-house analysis went, but after he achieved success, perhaps it was not surprising that “he doesn’t take any prisoners.” 5
    Raymond’s predecessor, Lawrence Rawl, had created an unforgiving climate within Exxon while tearing into the corporation’s bloated cost structure and overseeing a campaign of staff reductions that federal investigators found had contributed to the
Exxon Valdez
fiasco, but which had also protected the corporation from financial distress. Rawl had also belittled colleagues at meetings, engendering an atmosphere in which his principal deputy, Raymond, seemed to believe as he ascended, one executive said, that he should be “out-Rawling Rawl” in toughness. 6
    R aymond saw himself as an oil and gas purist. He told colleagues that outside its headquarters the corporation should carve in stone the words, “crude oil.” He felt that it was critical that Exxon “not get confused about what we are trying to do around here.” 7 He and Rawl had employed their drill sergeant–inspired ethos to direct a sharp turn in corporate strategy away from an era, during the 1960s and 1970s, when Exxon had tried to adapt itself partially to environmentalism. (Rawl’s predecessor as chairman, Clifton Garvin, a chemical engineer, had gone so far as to install solar panels to heat the swimming pool at his suburban New Jersey home.) Besides cost cutting, they sought to restore Exxon’s focus on its core business. 8
    Some of his colleagues believed Raymond possessed a one-of-a-kind analytical mind and memory, and that his acuity contributed mightily to Exxon’s superior business and Wall Street performance. At a time of wage stagnation and other rising cost pressures on working and middle-class American families, this success enriched many Exxon employees and increasingly set those located in the United States apart as an economically secure class. Exxon managers had jobs for life if they could hack the corporation’s internal systems and were willing to move from place to place. They enjoyed secure defined-benefit pension plans and restricted stock that would make many middle and upper managers millionaires if they stayed long enough and managed their personal finances carefully. Exxon managers tolerated Raymond’s tirades in part because they understood, as the years passed, that he was making them rich. This was not Silicon Valley: The corporation’s scientists and division chiefs did not walk away with fortunes at thirty-five, but if they conformed and performed, they would rise gradually on a tide of oil profits into