ExxonMobil’s global headquarters are situated on a campus in Irving, Texas, beside a man-made lake. Employees sometimes refer to the glass-and-granite building as the “Death Star,” because of the power that its executives project. During the eleven years that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson served as ExxonMobil’s chairman and chief executive, he had an office on the top floor, in a suite that employees called the “God Pod.” When I visited a few years ago, the building’s interior design eschewed the striving gaudiness of Trump properties; it was more like a Four Seasons untroubled by guests.

When Tillerson travelled, he rarely flew commercial. The corporation’s aviation-services division maintained a fleet of Gulfstream and Bombardier corporate jets at Dallas Love Field Airport, a short drive away. Whether Tillerson was flying to Washington, Abuja, Abu Dhabi, or Jakarta, he would typically be driven in a sedan to a waiting jet. He boarded with a meticulously outlined trip schedule and briefing books. He worked and slept aboard in private comfort, undisturbed by strangers, attended by corporate flight attendants.

During his years running ExxonMobil, Tillerson rarely gave interviews. (He declined my repeated requests for one when I was working on a book about the company, “Private Empire,” which came out in 2012, although he authorized some background interviews with other ExxonMobil executives.) Tillerson’s infrequent public appearances were usually controlled and scripted. A few times a year, he turned up at a think tank or an economic club, where he read a prepared speech and then accepted a handful of audience questions. He was usually at ease and on message during these sessions, yet he rarely allowed himself to be questioned freely by professional journalists.

All this may help explain the strange judgments that Tillerson has made in the six weeks since he took over the State Department. He has managed to turn his unwillingness to engage with the press into at least as big a story as his early diplomatic efforts in Asia and Europe. Last week, during an important trip to Japan, South Korea, and China, Tillerson refused to travel on a plane large enough to carry the diplomatic press corps. Instead, he invited a single reporter, Erin McPike, from a digital news site whose chief executive is a former Republican Party communications specialist. When McPike asked Tillerson why he wouldn’t travel with more reporters, he told her, “Primarily, it’s driven—believe it or not, you won’t believe it—we’re trying to save money. I mean, quite frankly, we’re saving a lot of money by using this aircraft, which also flies faster, allows me to be more efficient.”

One could perhaps detect the entitlement of a man who has come to appreciate high-end Gulfstreams. The cost issue is not trivial, especially since Tillerson has publicly endorsed President Donald Trump’s initial budget plan to eviscerate State Department and foreign-aid spending by more than thirty per cent. Yet, in an Administration led by a President who incurs tens of millions of dollars in extra expenses by spending his weekends at his private club in Florida, such parsimony is a weak excuse, particularly as reporters who fly with the Secretary of State pay for their seats, at commercial first-class rates.

To McPike’s credit, she pressed Tillerson several times on the press-access question, and he offered additional explanations for his reticence. “What I’m told is that there’s this long tradition that the Secretary spends time on the plane with the press,” he said. “I don’t know that I’ll do a lot of that.” He added, “I’m not a big media-press-access person. I personally don’t need it.” These remarks justifiably inflamed reporters on Twitter and in other forums. They pointed out that, in a democracy, the purpose of press coverage of powerful government figures who shape national security is not to celebrate them or to raise their profile (admittedly, this appears to be President Trump’s hypothesis) but to render their assumptions and their decisions transparent and accountable to the public.

This function of the press in no way comports with Tillerson’s experience at ExxonMobil. Some corporations, like Apple and Starbucks, are dependent on fickle consumer preferences and public attitudes for the health of their businesses. For them, media strategy is part and parcel of their business model. ExxonMobil is not such a corporation. Oil is not an especially popular product, and its production generates manifold controversies, yet just about everybody needs oil, at least for now, so well-run corporations in the industry can be as durable as public utilities, no matter what consumers think. Some time ago, ExxonMobil executives concluded that they were better off avoiding journalists to the extent that it was possible, and putting out what little they had to say on their own Web site.

Tillerson told McPike that he understood that, as Secretary of State, he is now accountable to the American public, but he added that he was determined to do things his way, because, at ExxonMobil, he had “been very successful diplomatically over twenty-five years” by staying quiet and letting the governments he negotiated with manage their own domestic politics. This is a narrow conception of “diplomacy,” however, one where bargains are struck on the basis of private interests.

In the sort of diplomacy that Tillerson must conduct now, secret talks certainly have their place; for example, in forging breakthroughs like President Nixon’s opening to China or President Obama’s to Cuba. More routinely, however, diplomatic success requires using interviews, press conferences, social media, and speeches to address and shape public and legislative opinion simultaneously in multiple countries, including the United States. Last week, in Asia, Tillerson emphasized the seriousness of the threat from North Korea’s nuclear program and said that he would help lead a new, more confrontational policy to denuclearize the region. Yet, if democractic legislatures and citizens in countries such as Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Japan, and the nations of the European Union don’t find Tillerson and the Trump Administration open, credible, and willing to address hard questions, including those posed by their own media, they are not likely to follow them into some new and more martial policy in Northeast Asia—and certainly not if Trump’s hawkishness could put their own territories and economies at risk.

“I would hope that people can maintain their patience in these early days and recognize I’ve only been at it six weeks,” Tillerson told McPike. That’s fair—Tillerson has no government experience, and perhaps he can learn how to change the narrative around his role as Secretary of State from his insupportable treatment of the media to the conduct of American foreign policy. In his interview with McPike, Tillerson did have some interesting things to say about policy. He talked of an “inflection point” in relations between great powers, and of the complications facing the United States and China as they reset the discussion of how to preserve peaceful coexistence for the next fifty years. Tillerson’s remarks suggest that his problem is not that he can’t handle the press but that he is too hubristic or too set in his ways to accept the challenge—and the fundamental responsibility of holding high public office in a democratic country.