Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson. ( David Woo - Staff Photographer )

Dressed in a blazer and gray slacks, Eagle Scout Rex Tillerson — better known as the CEO of Exxon Mobil — approached the podium during a national meeting of the Boy Scouts of America at a Grapevine hotel last year.

The organization's delegates had just voted to allow openly gay youths to join their troops and earn their merit badges. And Tillerson began laying out next steps in the same forthright tone with which he delivers financial results to shareholders.

"So we've made the decision we're going to change. Now what?" he said. "No winners or losers. After we make the decision to change, it's the mission."

In between deals with Arab sheiks and Russian oligarchs, not to mention managing a flow of oil large enough to power Brazil, Tillerson has remained steadfast in his devotion to the Boy Scouts since he took over Exxon Mobil eight years ago.

In 2010, as Exxon and other companies were still reeling from the crash in oil prices during the world economic crisis, he agreed to serve as president of the Scouts at a time the organization was taking increasing heat over its position on homosexuality. He served for two years, at the same time Exxon was completing what could be a transformational deal to drill in Russian Arctic, before stepping down in 2012.

Among other titans of the energy world, the Exxon CEO’s history with the Scouts as a boy is well-known. Ray L. Hunt, the chairman of Hunt Consolidated and a longtime friend of Tillerson, said after hearing Tillerson talk about the Scouts and its emphasis on leadership and discipline that he came to consider his own lack of interest as a child a “shortfall.”

“To understand Rex Tillerson, you need to understand Scouting,” Hunt said.

The image of Tillerson as an ever-polite Boy Scout adept at lighting a campfire with just a pair of sticks runs counter to his image among the public as a ruthless corporate executive hellbent on extracting oil whatever the environmental cost.

But those who know him maintain that the Boy Scouts code might as well be describing Tillerson when it instructs its members to be “trustworthy, loyal, helpful….”

Even with a compensation package that topped $28 million last year, the Exxon CEO is a regular at soliciting donations for the Scouts’ annual jamborees, said real estate developer Ross Perot Jr., an Eagle Scout himself and a friend of Tillerson’s.

“When Rex Tillerson calls me with his schedule, as busy as it is, to talk about Scouting, it’s very impressive,” he said.

Ties that bind

Tillerson’s close ties to the Scouts were evident last year when he took the stage to address the decision to allow gay youths to join.

The Boy Scouts of America declined to make board members or professional staff available to discuss their well-known Scout. And Tillerson, through the public relations office of Exxon Mobil, also declined to be interviewed.

Despite increasing pressure from gay rights advocates, Exxon has refused to create a specific policy barring discrimination against gay employees, as many Fortune 500 companies have done. Nonetheless, Tillerson was instrumental in lobbying the Scouts’ board to accept openly gay youths, said John Hamre, president of the Washington think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, of which Tillerson is a board member.

“I can’t get into the intimacy of these conversations. But he agonized over this. He prayed on it, and ultimately he came to the conclusion the only thing that can guide him here is what’s best for the young boys,” he said. “I think he became a key leader in helping the group come to a consensus.”

Tillerson’s connection to Scouting extends back before he was even born 62 years ago.

His parents met at Boy Scout camp as teenagers. His father, Bob, worked at the camp and met his mother, Patty, while she was visiting her brother; sparks flew over a sing-along.

After serving on a battleship during World War II, Bob returned to North Texas and eventually took a full-time job with the Scouts, a career that would span four decades.

As the family moved between Boy Scout offices in Wichita Falls, Stillwater, Okla., and Huntsville, Scouting was ever-present for Tillerson. As a child and into adolescence, he racked up not just merit badges but some of Scouting's highest awards, designated for leadership abilities and dedication.

To this day, Tillerson lists his rank of Eagle Scout on his résumé. And he maintains a reputation in the business world for honesty and straightforwardness, traits some interpret as proof that despite his success and wealth, he remains a Boy Scout to his core.

Hunt, who met Tillerson when they worked on a joint oil and gas drilling project in Yemen in the 1990s, recounted how the government there had threatened to hold up their project if they did not back down on a contractual dispute over natural gas royalties.

The opportunity was there to speed up the project by bribing a customs official, but Tillerson and Hunt refused, Hunt said.

"In Yemen, it was not uncommon for large foreign companies to pay small bribes to custom officials to expedite the importing of machinery," he said. “He has the courage of his convictions, and he will never do anything that creates a short-term gain at the price of a long-term loss.”

Environmental heat

In public appearances, Tillerson maintains a pragmatic, ever-polite tone that even his most ardent critics admit is eminently likable. During a 2008 Today show segment at the height of the oil price spike, Tillerson, in his steady Texas drawl, addressed his company's record profit and allegations of price manipulation by oil companies.

“We’ve got to try and do a better job of explaining this to the American people,” he told host Matt Lauer.

That was a long way from his predecessors. Lee Raymond was famous for his blunt, sometimes rude demeanor — he once cut off a visibly ill nun speaking at an Exxon shareholder meeting. And in an interview with Time magazine in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez spill, Lawrence Rawl quipped, "We would have liked to recall the oil off the Prince William Sound. We called, but it didn't hear us."

Tillerson has had his moments, too. Last year he took heat from environmentalists when he explained how efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions would hinder global economic development.

“We do not see a viable pathway with any known technology today to achieve [the CO2 reduction] that is not devastating to economies, societies and people’s health and well-being around the world,” he said. “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”

The comment was blasted as self-serving; reducing CO2 emissions would mean burning less of Exxon’s oil. But it was still a decided departure from Raymond’s efforts to undermine the science of climate change itself.

Kert Davies, a former Greenpeace activist who has spent years researching Exxon’s operations, said Tillerson has adopted a less hostile and “smoother” tone on global warming; his policies are another matter.

One morning this summer at Exxon's annual shareholder meeting at the Meyerson Symphony Center, Tillerson was gliding through the lobby shaking hands and posing for photos when he was confronted by a member of the Dallas Sierra Club.

The woman, Molly Rooke, wanted to know why Exxon Mobil employed hydraulic fracturing, considering the potential environmental damage. Tillerson’s grin dropped; his bodyguards looked on nervously. But moments later, Tillerson was quietly explaining that he knew there were some “bad operators” out there, but hydraulic fracturing in and of itself wasn’t dangerous. He assured Rooke that Exxon took safety seriously.

Afterward, Rooke said she was surprised how gracious Tillerson was. “He has a different position. But at least he’s polite,” she said.

Merit-badge system

Tillerson joined Exxon in 1975. He had just graduated from the University of Texas, where he had encountered a campus at the tail end of the counterculture movement. But the young Tillerson mostly stuck to his engineering studies, playing in the marching band and Scouting, according to James Flodine, a Houston attorney and fraternity brother of Tillerson's.

Tillerson was a member of Alpha Phi Omega, a fraternity that up until 1968 accepted only Boy Scouts as members. Instead of throwing keggers à la Animal House, brothers spent their time wheeling disabled students around campus or acting as intermediaries between police and students protesting the Vietnam War.

“We were kind of nerds,” Flodine said. “Rex was one of those guys who just gave you a great feeling. But he went to school for a purpose, and it wasn’t to drink beer and goof off. … When he was getting ready to leave, he told me he was going to work for Exxon, and I thought, he’s an Exxon sort of guy.”

In Exxon, Tillerson found a highly regimented organization not dissimilar to the Scouts. The company traces its roots back to Standard Oil, founded in 1870, and is renowned for maintaining a corporate discipline and sense of continuity that is the envy of many oil companies.

One of his early assignments was as an engineer on an oil and gas field near Tyler. Decades later, employees who worked that field still approach Tillerson at shareholder meetings to trade gossip. “He still remembers everyone,” Jerry Russell said.

Since becoming CEO, Tillerson has brought some of Scouting to Exxon. As Steve Coll reported in his book, Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power, Tillerson has created a merit badge-like system at Exxon where employees earn coins for skills like teamwork and leadership, sometimes to the amusement of those beneath him.

But in public, Tillerson limits the flow of information about his connection with the Scouts — and his life outside Exxon in general. Those who know him say he avoids Dallas’ moneyed social scene and would rather be watching a UT football game or at a rodeo. He used to act as driver for his wife, Renda, when she was still on the barrel racing circuit.

Earlier this year, Tillerson drew attention when he joined a lawsuit to try to stop the construction of a water tower close to his ranch in Bartonville. The lawsuit cited a potential increase in truck traffic from hydraulic fracturing operations nearby filling up with water. And Tillerson was quickly flagged as a hypocrite. He later dropped out of the suit.

Likewise, efforts to speak to people who know Tillerson met with continued roadblocks. Outside of a preapproved list of business and policy leaders, many who know him were reluctant to speak without approval from Tillerson’s office. Scheduled interviews with the likes of AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, also a Scout, were canceled at the last minute, often without explanation.

About three years ago, members of Tillerson’s old Scout troop in Huntsville, where he graduated from high school, decided to put on a ceremony honoring his and his father’s contributions to the organization.

They got approval from Sam Houston State University to host the event, and the invitation to the Exxon CEO went out.

Shortly thereafter, they received word he was declining.

“He kindly sent back a note saying he thought it was a little too much, that he didn’t want to be the center of attention,” said Bill Dabaghi, an attorney in Washington, D.C., who grew up in Huntsville. “We put on [reunions] sometimes. It would be a wonderful thing to have someone like Rex Tillerson attend, but we haven’t asked him. The idea is not to bug him. But we do feel he’s a part of us.”

Follow James Osborne on Twitter at @osborneja.

Rex Tillerson

Age: 62

Birthplace: Wichita Falls

Education: University of Texas in Austin, class of '75

Career: Joined Exxon Mobil in 1975 as a production engineer. Assignments in Texas, Yemen and Russia. Succeeded Lee Raymond as CEO in 2006.

Honors: Former president of Boy Scouts of America. Awarded Order of Friendship by Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013. Former director of the United Negro College Fund.