In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when his fellow teenagers were going to rock festivals and protesting against the war in Vietnam, Rex Tillerson spent his summers with the Boy Scouts of America as aquatics director at Camp Strake, about 35 miles north of Houston.
Today he is one of America’s most powerful business leaders as chief executive of ExxonMobil, and says he owes it all to scouting. “All of the leadership training I got, I got in the Boy Scouts of America,” he told a meeting of the organisation in October.
Now he is about to find out whether the lessons he learnt splashing around five decades ago will hold good in the swamps of Washington. Until he was chosen this week by Donald Trump to be his nominee for secretary of state, Mr Tillerson had been heading for a comfortable retirement next year. He could have been spending more time with his second wife Renda and his four children, and on his interests including scouting, the church and golf. Instead, he has walked into a firestorm.