Perot and Con
Elkind, Peter
PEROT AND CON What America’s most famous billionaire could learn from a South Texas rabbi by Peter Elkind When I first met Ross Perot, he was pacing about his office, lamenting his...
...Business One Irwin, $19.95...
...But was Perot’s approach the best way to salvage ~. . . ~ bothers to wrestle with those questions...
...It illustrates how the greed of investment bankersrather than good business sensedrove so many of the mega-deals that dominated Wall Street in the gogo eighties...
...Doron Levin’s book* focuses on the deal itself, the ill-fated 1984 marriage of General Motors and Perot’s Dallas-based Electronic Data Systems (EDS...
...salvaging public education...
...How many corporate executives regard fighting forest fires as their personal burden...
...When one California facility voted to organize, Perot shut the place down, writes Mason, “rather than tolerate a union beachhead in EDS...
...waging war on drugs...
...When the story moves to Perot’s later years at EDS, we catch the first hints of his darker side, with a brief account of his vicious “scorched earth” campaign to discredit a competitor who had outbid EDS for a $2 billion Texas data-processing contract...
...Forced to rely on others, Mason has dug up an assortment of fresh nuggets...
...earnings and profits are strong...
...The forecast has proved wrong...
...He suggested that Perot should quote Churchill’s complete statement: “Never give in-in nothing great or small, large or petty-never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense...
...It was a Salomon Brothers partner, for example, who first pitched the idea of GM buying EDS...
...When right, he is an incomparable ally...
...He suggests Perot was incapable of answering to others or working within a system...
...Never give in...
...Perot defies easy comprehension because he is no ideologue: he reacts to issues on instinct...
...In these pages, the feud that erupted between GM’s Roger Smith and Perot, as well as those who worked for them, unfolds as the inevitable product of an ill-conceived union of disparate corporate cultures...
...Ross Perot is the demagogue who whipped up antidrug hysteria in Texas by catering to the worst fears of affluent white parents...
...Todd Mason, a former reporter for Businessweek, reaches more broadly, with what is conspicuously subtitled “an unauthorized biography”* (translation: “Perot wouldn’t talk to me...
...Todd Mason...
...In 1988, he proposed solving Dallas’s drug problem by cordoning off infested black neighborhoods and sending in hundreds of cops for house-to-house searches...
...Instead of chronological structure, individual chapters jump back and forth wildly in time...
...By the end of this book, Perot emerges as flawed-manipulative, insensitive, and arrogant...
...There is a simple reason: Whatever course he selects, Perot is always utterly convinced of the righteousness of his cause...
...Peror...
...Therein lies the magic-and mystery-of H. Ross Perot...
...Mason also reminds us that the man hailed as a hero in the 1980s by GM’s unions waged open warfare with organized labor in the 1960s...
...Journal and is now Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times, hews closely to the natural narrative of the “deal-book’’ genre...
...Could Perot have employed any other tactics...
...PEROT AND CON What America’s most famous billionaire could learn from a South Texas rabbi by Peter Elkind When I first met Ross Perot, he was pacing about his office, lamenting his personal role in the incineration of Yellowstone National Park...
...Levin doesn’t question Perot’s public assertions that he entered into the marriage with GM as yet another philanthropic mission: to save America’s largest automaker...
...After much mudslinging and political arm-twisting, EDS regained the contract...
...One boyhood friend, for example, brands as “bullshit” a famous anecdote about Perot delivering newspapers through the local black ghetto on horseback...
...Reading the two books, we are left with the contradictions...
...The story is cleanly written and well reported, filled with backstage detail...
...I could’ve raised enough hell that they would’ve had to put the fire out...
...Relations with GM have improved...
...Because he had failed to alert the nation, Perot reasoned, he had to shoulder the blame for the immolation of the park...
...His selfish motives for agreeing to sell his companymoney, power, and attention-are noted...
...Those who disagree with him not only become the enemy, they take on dimensions of evil...
...New American Library, $9.95...
...But they are treated ultimately as secondary considerations...
...A biographical section mostly retraces the familiar turns of the Texan’s legend: his Norman Rockwell-esque childhood (small-town boy who loved his mother, Eagle Scout, Naval Academy...
...Is he a right-wing nut or a populist visionary...
...when wrong, he is a fearsome foe...
...If the automaker was slow to change, Perot was too often uncompromising, refusing to budge, threatening “World War 111...
...Content with offering the play-by-play, Levin never Data games Levin, however, does little to explain the riddle of Ross Perot...
...Irreconcilable Differences: Ross Perot versus General Motors...
...He “misunderstood the challenge at GM...
...A few weeks after my story appeared, I received a letter from a South Texas rabbi...
...We learn that some of Perot’s self-spun tales about his youth in Texarkana are embellished...
...With Perot as the central character, even a corporate merger assumes the dimensions of a public saga, grand enough to inspire two separate additions to the library of business literature...
...At first glance, it seemed . . . well, a little kooky...
...Perot, writes Mason, “reacted badly to the news that EDS could live without him...
...In an extraordinary act for a man who spoke loud and often about loyalty, he ridiculed the new EDS management4xecutives he once trained and praised-and predicted disaster for the company...
...After all, much of what he had to say about GM’s managementits bureaucratic mentality (“revitalizing General Motors is like teaching an elephant to tap dance”), its isolation from the average worker, and its inattention to the basic product-had the unmistakable ring of truth...
...Perot is the clear hero in this tale, portrayed (as on the cover of the hardback edition) as a David bedeviling Goliath...
...And he had the will to push through a package of legislation aimed at realizing that vision...
...Although Perot contains a welcome, less starryeyed view of its subject, as well as some good-if incompletereporting, terrible organization dooms the book...
...Yet the same man magically brought groups of Texas businessmen to their feet with a call for higher taxes to fund his splendid vision of transforming the state’s dismal system of public education...
...Perot’s immense wealth (about $3 billion), blunt talk, commando team to free two employees held hostage in Iran) have combined to make him America’s most intriguing-and most publicized-businessman...
...Mason reveals Perot’s genius for media manipulation...
...Never...
...his frustrations as an IBM salesman (in one year he earned the maximum annual commission by January 19...
...After hand-picking spy novelist Ken Follett to recount EDS’s Iranian rescue mission (eventually titled On Wings of Eagles), Perot personally negotiated changes in the manuscript with the benefit of the ultimate leverage-the right to kill the project by paying the publisher $1 million...
...On Wings of Escrow While Levin clearly relied on Perot and his associates for much of his detail, Mason, who initially sought a collaboration, seems to have been liberated by his subject’s refusal to cooperate...
...Why aren’t there more like him...
...It seemed the Texas billionaire had a friend who, shortly after the mammoth fire started, had tipped him to the fallacy of the National Park Service’s “letburn” policy...
...The rules of warfare are different inside the castle walls, where . . . feats of individual bravery are less important than cooperation...
...Texasvillain...
...As Perot skillfully embraced that role, the business press delighted in his every pronouncement...
...This makes it difficult for the reader to see how eventsand the passage of time-have shaped Perot...
...Mason notes that after GM’s board decided to buy out the troublesome Texan, Perot privately negotiated a premium price of $742 million for his stock, then publicly denounced the expenditure as outrageous at a time GM was closing plants...
...Perot often quotes a remark by Winston Churchill that he clearly has embraced as his credo...
...I’m better than that,” Perot declared, slamming a bony fist on his antique desk...
...No other private citizen has embraced so many monumental public missions: freeing POWs in Vietnam...
...Never...
...Mason’s biographyand subsequent events-provides some additional clues...
...Levin, who covered Perot for The Wall Street Peter Elkind is an associate editor of the Texas Monthly...
...Never...
...Doron P. Levin...
...After the buy-out was complete, Perot raided EDS’s ranks to launch a competing data-processing company...
...Perot also could be disingenuous...
...What motivates such a man...
...and his decision (while sitting in a barbershop, after reading a passage from Thoreau) to start EDS, the computer services company that made him a billionaire...
...Never give in...
...Perot even retained casting and script approval for the resulting TV miniseries...
...The comment appears in both these books, as it did in a magazine profile of Perot I wrote two years ago...
...reversing the decline of industrial America...
...Yet, partly due to his genius at crafting his own image, Perot remains poorly understood...
...Perot embarrassed GM with his announcement that he would put the money in escrow to give the automaker a chance to reconsider, but, as Mason reports, he never actually sequestered the funds...
...With the aid of depositions from a subsequent court fight, Mason also offers a distinctly different view of Perot’s battle with GM...
Vol. 22 • November 1990 • No. 10
