The Ross Perot You Don't Know
Elkind, Peter
The Ross Perot You Don’t Know The things that muk him a great leader would make him a dangerous president by Peter Elkind ‘I’m better than that,” lamented Ross Perot. He pounded a bony...
...That same simplicity of visicin guided Perot’s mission to free the two EDS employees imprisoned in Iran-a rescue mission remembered as a brilliant success...
...The mission also violated both U.S...
...His 22-acre estate in North Dallas, guarded round-the-clock by an elaborate security system and armed guards, includes a pool, a gymnasium, a tennis court, and stables...
...Perot was suddenly serious business: the ‘‘ultimate wild card,” as The New York Times put it, “in a year in which half the cards in the political deck seem to be jokers...
...Perot is personally bankrolling the committee’s space, as well as the cost of a massive phone system manned seven days a week by scores of volunteers...
...In 1986, Perot told a black-i.ie audience gathered to honor him that he had once dreamed of being the beautiful pearl in an oyster...
...The political vision he prefers to support is his own...
...I’m not asking to be drafted . . . I am not encouraging people to do this . . . the push has to come from them...
...What is the problem...
...flier...
...He would raise taxes to reduce the deficit, while the shrewd philanthropist in him would cut social security benefits for those not in need...
...He doesn’t want anything he can’t use, and he insists on getting value for his money, whether it’s being spent on cigarette boats or charity...
...If Perot’s posturing is sometimes transparent, it’s also-make no mistake-a canny way to sell himself to the American people...
...The antidrug crusader would force millions of federal workers in sensitive jobs to submit to drug testing...
...Under the Constitution, that’s illegal...
...no public figure so conspicuously embraces the role of savior...
...But what Perot’s mythmakers some times forget is that this bootstrap philosopher owes much of his success to the federal government...
...Praclically before anyone could say “Texarkana,” petition drives were underway in all 50 states...
...Unconvinced that the college had the leadership to become “world class,” Perot let Bishop die...
...Without missing a beat, Perot shot back: “How long will it take, and how much will it cost?’ As that response suggests, Perot is a man without discernible political ideology...
...You can almost hear him today saying the same thing about Americans’ choices in Campaign ’92, a race between men without world-class potential...
...But for the Texas billionaire things are seldom that simple...
...Identifying with his troops, Perot ate in the EDS cafeteria and attached his personal fortunes to the company’s...
...name up outside, some people wandered in expecting to find a restaurant named “Ed’s...
...Perot finds corporate bureaucracies maddeningly slow...
...No one can doubt Ross Perot’s good intentions...
...Such conviction is compelling in Citizen Perot...
...provide smaller class sizes in the lower grades, a Head Start program for four-year-olds, teacher-competency testing, and merit pay raises...
...Everyday folks” were pressing him to run, he explained, “writing me in longhand...
...At one time, Perot sought to promote his political opinions the way most businessmen do: through campaign contributions...
...Once again, he made the sale...
...He called Mikhail Gorbachev “the most interesting leader alive...
...This project, unlike many of Perot’s other schemes, required not just money, but real political finesse: The education establishment had political influence in every community in Texas...
...By the eighties, his targets had multiplied: drug use, mediocrity in Texas public schools, myopia in corporate America...
...Now that touches me...
...He is, he says, a simple man...
...To understand the current presidential hopeful, then, you have to plumb the secrets of Perot past-the shrewd salesman, the plain-living billionaire, the judgmental philanthropist, the crusading school reformer, and the political pragmatist whose firm beliefs in efficient government, strong public schools, and drug-free kids sometimes make little allowance for niceties like the Constitution...
...And today, he’s set his sights on the American system in general...
...Employees who won a critical bidding war with IBM received cash and stock bonuses “while they were still sweating,” as Perot put it...
...The last thing those students need,” he explained at the time, “is anything second-rate...
...He praised Jesse Jackson for his 1983 mission to Syria to free a captured U.S...
...Perot recoiled...
...In search of the flashy project that will create great change and galvanize public attention, he can do a fair amount of damage...
...In accordance with that vision, he would take on the education lobby, just as he did in Texas...
...Now he donates only token amounts to politicians...
...Now he would have the time to exercise his salesmanship skills more broadly...
...When EDS stock nosedived in 1970, costing Perot a oneday paper loss of $450 million, he said he would be more upset if one of his children had broken a finger...
...It would be hard to imagine a better leader in wartime: cutting through red tape to speed industrial production, inspiring workers lo accept lower wages while they work overtime for the national good, assigning Boy Scout troops and PTAs to collect scrap rubber and metal for recycling...
...Ross Perot is utterly self-assured, the sort of person who walks into someone else’s house and turns on the lights...
...But before we line up behind Perot, we had better get to know him: a man whose righteousness and impatience might shake things up in Washington as they have in Texas...
...At IBM he broke so many sales records that the company started capping his commissions...
...Insstead, he decided, his lot in life was to be the grain of sand that irritates the oyster to produce the pearl...
...World class” is Perot’s mantra...
...When they arrived at the chairman’s office, the radicals stated their purpose: Would he fund the Revolution...
...But beneath the corporate gloss was a strict, sometimes nasty meritocracy...
...His remarks had been well practiced...
...No public figure in America defines his personal mission in more cosmic terms than Perot...
...As usual, Perot was convinced he could “do better than that...
...I could have gotten that fire put out...
...Then, in 1965, the federal government got into the health insurance business...
...And it doesn’t seem strange today that the new burden he’d like to shoulder is running this country...
...But to what end...
...So Perot hired the best lobbyists in Austin and stroked the local and national press to turn one man’s idea into a mandate...
...The Coy Candidate will issue no position papers...
...Yet, to free the jailed pair, Perot’s commandos orchestrated a riot that sprang 11,000 peopleincluding murderers and rapists-from a Teheran prison...
...In 1970 he freed himself from daytoday affairs at EDS while retaining the title of chairman...
...At the moment of crisis, Churchill did for England what Perot wants to do for America: He mobilized the will of a nation...
...His ego is unaccustomed to compromise...
...To Perot, money is primarily a tool, a lever to force the world in the direction he wants it to go...
...Of course, Perot had already been doing a little pushing himself...
...In choosing which projects to devote his time to, he measures worthiness by one primary criterion: the potential for greatness...
...North Dallas sporty “America’s first welfare billionaire,” Ramparts magazine called Perot in the sixties...
...He would raise the passing grade from 60 to 70...
...The 11th-floor headquarters of the Perot Petition Committee-the spontaneous people’s crusadebears the billionaire’s unmistakable, high-efficiency mark...
...And in Perot, that notion breeds a powerful temptation...
...But Ross Perot has never been content with mere money...
...Waiting for Perot “Is there any scenario in which you would run for president...
...It is no coincidence that the historical figure Perot admires most is Winston Churchill...
...After a few minutes’ discussion, Perot had apparently reconsidered...
...He is abrasive, turning opponents into implacable enemies...
...It’s in his charitable giving that Perot’s attitude toward money is most apparent...
...The Ross Perot You Don’t Know The things that muk him a great leader would make him a dangerous president by Peter Elkind ‘I’m better than that,” lamented Ross Perot...
...Instead, a Perot presidency would be a stiff dose of medicine, administered with swiftness and the expectation that we would swallow gamely-that we would see as clearly as he does the fundamental rightness of his vision...
...Ross Perot is better than that: It might be the slogan for his rearguard charge against George Bush and Bill Clinton...
...When it came time to start his own business, that salesmanship helped him parlay his $1,000 investment-the minimum required to incorporate under Texas law-into an empire...
...In 1984 he sold EDS to General Motors for $2.5 billion, but he continues to live by rules of thrift...
...One sample question reads, “Where does Ross Perot stand on the issues?’ The answer: “At ths point, we’re focusing on the petition dnve to get Ross Perot on the ballot...
...There was no denying at the time-although the teachers tried to-that the Texas schools needed serious fixing, and Perot, appointed by the governor as chairman of a state committee on public education, helped package the issue brilliantly for the public...
...A few years back, after cruising drug-infested South Dallas neighborhoods in a police car, Perot proposed his own solution: The city should cordon off sections of the area and send in hundreds of cops for a house-to-house, person-to-person confiscation of drugs and weapons...
...Who is Ross Perot...
...six years later he became a megamillionaire...
...It is the fatal flaw of the pragmatist: Obsessed with blazing the shortest path to a solution, he’s willing to sacrifice as “details” those safeguards that keep government from abusing its power...
...He is not ostentatious, but neither is he an ascetic...
...Perot’s EDS was a tight ship, captained by people as smart and tough as he...
...Go-Go Perot In The Go-Go Years, a book about the stock market boom of the sixties, there’s a description of Perot’s meeting with a group of long-haired West Coast radicals in 1969...
...Although the candidate seems to have forgotten his own insight in the “Draft Perot” frenzy, it captures why we should hope that Ross Perot does not become president...
...He founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1962...
...He would cut government aid to any developing nation that lacked promise of becoming world class...
...This article is adapted from his work in thatpaper and Texas Monthly tions), class president at the Naval Academy (twice), and IBM supersalesperson (one year he earned the maximum annual commission IBM allowed by January 19...
...I could’ve raised enough hell that they would’ve had to put that fire out...
...No,” Perot answered flatly...
...Who can get the job done...
...And no ego in America is better primed to take the pounding...
...In the seventies, he financed the rescue of two EDS employees from an Iranian prison...
...But public approbation did not soften Ross Perot...
...he is decidedly vague on the details...
...It was a stunning political accomplishment-one that has secured Perot a place in Texas civic history...
...In the sixties, he spent $1.5 million to handdeliver mail, medicine, and Christmas meals to American POWs in North Vietnam...
...But what do his business moves, his charitable projects, his personal crusades tell us about Perot as president...
...Perot quickly began capturing lucrative state contracts to computerize systems for paying htedicare and Medicaid claims...
...And if a defense contractor billed the government for boarding its executives’ pets in kennels, the unostentatious Perot would, in his words, “put them under the jail and pour the cement...
...A pair of national polls showed Perot-without having sullied himself with a declaration of candidacy, without tapping into the $100 million he promised to invest in a national campaignpulling more than 20 percent of the vote...
...His basic character and positions seem to be well known...
...Packs of reporters have told the Perot legend: born in Texarkana (on the Texas side, of course), a salesman before he was a teenager (garden seeds, saddles, newspaper subscripPeter Elkind is the editor of the weekly Dallas Observer...
...But let’s not draft him yet...
...If money was the game, Perot, after eight lively years, had won...
...On foreign policy, he would try to make the Japanese and Europeans foot the bill for their own defense...
...and international law...
...When EDS moved into its own building and put it...
...For many years he did not take a tax deduction for his charitable contributions on the grounds that he owed his wealth to his country...
...Somehow it didn’t seem at all strange that this private citizen, who had accumulated a $3 billion fortune selling computer services, regarded fighting forest fires as not merely his mandate, but his burden...
...If he thinks he can do better, he’s going to try...
...That strategy proved a smart one...
...establish a no-pass, no-play rule to correct Texas’ overemphasis on athletics...
...It is certainly the perfect expression of his confidence...
...His first major gift, at a time when he was still regarded as a right-wing businessman, was $2.4 million donated to establish special learning programs at one of Dallas’ inner-city black elementary schools...
...Many elements of Perot’s character are poorly suited to a peacetime presidency...
...He is a political neophyte who wants to save our political system, a billionaire who claims to speak for the little guy, an antigovernment crusader who made his fortune on government contracts, and the consumniate noncandidate, now actively running for president...
...Yet his legend is full of contradictions...
...While Perot is no advocate of government handouts to the poor, he’s personally handed them millions...
...I don’t want to fail them...
...His value to the nation is the purity of his opinion, his radical pragmatism...
...He found state colleges of education that were turning out illiterate teachers, a junior high school that closed at noon on Tuesdays for football games, a student who had been excused for 35 class days to exhibit his prize chicken...
...And who, when things finally settle down, might leave some nagging questions in his wake...
...Weeks before, he had resolved to run for president and had arranged his own appearance on Larry King (after duly considering other media outlets) specifically to orchestrate his own draft...
...In accordance with a written dress code, his male emp1oyee:s wore dark suits, white shirts, and subdued facial hair...
...In 1969, as he financed the massive airlift of supplies to POWs in North Vietnam, he reveled in the media spotlight, appearing on the “Today” show and taking out ads in hundreds of newspapers...
...Well, okay...
...But Perot saw it as the simplest way to free the neighborhood from crime...
...And the most world-class of all his projects-until now-was the wholesale remaking of the Texas school system in the mid-eighties...
...Forget his proposed electronic town meetings and phone systems over which average citizens could offer their solutions to America’s problems...
...Fortune called him the “fastest richest Texan ever...
...But the nuanced way he has treated those billions is a quality those Ramparts editors might grudgingly respect...
...Electronic Data Systems Leasing Corporation, which Perot founded in 1962 on his 32nd birthday, struggled for its first four years...
...Can you give a scenario in which you’d say, ‘OK, I’m in’?’ It was February 20, and “Larry King” was live...
...Shortly after his triumph, supporters of Bishop College, a debt-ridden black school in Dallas, pleaded with Perot for a contribution that would keep its doors open...
...Today, he is the 13th wealthiest man in America...
...Instead, he sees life as a series of puzzles...
...The committee, which in March registered with the Federal Election Commission, operates out of the silver-glass North Dallas skyscraper where Perot presides over his empire...
...The less successful were expelled with equal speed...
...And most importantly, he has a tendency to act too boldly-like “an unguided missile,” Molly Ivins once wrote...
...Selling, not managing, has always been Ross Perot’s genius...
...What is the solution...
...Only months after he first acquired wealth, he established a charitable foundation, and he has since parted with more than $120 million...
...and redistribute state aid to narrow the funding gap between wealthy and poor school districts...
...imagine how he would find real participatory democracy...
...He can serve America best as an irritant...
...He pounded a bony fist on his antique desk...
...In the second-floor phone room, binders hold scripts to guide these volunteers...
...it’s also inhuman...
...Moments later, Perot was preaching directly to the little people: “[Ilf you’re that serious-you, the people, are that serious-you register me in 50 states, and if you’re not willing to do that-” So you’re considering running as an independent, King interrupted logically...
...Less than two years after EDS went public in 1968, the paper value of his interest-about 78 percent of EDS -leapt to $1.5 billion...
...it’s clear that the nation’s problems deeply engage him...
...The politics of Perot’s philanthropy are characteristically complex...
...It is these contradictions that leave him exhaustively chronicled but poorly explained...
...On a September morning a few years back, Perot was sitting in his North Dallas office, blaming himself for the incineration of Yellowstone National Park...
...In an arduous special session, the Texas Legislature passed the Perot reforms with modest changes...
...One can just imagine a younger Perot making a sales pitch, sitting across a desk from some executive who has never heard of a computer, leaning forward, looking oh-so-earnest, selling not just a machine but a promise of a new world...
...It could beand has been-frightening in a leader...
...Profits soared...
...He has criticized Reagan and Bush for failing to deal with the budget...
...It has been written, wrongly, that Perot buys his clothes off the rack at K-Mart...
...Most rich Texans think that wealth is a way of keeping score...
...He was not shy, however, about accepting credit for his largesse...
Vol. 24 • May 1992 • No. 5
