Among the hundreds of people who came here Aug. 18 to hear a fired-up Ross Perot start his second campaign for the presidency, two offered particularly interesting perspectives.
One, Pat Cummings of Gaithersburg, Md., is a clinical psychologist and independent candidate for the Maryland legislature. “Ross Perot is not crazy,” she announced to anyone who inquired about her favorite candidate. “In fact, he could be included in a study of exceptionally healthy individuals.”
The other, journalist-historian Gerald Posner, is the author of the newly published biography, “Citizen Perot.” “The question that fascinates me,” Posner said, “is whether Ross Perot can get through the next 11 weeks without creating some kind of personal crisis for himself.”
Those two comments explain why Perot’s run poses such interesting issues for the political system, for journalists covering the race, and most importantly for Perot himself. He is not your everyday candidate.
Appearing on CNN’s “Larry King Live” after his acceptance speech, Perot, unprompted, brought up the “endless comments about my paranoia,” and claimed that he had “no security” with him when he went to Vietnam, Laos and, later, Iran on some of his celebrated prisoner rescue missions–nor, he said, when he campaigned in 1992.
Well, he had a ton of security men with him here–understandably enough after the Olympics, but it certainly didn’t suggest any daredevil impulse on his part.
Posner grapples with the question in his thoroughly researched book. He quotes Rob Brooks, a longtime Perot employee, as telling him: “The thing that has always puzzled me about Ross is the paranoia that I have seen manifested there. Even when one of his children was born at Presbyterian Hospital . . . he had the floor of the hospital where his wife, Margot, was having the child cordoned off, with security guards at each end. I mean, the paranoia was just unbelievable. Let’s say Ross was going to fly to New York. He would have his secretary make five or six reservations, and no one knew for sure which one he was going to be on. . . .
“But the contradictory thing is that once or twice a week he will go over to Dickey’s Barbecue by himself–you can see him in line–and he sits there and eats a sandwich in the corner all by himself. I have seen him drive down Forest Lane honking away. He goes alone to get his haircut. He’s hard to figure.”
That is putting it mildly. This is a man who by testimony of his former business associates routinely used private investigators to compile dossiers on competitors, employees and others. “This was almost a Ross Perot genetic disposition. . . . Find the dirt,” said his former general counsel, Richard Shlakman.
He is famously the man who said he quit the race temporarily in 1992 because Republicans were threatening to disrupt his daughter’s wedding. And the man who has left standing, without proof, for many months now, the charge that he was importuned by unnamed officials of an unnamed party to put up $1 million dollars two years ago for a “dirty tricks” campaign.
All this lent unusual interest to the views of the Maryland psychologist I encountered by chance while interviewing Perot supporters before his acceptance speech. It was Cummings who raised the issue by strongly affirming his good mental health, adding that Perot has “great energy, great focus and an exceptionally positive outlook” on life, all of which is supported by what reporters have seen of his campaigns.
What she said of the psychology of the Perot movement, now embodied in the Reform Party, also rings true. In the eyes of his supporters, Cummings said, “he is not just Mr. Moneybags but somebody who stood up for his country.
“He has been able to give voice to a large section of people who had felt powerless. Many of us feel that William Greider (the author and social critic) is right when he says we have a sham democracy. Both parties are being controlled by money and special interests. And Ross Perot is the only one doing anything about it.”
That belief is certainly not peculiar to Cummings. But there is something about Ross Perot and his pattern of finding conspiracies and forcing confrontations that makes Posner’s question about his ability to get through the next 11 weeks pertinent.
He is a puzzle.
