Citizen Perot
By Gerald Posner
Random House, 400 pages, $25.95
Since Ross Perot first became a presence on the national stage, the conundrum has been in reconciling his businessman’s brilliance, his patriotic fervor and his humanitarian generosity with his flinty-eyed fascination for things conspiratorial and his vindictiveness toward those he detests or deems enemies.
That latter category has had its expansive moments. It has included former Assistant Defense Secretary Richard Armitage, the National Security Council, George Bush and the national press corps, the latter two of which he apparently was convinced at one time or another were out to destroy him politically.
Most highly successful men are complex. What has been confusing about Perot is that the image he projects is that of a shrewd, simple, forcefully direct man who disdains political superficiality and does not suffer fools gladly. That is the icon he became for the 20 million Americans who voted for him in 1992, and the icon he continues to be for a still unknown segment of the 1996 electorate.
Gerald Posner’s unauthorized biography, “Citizen Perot,” is a balanced effort to explore the complexity. In more detail than anyone has presented before, Posner gives us the good, the bad and the ugly of Ross Perot.
Posner, who gained Perot’s cooperation well into the research process, does not give us an intimate portrait of the Texan, of his private life, his joys, or his terrors. Perot has fully exploited the perogative of the very rich to keep these matters veiled to public scrutiny.
At the end of his well-footnoted book, what sticks most in the mind is the image of Perot as a man with an intense drive for results–a truly can-do, fiercely competitive executive who will go to extraordinary lengths to help someone or some cause he champions–and to oppose one he does not. He consistently puts what he believes to be principle–whether getting his money’s worth, finding MIAs and POWs, or winning at all costs–above political expediency. He is also someone who almost never says he is sorry ; someone who will go to great lengths to remove his fingerprints from an act or statement he does not want to be associated with, and someone who truly cares as much about his image as any politician.
Posner begins with Perot’s boyhood in Texarkana, where he weathered the Depression as the son of a successful cotton broker and held a series of jobs that paid him on the basis of performance. In the Boy Scouts, he developed a liking for goal-oriented tasks by climbing his way up the merit-badge ladder to Eagle Scout.
In the Navy, the clean-living Perot came into contact with a sampling of the rest of the nation’s young men. His leadership abilities and debating skills shone at Annapolis, where he loved the spit-shine discipline and was president of his class and headed the honor committee. But on board the destroyer USS Sigourney, where he was a Shore Patrol officer, he grew disgusted with Navy life, its shore leave immorality and its one-step-at-a-time promotion system. He sought an early discharge, but his request was denied, and Perot finished out his tour of duty determined to peform at his best. But not before coming into contact with an IBM executive who offered him a job.
Perot excelled at IBM, where high moral values were appreciated and hard work was rewarded. But when Perot became a supersalesman and hit the commission ceiling, he left IBM to form his own company, Electronic Data Systems Inc., or EDS, which came to hold Medicare claims-processing contracts across the nation.
During the Nixon administration, Perot, with his promise of millions of dollars for the president’s projects, became a treasured resource–initially. But he clearly expected a quid pro quo for his contributions, and when he didn’t get what he wanted, he began withholding his promised funding for the projects.
Perot wanted plenty: he wanted the Social Security Administration to scrap its own computer-claims program and rely on EDS; he wanted the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to give him its Medicare contracts; he wanted the Army Corps of Engineers to reverse a decision to terminate a lakefront grazing lease he held in Texas; and he wanted the right to approve congressional candidates in return for contributing to a Republican campaign fund.
He did follow through on an administration request that he help bail out an ailing Wall Street brokerage firm, du Pont-Glore, Forgan, in 1971. By the time the firm folded in 1973, an angry, despondent Perot had poured nearly $70 million into it.
The MIA-POW issue was one Perot stuck to for nearly two decades, financing his own exploratory missions in Southeast Asia in 1973 and 1986. So strong was his belief that POWs were still being held in Laos and Vietnam that he subscribed to conspiracy theories proferred by flighty adventurers.
Eventually he came to view government intelligence agencies as compromised by involvement in the drug trade, and the government itself as the major impediment to progress. It was in this belief that he conducted a rumor campaign, according to Posner, to block the career progress of Armitage, about whom he had unquestioningly accepted a suspect story of drug-trafficking involvement in Thailand.
The tendency to buy into shaky evidence against people he suspects of ill will or misconduct is a consistently worrisome aspect of Perot’s character. As late as 1992, Scott Barnes, a man with a track record for fabrication, convinced him that the Bush administration was planning dirty tricks against him and his daughter. The FBI took the alleged plot seriously and investigated, finding nothing. But Perot continued to believe there was a plot, citing it on national televison in fall 1992, as the reason he dropped out of the presidential race in July.
Perot’s own fabrications are also worrisome. Posner found that former employees called his tales “Rossisms.” The most famous one emerged in 1992 when Perot said the North Vietnamese hired Black Panthers to assassinate him after his second trip to Southeast Asia, and that five of them armed with rifles made it onto his property before they were chased off by one of his guard dogs. The FBI and Dallas police found his claims groundless, and Perot’s own security chief at his estate said that as far as he knew the incident never happened.
On the positive side, Posner depicts a Perot who generously gave or was prepared to give hundreds of thousands of dollars to secure the release of U.S. hostages, including Beirut CIA station chief William Buckley. And when two of his own employees were held captive in Iran, he spared no cost in an effort to secure their release.
“Citizen Perot” is replete with other examples of Perot’s generosity. He arranged for doctors to treat sick employees and their families, flew in medical teams during crises and funded special-education projects for the disabled. For the State of Texas, he headed task forces on drugs and public schools, devoting to each his single-minded determination to get results, right down to commanding a small army of lobbyists to pass legislation his team had drafted.
It was his can-do, straight-forward image that eventually brought people to encourage Perot to seek the presidency in 1992. Riding on the crest of an amazing display of grass-roots support, Perot entered the contest, putting forward innovative ideas and gutsy solutions couched in a kind of blunt talk voters had not heard before.
By late spring 1992, the polls had him at 34 percent, neck and neck with George Bush and Bill Clinton. A June exit poll in California indicated that had Perot run in the Democratic or Republican primary, he would have won. This prompted political commentator David Gergen to comment that “the only one who can beat Ross Perot is Ross Perot.” If there is one line that summarizes Posner’s findings, that may be it.
