American billionaire who ran for the White House
Ross Perot 1930-2019
Ross Perot was a self-made American billionaire with no experience of political office, who described Washington as a cesspool and ran for the presidency in 1992 on a promise to drain it. He would, he vowed, slash red tape, root out corruption, rebuild crumbling cities and restore America to his vision, said The New York Times: the “smalltown life idealised in Norman Rockwell’s homey” paintings (which he collected). As an aspiring president, he looked “all wrong”: elfin (he was five foot five), with a 1950s buzz cut and jug ears, he spoke in a nasal twang and was given to folksy epigrams: “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.” Yet he won almost 20% of the vote, and changed the face of US politics.
Perot described himself as a reluctant political player, said Major Garrett on CBS News. But in an appearance on Larry King Live in early
1992, he said that if people got him on the ballot in all 50 states, he would run for the White House as an independent candidate – and in droves they responded to the call. In that pre-internet era, they used landline phones, fax machines, and paper and pens to mobilise an extraordinary grass-roots campaign, while he paid for a series of infomercials about himself and his ideas. These included “cleaning out the barn” of Washington and balancing the federal budget. In June, he was leading the polls, and though he temporarily dropped out of the race that month, his volunteers plugged on. By October, they’d got him on the ballot in the 50 states – and he qualified for the presidential debates. In the event, he won nearly 20 million votes. He was blamed by some Republicans for costing George H.W. Bush a second term, though exit polls showed that his support was not predominantly drawn from Republicans; the success of Perot’s campaign also persuaded the new president, Bill Clinton, to drop some of his spending plans and concentrate on cutting the deficit. Four years later, Perot ran again, this time for his own Reform Party. But by then, his image as a folksy, patriotic anti-politician had been dented by reports that he was a cantankerous control freak, and he took just 8% of the vote.
Perot, who has died aged 89, was born in Texas, the son of a cotton broker. He started working at the age of seven, selling seeds door to door, later breaking in horses at a dollar a head. He joined the Boy Scouts and, aged 12, reached its highest rank (Eagle Scout). Later, he enlisted in the navy, but despite his devotion to the military, he found serving in it frustrating – and left in 1957 to become a salesman for IBM, in one year selling his annual quota in three weeks. But his bosses ignored his ideas, so in 1962, he left to found his own company, Electronic Data Systems (EDS), using $1,000 of his wife Margot’s savings, said The Guardian. As the world shifted away from paper records to digital files, EDS cashed in by selling computer services such as billing and payroll to the recently launched US Medicare system. By the late 1960s, Perot was one of America’s richest men.
In 1969, he became more widely known when he tried to airlift essential supplies to US PoWs in Vietnam. A decade later, he funded a commando raid to rescue two employees who had got caught up in the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In 1984, he sold his company to General Motors (GM) as part of a deal that made him GM’s biggest stockholder. He then founded Perot Systems – which at one point had 23,000 employees and which was acquired by Dell for $3.9bn in 2009. Last year, he was estimated to be worth $4.1bn, though he had by then given millions away to schools, hospitals and cultural institutions. He’d led a singular life, and was proud of it. “Eagles don’t flock,” he liked to say. “You have to find them one at a time.”