Texas billionaire was no quitter
Two-time presidential candidate touted progressive platform, shaped state policy
H. Ross Perot, the wiry Texas gadfly who made a fortune in computer services, amazed the nation with audacious paramilitary missions to Vietnam and Iran, and ran for president in 1992 and 1996 with populist talk of restoring Norman Rockwell’s America, died Tuesday at his home in Dallas. He was 89.
The cause was leukemia, a family spokesman, James Fuller, said.
They called him the man from Texarkana, but he really came out of an era — the Great Depression, World War II and the exuberant postwar years — when boys had paper routes, folks tuned in to the radio and patriots rolled up their sleeves for Uncle Sam and built innovative companies and a powerful nation.
“Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success,” Perot liked to say. “They quit on the 1-yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game 1 foot from a winning touchdown.”
He was no quitter: an Eagle Scout, a Navy officer out of Annapolis, a top IBM salesman, the founder of wildly successful data
processing enterprises, a crusader for education and against drugs, a billionaire philanthropist. In 1969, he became a kind of folk hero with a quixotic attempt to fly medicine and food to American prisoners of war in North Vietnam.
In 1979, he staged a commando raid that he asserted had freed two of his employees, and thousands of criminals and political prisoners, from captivity in revolutionary Iran.
He was then recruited by thenTexas Gov. William P. Clements to spearhead a state war on drugs. In 1983, Gov. Mark White called on Perot to lead an overhaul of the state public school system, which included the no-pass, no-play rule that still affects Lone Star education and sports today.
And in 1992 he became one of the most unlikely candidates ever to run for president. He had never held public office, and he seemed all wrong, like a cartoon character sprung to life: an elfin 5 feet 6 inches and 144 pounds, with a 1950s crew cut; a squeaky, nasal country-boy twang; and ears that stuck out like Alfred E. Neuman’s on a Mad magazine cover. Stiff-necked, cantankerous, impetuous, often sentimental, he was given to homespun epigrams: “If you see a snake, just kill it. Don’t appoint a committee on snakes.”
Under the banner “United We Stand America,” he spent $65 million of his billions in a campaign that featured innovative half-hour infomercials about himself and his ideas. They were popular, with ratings that sometimes surpassed those of prime-time sitcoms. He laid siege to radio and television talk shows. Switchboards lit up with calls from people wanting to volunteer.
Before long, millions were responding to his calls to cut government deficits, red tape and waste, to begin rebuilding crumbling cities and to restore his vision of America: the small-town life idealized in Rockwell’s homey portraits.
While Perot had done business with every administration since Lyndon B. Johnson’s, the federal government was one of his favorite targets. Washington, he told its own denizens, “has become a town with sound bites, shell games, handlers, media stuntmen who posture, create images, talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don’t ever accomplish anything. We need deeds, not words, in this city.”
In, out, back in again
Improbably, he surged in the polls while the Republican incumbent, George H.W. Bush, and the Democrat, Bill Clinton, trained their fire on each other. Polls showed that Perot’s support came from across the spectrum, from Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, mostly from the middle class. Citizen drives got him on the ballot in all 50 states. He was on the cover of Time magazine and mimicked by Dana Carvey on “Saturday Night Live.”
But at the peak of his popularity, he unexpectedly dropped out of the race. Months later, he jumped back in, saying his withdrawal had been prompted by Republican “dirty tricks” to sabotage his daughter’s wedding with faked compromising photographs.
He did surprisingly well in three presidential debates, often mocking the “gridlock” in Washington.
“It’s not the Republicans’ fault, of course, and it’s not the Democrats’ fault,” he said in the second round. “Somewhere out there there’s an extraterrestrial that’s doing this to us, I guess.”
On Election Day, Perot finished with 19 percent of the popular vote — almost 20 million ballots — compared with 38 percent for Bush and 43 percent for Clinton. It was the strongest third-party showing since Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose run in 1912.
It also led to claims by some Republicans, including the president’s son and future president George W. Bush, that Perot’s candidacy had cost George H.W. Bush a second term — a contention refuted by many political analysts, who pointed to, among other things, exit polls showing that Perot’s strength had not come disproportionately from defecting Republicans.
In 1996, Perot ran again, this time on the new Reform Party ticket, but he fared poorly. By then, the epigrams had paled and voters suspected that his business strengths, the risk-taking and stubborn autocratic personality, might not serve a president constrained by Congress and public opinion. And by then more was known of Perot, who could be thin-skinned and mean-spirited, who had subjected employees to moral codes and lie detector tests, who was drawn to conspiracy theories and had hired private detectives to chase his suspicions.
His candidacy was crippled when a commission refused to let him join debates between Clinton and the Republican nominee, Sen. Bob Dole, on the grounds that he did not have a realistic chance of being elected. He won only 8 percent of the vote. But, as he liked to say, “Failures are like skinned knees: painful but superficial.”
Story of persistence
He was born Henry Ray Perot on June 27, 1930, in Texarkana to Gabriel and Lulu May Ray Perot. His father was a cotton broker and a horse trader. The boy did well in local schools, but teachers said his good grades had more to do with persistence than with superior intelligence.
He began working at 7, selling garden seeds door to door and later breaking horses (and his nose) for his father at a dollar a head. When he was 12, he began delivering The Texarkana Gazette on horseback in poor neighborhoods, soliciting subscriptions and building his route from scratch for extra commissions. He did so well his boss tried to cut his commissions, but backed off when the boy went to the publisher.
He changed his name to Henry Ross Perot in honor of a brother, Gabriel Ross Perot Jr., who died as a toddler in 1927. The family pronounced the surname PEE-roe, but in his 20s he changed that, too, making it puh-ROE because, he said, he got tired of correcting people. He called himself Ross; years later the news media added the initial “H” at the beginning of his name, but he never liked it.
He joined the Boy Scouts at 12 and in little more than a year was an Eagle Scout, an extraordinary achievement that became part of his striver’s legend. After two years at Texarkana Junior College, he won appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was elected class president.
In his senior year, Perot met Margot Birmingham, a student at Goucher College in Baltimore. They married in 1956. She survives him, as do his son, Ross Jr.; four daughters, Nancy Perot; Suzanne McGee; daughter Carolyn Rathjen and Katherine Reeves; 16 grandchildren; three step-grandchildren; and a sister, Bette Perot.