Perot, twice candidate for president, dies
DALLAS — H. Ross Perot, who rose from Depression-era poverty to become a self-made billionaire and who twice ran for president, died Tuesday. He was 89.
Perot ran for the nation’s top office in 1992 and 1996 with a mixture of folksy sayings and simple solutions to America’s problems. His 19 percent of the vote in 1992 stands among the best showings by an independent candi
date in the last century.
Perot died of leukemia at his home in Dallas surrounded by his family, family spokesman James Fuller said.
As a boy in Texarkana, Texas, Perot delivered newspapers from the back of a pony.
He earned his billions in a more modern way, however. After attending the U.S. Naval Academy and becoming a salesman for IBM, he set out on his own — creating and building Electronic Data Systems Corp., which helped other companies manage their computer networks.
The most famous event in his storied business career didn’t involve sales or earnings. In 1979, Perot financed a private commando raid to free two EDS employees who were being held in a prison in Iran. The tale was turned into a book and the movie, “On Wings of Eagles.”
“I always thought of him as stepping out of a Norman Rockwell painting and living the American dream,” said Tom Luce, who was a young lawyer when Perot hired him to handle his business and personal legal work. “A newspaper boy, a midshipman, shaking Dwight Eisenhower’s hand at his graduation, and he really built the computer-services industry at EDS.”
Perot’s wealth, fame and confident prescription for the nation’s economic ills propelled his 1992 campaign against President George H.W. Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. In June of that year, a Gallup poll showed Perot leading his major-party rivals.
Perot dropped out in July, then rejoined the race less than five weeks before the election, but his popularity had fallen.
Still, Perot recorded the highest percentage for an independent or third-party candidate since President Theodore Roosevelt’s second-place showing in 1912.
During the campaign, Perot spent $63.5 million of his own money. He bought 30-minute television spots during which he used charts and graphs to make his points, summarizing them with a line that became a national catch phrase: “It’s just that simple.”
Perot’s second campaign four years later was far less successful. He was shut out of presidential debates when organizers said he lacked sufficient support. He got just 8 percent of the vote, and the Reform Party that he founded and hoped to build into a national political force began to fall apart.
In Dallas, Perot created the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, helping finance the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center, and being a major benefactor of The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He also provided help to families dealing with medical expenses or other challenges, according to those who knew him.
Forbes magazine this year estimated Perot’s wealth at $4.1 billion.
“He gave a lot to other people in public ways, but he also did it in private ways that nobody saw. There were thousands of stories just like that,” said Meyerson, a longtime senior executive in Perot’s companies.
In later years, Perot pushed the Veterans Affairs Department to study neurological causes of Gulf War syndrome. He scoffed at officials who blamed the illnesses on stress — “as if they are wimps” — and paid for additional research.