ROSS PEROT DIES AT 89
3rd-party bizman jolted WH race
Ross Perot, the fiery, self-made Texas billionaire whose failed but memorable White House bids as a third-party candidate garnered a sizable slice of the popular vote, died Tuesday. He was 89. Perot lost a five-month battle with leukemia, surrounded by relatives in his Dallas home, family spokesman James Fuller said.
What the 5-foot-5 Perot lacked in stature, he made up in Lone Star State-sized gumption.
“I always thought of him as stepping out of a Norman Rockwell painting and living the American dream,” said Tom Luce, Perot’s longtime business adviser and personal lawyer.
The son of a cotton broker and a secretary, young Henry Ross Perot’s first job was delivering newspapers on the back of his pony, Miss Bee, through the streets of Texarkana.
When the paper tried to cut his commission, Perot took his complaints straight to the publisher and saw his pay restored, the first of many times he stood up to authority.
After a stint in the Navy, Perot took a job with IBM in 1955, quickly becoming one of their ace salesmen. In 1962 Perot struck out on his own, and with $1,000 from his wife, Margot, founded Electronic Data Systems.
Within six years, EDS won state contracts to process millions of claims for the newly formed Medicare and Medicaid. When the company went public, Perot was worth $350 million.
But that was a drop in the bucket compared to the $2.5 billion for which Perot flipped the company to General Motors in 1984, and his $4.1 billion personal valuation estimated this year by Forbes.
But in the decades before his presidential runs, Perot was perhaps known best for an incident in 1979, when he bankrolled a commando raid to rescue two EDS employees held in an Iranian prison.
“Ross came to the prison one day and said, ‘We’re going to get you out,’ ” recalled one of the workers, Paul Chiapparone, to The Associated Press. “How many CEOs would do that today?”
In 1992 Perot turned his eye to the national stage, mounting a selffinanced, third-party run against President George H.W. Bush and Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. Spending $63.5 million of his own money, Perot bought 30-minute television ads in which he employed large charts and graphs to make his point about the US economy and trade issues.
He was known for his catch phrase, “that giant sucking sound,” referring to American jobs that he claimed would head to Mexico if the NAFTA trade deal was passed.
Perot’s folksy turns of phrase, down-home twang and plus-sized ears saw him skewered on “Saturday Night Live” by Dana Carvey — but his election rivals weren’t laughing.
In 1992 Perot snagged 19.7 million votes, or 19 percent of the popular vote, one of the best showings by an alternative candidate in the 20th century.
Bush and some fellow Republicans blamed Perot’s upstart campaign for splitting the conservative vote, leading to Clinton’s victory. Bush’s son, however, had nothing but fond words for his father’s electoral foil, a fellow Texan.
“Ross Perot epitomized the entrepreneurial spirit and the American creed,” said former President George W. Bush.
Perot mounted a second run four years later on the Reform Party line, but wasn’t as successful, capturing 8 percent of the vote.
He is survived by his wife of 63 years and their five children.
Ross Perot, who died Tuesday after a fivemonth battle with leukemia, was a selfmade billionaire and philanthropist, but he’ll go down in history as the most successful third-party presidential candidate of the last seven decades.
His 1992 run broke the Reagan coalition that had won the White House in three straight elections — and also presaged the Trump coalition of 2016.
Born to an impoverished family in rural Texas, Perot graduated from the US Naval Academy and served during the Korean War before making his fortune as founder and CEO of Electronic Data Systems.
He first entered the national spotlight with efforts on behalf of US prisoners of war in Vietnam. His 1992 runningmate, Adm. James Stockdale, was one of those POWs,
held at the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”
With his calls for a balanced budget and an end to the loss of US jobs to overseas competitors, Perot’s run shook the establishment. But he doomed his chances with a temporary withdrawal from the race, citing threats to sabotage his daughter’s wedding.
Pros laughed at his use of charts and talk of NAFTA’s “giant sucking sound” taking jobs to Mexico, but he won the very voters who’d later be the core Trump constituency.
It’s easy to see why: During the ’92 campaign, he groused: “Our president blames Congress, Congress blames the president, the Democrats and Republicans blame each other. Nobody steps up to the plate and accepts responsibility for anything.”
Ross Perot the outsider still has a point. Rest in peace.