Cover Stories

By PRISCILLA PAINTON

PEROT'S LIEUTENANTS The top members of Perot's team have at least three things in common: they are not ideologues, they have never belonged to the East Coast order of political druids who climb onto campaigns and television talk shows, and they have each achieved great success with a low-key, unassuming intensity.

THOMAS W. LUCE III, 51, HAS MADE A CAREER OF CALMING the waters that Perot has stirred up. The founder of a large Dallas law firm, Luce was hired by Perot in 1974 to help dig him out of a disastrous attempted bailout of the Wall Street brokerage house of DuPont Glore Forgan. In 1984 Luce helped Perot negotiate the sale of his EDS computer-services company to GM; two years later, Luce settled a bitter dispute over the buyout of Perot's GM shares. To the general public, however, the Dallas attorney is better known for having been Perot's cerebral but lackluster political surrogate: when Luce ran unsuccessfully for Governor in 1990 as a moderate Republican, the joke was that Perot was too busy to do it himself, so he hired his attorney to stand in for him. (Perot ultimately paid off Luce's $950,000 campaign debt.) Luce was an intellectual architect for Perot's crusades to fight drugs and overhaul Texas schools, and many of his ideas -- including school choice and early-childhood intervention -- are likely to figure in a Perot platform. But it is his quieting influence on Perot that will help steer the sometimes impetuous candidate through the election.

MORTON MEYERSON, 53, WAS PEROT'S ALTER EGO AT EDS, the man who helped put the founder's ambitions into practice and stayed on top of the details. He started in 1965 as a trainee and left the company 21 years later as its vice chairman with more than $20 million from the buyout. Since then, Meyerson has invested his time in civic projects. He headed the group that sold the Federal Government on building the controversial $8.4 billion supercollider in Texas. He spearheaded the construction of the new symphony hall in Dallas, which is named after Meyerson because Perot made that a condition for his own $10 million contribution. The two men are so close, says Meyerson, that "we can communicate in shorthand." He will help screen prospective staff members as well as meld a cross section of ideas into the position papers that Perot has promised to produce.

JAMES SQUIRES, 49, IS AN UNLIKELY PRESS SPOKESMAN because he comes close to fitting the stereotype of the crusty, all-sides-are-suspect city editor. Perhaps that is why he has proclaimed his distaste for the impure partisanship of most political press secretaries. "I'm not a spin doctor," he says. "We don't do research on the opponents and feed it to the press." At 31, after 10 years at the Nashville Tennessean, he became the Chicago Tribune's Washington correspondent. By 34, he was the editor of the Tribune Co.-owned Sentinel in Orlando. Four years later, he was editor of the Tribune itself. He ruffled feathers in that newsroom by detaching reporters from their regular beats -- one sportswriter was assigned to cover national politics -- but earned the admiration of some of his troops by backing special projects like a long series on Chicago's underclass. The newspaper won seven Pulitzers during his tenure. After leaving the Tribune in 1989, the editor-horse breeder moved to his Kentucky farm. Since then he has taught journalism, written a book on the press, finished one novel and started another. It was Luce, whom he met during a fellowship at Harvard last year, who brought Squires into the Perot camp. "I don't know where this will go," he says, "but it might turn out to be historic."