The Other Side of Perot

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

What made me a success in business would make me a failure as a politician.

-- Ross Perot to the Washington Post, 1969

Some failure. Without even formally declaring his candidacy, Perot has unleashed a hurricane of discontent with politics -- and politicians -- as usual, sweeping up millions of citizens in an emotional crusade that could conceivably propel him all the way to the White House. Despite what may be a temporary leveling off in his popularity, the Texan still outpaces George Bush in the polls and leaves Democrat Bill Clinton in the dust. No other independent candidate in modern American history has mounted a more serious challenge to the two-party Establishment.

Paradoxically, Perot's spectacular rise has been fueled by his image as an anti-politician, even though he has shown an intuitive mastery of political skills. While some experts -- and his rivals -- contend that a man who lacks years of hands-on government experience stands no chance of cutting through the gridlock in Washington, Perot's supporters have made his very lack of an electoral resume into a virtue. Other candidates debate proposals for coping with the deficit and various complex issues. Perot vows that he can solve problems that have baffled other politicians "without breaking a sweat," often adding, as a precaution, that the steps he takes "won't be pretty."

Until recently, Perot's can-do attitude alone has been enough to satisfy the fired-up volunteers who have already collected enough signatures to place him on the ballot in at least 16 states. He has been vague, to say the least, in specifying how he would go about setting things right in Washington. Perot says he needs time to bone up on the issues with a newly assembled team of experts.

Meanwhile a natural law of American politics is beginning to take effect: once a candidate is anointed as front runner, he inevitably triggers enough intense scrutiny from the press, opponents and voters to slow down his surge, at least for a bit. The impeding effect is greatest on candidates about whom the public and press know little, since negative revelations can easily shatter their tenuous popularity. The latest example: Clinton, who was declared a shoo-in for the Democratic nomination before the New Hampshire primary but then was staggered by bombshells about his alleged extramarital affairs, draft status and experiment with marijuana.

There are signs that something similar is beginning to affect Perot, whose political views remain so undefined that voters have no idea where to place him on the political spectrum. This has worked to his advantage, as voters of all stripes invest him with their hopes. So far, his supporters are willing to take the chance that a tough businessman like Perot can succeed where timorous politicians have failed. In any case, they figure, he can't do any worse. But there is a much larger segment of the electorate reluctant to take the plunge until they know far more about Perot.

Perot's political opponents are rushing to fill in the blanks. The Bush campaign, in particular, has pushed the theme that Perot was right when he told the New York Times in 1969 that "I'm a direct, action-oriented person, and I'd be terrible in public office." Bush's people portray him as a thin- . skinned and ruthless man who tends to take his goals as holy objectives to be reached by any means available, who sees rivals as evil conspirators to be crushed, and who pursues astonishingly meanspirited vendettas against anyone who crosses him, even in petty matters. Vice President Dan Quayle even warned that "it would be a very bad idea to replace a genuine statesman with some temperamental tycoon who has contempt for the Constitution of the United States."

Reporters have been digging into Perot's carefully tended story about his dramatic transformation from obscure computer salesman into proprietor of one of the nation's largest fortunes. Already some cracks are beginning to appear in the facade. Perot, like some of the mainstream politicians he derides, does have a credibility problem. He once remarked that "I'm not a living legend. I'm just a myth." Which sounds disarming -- except that some parts of the myth appear to be self-created. Even some admirers concede that Perot is an inveterate embroiderer of good stories. A less sympathetic way of putting it is that for a supposedly down-to-earth, homespun character, Perot is extremely conscious of his image and prone to inflate it. Separating the facts from the exaggerations and inventions is no easy task. But it needs to be done so that the many Americans who look to Perot as a savior from incompetent, self- serving politics can judge whether his image squares with the facts.

SELF-MADE MAN -- AND MYTH

By now many elements of Perot's biography have become a standardized recitation: the son of a Texas horse trader (yes, literally) and cotton dealer, Ross learned Norman Rockwell values at home in Texarkana and as an enthusiastic Boy Scout. An Annapolis graduate, he lost his zeal for the Navy because its bureaucracy was stifling, and he tried to get out early. He became a top salesman for IBM, but the company cut his commissions so that he would not earn more than his managers; worse, when he fulfilled his annual quota by Jan. 19, 1962, he was forced to sit idly for the next six months. The computer giant rejected his idea for a computer-service company. Disgusted, he founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in June 1962 with $1,000 put up by his wife Margot. Only six years later, a public sale of the stock made Perot a multimillionaire at 38.

Trouble is, much of this story is open to dispute. Take the tale that as a preteen Perot delivered the Texarkana Gazette in a dangerous neighborhood, riding a horse so that he could escape from customers who might try to mug him. In his 1990 book, Perot: An Unauthorized Biography, journalist Todd Mason suggests that Perot actually rode a bicycle.

A trivial matter? Not to Perot. For six months he bombarded Mason and his editor, Jeffrey Krames, with letters and phone calls from himself, his sister Bette and boyhood acquaintances who insisted Perot did so ride a horse. He even sent Krames a poster-size map of Texarkana, with his route outlined block by block, and pretyped letters of retraction, needing only a signature. He never got one.

Reporters have dug up a 1955 letter from Ross to his father, asking the senior Perot to use his influence to get his son out of the Navy before the four-year hitch standard for Annapolis graduates was over. Reason: he found the Navy "fairly Godless" and was constantly offended by the blasphemous language and moral laxity of his shipmates. Perot blithely ignores the question of whether he could really have been that naive and, as he often does when one of his stories is not believed, produces another. The real reason he wanted out of the Navy, he says, is that his commander pressured Perot to use part of a sailors' recreation fund to decorate his quarters (the commander has turned up and insists that he did no such thing). Critics suspect that Perot simply thought he could make more money as a civilian.

He certainly did; he was in fact a whiz-bang salesman for IBM and really did fulfill his annual quota for 1962 on Jan. 19 (by, he says, selling a single giant IBM 7090 computer). But fellow IBM salesmen from that period say the rest of the story is fantasy. IBM had no objection to salesmen earning more than managers, they say, and many did -- with the blessing of the managers, whose own incomes rose the more their salesmen produced. Moreover, they say, IBM was not so stupid as to deny itself revenue by forcing its best salesmen to sit idle. Says Henry Wendler, who was Perot's branch manager in Dallas: "If you sold 100% of your quota, you didn't stop there. You could go to 200%, 300%, 500% and get more commissions."

Perot has acknowledged lately that Margot's $1,000 check to get EDS started, which he keeps as a memento, represented only the registration fee Texas required to charter a new corporation. He and his wife had, and used, a great deal more than that to launch EDS. Perot was making $20,000 a year as a part- time employee of Texas Blue Cross-Blue Shield, and Margot brought home a second salary as a full-time schoolteacher. This, however, is a rare case of Perot deflating a tall story; more distressing than any of the disputes about individual incidents in his early career is his seeming ability to convince himself of the truth of whatever he wants to believe. Mason quotes EDS general counsel Richard Shlakman as saying, "A part of his genius is that he can be self-delusional when most of us are only hypocritical."

CHARISMA OR TYRANNY -- OR BOTH?

Perot's basic idea in starting EDS was to provide computer services to companies that did not have their own machines by leasing idle time on computers owned by others (or, later, by EDS) and writing the programs to put that time to use. One of its first big contracts, to process the Medicare- Medicaid claims being handled by Texas Blue Cross-Blue Shield, was not exactly an arm's-length deal; it was signed while Perot was still employed by the Blue plans, a clear conflict of interest. The company went on to win a great deal of state and Federal Government business, provoking some complaints from competitors and bureaucrats that it relied on political pull rather than on submitting the lowest bids. But Perot seems to have pushed EDS to its spectacular growth primarily by identifying and filling a genuine business need and by giving the company what even some of his critics call charismatic leadership. He inspired his subordinates to prodigious labor by setting clear goals that they were free to achieve any way they thought best. After Perot sold EDS to General Motors, he and chairman Roger Smith joked that Smith had given Perot permission to shoot the first GM man who visited EDS with a manual of company procedures.

But if EDS was a loose organization in some ways, it was phenomenally regimented in others. Perot bound employees by what has been compared to a system of indentured servitude: they had to sign agreements specifying that if they quit or were fired for cause within two years, they would repay EDS up to $9,000 in training expenses. Men were obliged to wear a dark suit, white shirt and tie and to cut their hair short; in 1983 the U.S. district court in Seattle ordered reinstatement of a computer programmer that it found EDS had fired "for the sole reason that he would not shave his beard." Perot's recent declaration that as President he would not put a known homosexual or adulterer into the Cabinet was no surprise to those who know him; he followed the same hiring practices at EDS. A former employee says she knew of instructions to recruiters not to hire anyone with a weak handshake because he might be a homosexual. Marital infidelity was punished by firing. Says a Houston oilman who knows Perot: "One of the scariest things about Ross is his tendency to exclude everybody who doesn't look or think like him."

Women were not excluded from Perot's EDS; in fact, 44% of its employees were female. But only about 5% of the managers and supervisors were women. One reason probably was that for many years Perot hired for key positions mostly young military men who were being mustered out (they were, after all, accustomed to regimentation). They created an atmosphere of foxhole camaraderie that women could not readily fit into. A woman employee says she was told that women had not been in the work force long enough to acquire the training and skills needed to become EDS executives. After Perot left, however, GM suddenly found many it deemed capable. Women now fill 31% of the management and supervisory jobs at EDS -- and, it is only fair to note, 25% of those positions at Perot's new company, Perot Systems.

Even in business, Perot's authoritarian style did not succeed in organizations he could not totally dominate. After selling EDS to General Motors, he was for two years not only a director of the auto company but also its largest single stockholder. He made many criticisms of the stodgy GM bureaucracy that, like his criticisms of Washington today, were perfectly valid; it was quite true that GM took longer to design and produce a new car (six years) than the U.S. did to fight and win World War II. But he could never make the company move -- a bad augury for a presidential hopeful who would have to deal with a federal bureaucracy that is even bigger, more rigid and more expert at sidetracking would-be reformers.

A major reason for the failure, say other directors, is that Perot never tried to build coalitions within the board or even to draft a detailed plan for reform; he just carped and nagged. A senior executive who agreed with many of his criticisms says he was rebuffed when he tried to work with Perot. His explanation: "I learned that you can't be 90% for Ross Perot. You have to be with him all the way." GM in 1986 got so fed up with Perot that it paid him $700 million for his stock just to get him out and shut him up.

In the political arena, as at GM, Perot is coming under heavy fire for relying on exhortation without offering specific programs. But Perot thinks a leader's job is to set goals and drive his followers to reach them by any means necessary. His formula at EDS was "a teaspoon of planning, an ocean of execution." Subordinates setting out to reorganize a customer's data- processing procedures were told only to "do what makes sense." That approach succeeded spectacularly at EDS, where goals could be simple and Perot could rely on well-understood rewards and punishments. It is questionable whether it would work in government, where goals can be complex or even contradictory (design a health-care system that covers everybody but holds down costs) and President Perot could not fire the leaders of Congress for failing to get desired legislation passed.

STRONG ARMS AND SKULDUGGERY

Still more disturbing is Perot's abiding belief in paramilitary, and often secret, action that is, to put it politely, not overly finicky about staying within the confines of the law. He denies suggesting that Dallas police cordon off sections of minority neighborhoods and conduct house-to-house searches for drugs and weapons, an idea that would seem prohibited by constitutional rules on searches and seizures. But reliable journalists insist that he did advocate such a sweep, and more than once. Moreover, it is of a piece with his openly stated belief that a war on drugs should be fought as a genuine, literal war. He has at various times suggested blowing up drug-carrying ships and bombing heroin producers in Southeast Asia. Perot also had an association with Bo Gritz, an ex-Green Beret. Gritz has contended in a book that Perot once told him he had government clearance to hire an antidrug operative. According to Gritz, Perot said, "I want you to uncover and identify everyone dealing cocaine between Colombia and Texas. Once you're sure you've got them all, I want you to wipe them out in a single night like an angel of death." A Perot spokesman denies the two were ever associated in actual operations, and dismisses some of the other stories.

That Perot has a penchant for getting involved in secret activities seems undeniable. He put up the money for some of Oliver North's efforts to buy the freedom of American hostages in the Middle East (and lost at least $300,000 that was taken by middlemen who disappeared). In 1981 Perot agreed to a suggestion by agents of the U.S. Customs Service that he finance a drug sting in the Caribbean. The idea was to set up a landing strip on a foreign-owned island where agents would gather information on drug-carrying flights that would be induced to put down there. Customs could not operate an undercover enterprise in a foreign country, however, without clearing it through the U.S. ambassador and the government involved, and it did not want to do that. So a Customs agent proposed that Perot build the landing strip and have his employees serve as unofficial agents. "Nobody would know who they were," says Frank Chadwick, a retired Customs official who was then special agent in charge of the Houston Customs office. "We would not be beholden to report to the U.S. State Department in the foreign country." Perot, he says, seemed ready to invest $1 million to $2 million and even assign an employee (another former Green Beret -- Perot keeps a number of them around) to scout potential sites. But Customs headquarters in Washington turned down the idea.

Perot's best-known and most extensive unofficial operations, of course, have been those involving U.S. prisoners of war, real or imagined, in Vietnam. The operations began with his shipment of a planeload of food and clothes to them at Christmas in 1969, an unexceptionable venture that made him a hero (even though the shipment did not get through). For a while after the peace accords of 1973, he became convinced that there were no more Americans being held prisoner in Vietnam, but later he became equally positive that there were and are -- why he has never made clear. He speaks darkly of secret informants who would talk publicly only under subpoena, but has refused to give their names to a congressional subcommittee that pledged to subpoena them. In 1985 he contravened U.S. policy by proposing to pay $10 million for each American that the Vietnamese released, and in 1987 he made a trip to Hanoi, where, government officials grumble, he came close to violating the Logan Act, which forbids a private citizen to conduct foreign policy. Among other things, they say, he prematurely informed the Vietnamese about a forthcoming visit by an official emissary, General John Vessey, and talked about potential U.S. aid -- "major development projects," says one official -- beyond anything Vessey was authorized to discuss. Richard Childress, a former National Security Council official who dealt with both Perot and the Vietnamese, accuses Perot of "confusing the Vietnamese and the American people" by blundering into delicate negotiations that "he tried to take over."

Perot last week canceled a scheduled appearance before a Senate committee to tell his side of the story; the committee is now trying to decide whether to subpoena him. But Perot, a confirmed conspiracy theorist, has made it plain that he believes government officials have been engaged in a far-ranging plot to prevent an honest investigation into whether American POWS are still being held in Vietnam, for fear it would expose drug-smuggling operations they conducted to finance a secret war in Laos. Perot may have got that idea from Christic Institute, a leftish public-interest law firm that filed a suit making similar charges (the suit was dismissed in 1988 by a federal judge in Miami, who forced Christic to pay $1 million in court costs as damages for making frivolous charges). The generally conservative Perot and the left- leaning Christic are the oddest of allies. Nonetheless Christic general counsel Daniel Sheehan confirms that he drove Perot around Washington in a battered blue Volkswagen to call on secret sources.

A special target of Perot's has been Richard Armitage, at the time an Assistant Secretary of Defense, now a State Department official. In 1986 Perot called on both Vice President Bush and President Reagan to urge them to fire Armitage. Just what Armitage did to arouse the Texan's wrath, other than blocking Perot, is not clear. He was named in the Christic suit but produced a factual refutation of several charges; among other things, he proved that he was in Washington at a time when Christic and Perot said he was in Bangkok arranging drug smuggling. Armitage did once have a Vietnamese mistress and years later used Pentagon stationery to write a character reference for her when she was convicted in Washington of running a gambling operation, which he concedes was a stupid move. It may also have aroused Perot's moralistic antagonism. Perot to this day keeps a picture of Armitage and the woman and shows it to visitors, without making clear what relevance it might have to drug smuggling or pows.

MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY

Armitage is certainly not the only person subjected to the lash of Perot's righteous wrath. Perhaps the most frightening of Perot's characteristics is his tendency to use all his wealth and influence to conduct vendettas against those who cross him. Critics contend that on most occasions Perot is so convinced he is absolutely right that he believes those who oppose him are not just mistaken but evil, and feels perfectly justified in going after them hammer and tongs. Some examples:

-- In 1980 Perot, vacationing in London, got news that Bradford National Corp., a New York-based firm, had wrested a Texas Medicaid contract away from EDS. Perot could not accept the idea that EDS had lost fairly. He flew back to convene an EDS meeting in Dallas, at which, says author Mason, "eavesdroppers outside the third-floor conference room heard him shouting, 'I want to find the son of a bitch who let this happen and get him out of the company!' " Though the principal question was whether EDS or Bradford had submitted the lower bid, Perot and his aides dug up and deluged the state with an enormous amount of negative information about Bradford and Arnold Ashburn, the Texas bureaucrat who awarded the contract. The state eventually gave the contract back to EDS but absolved Bradford of any wrongdoing and paid it $3.1 million to walk quietly away.

-- Displeased with the widely praised Vietnam Memorial in Washington, Perot, who helped finance the design competition, asked for an audit of the books of the committee raising money to build it. No impropriety was ever found. The controversy illustrates that Perot's munificent charitable gifts are often given with strings attached, and there are instances of his pulling on the strings to withdraw the gifts.

-- Angered because a tenant of a house he owned in Dallas had missed a monthly rent payment, Perot filed a suit citing that and "certain unsavory actions" (never specified). He won a judge's authorization for guards to search the house three times a day; they apparently found nothing much. A former cop who participated in the searches says no one without Perot's money and clout could ever have got away with that. Trivial as the incident might seem to those not involved, it revives shivery memories of how Richard Nixon, a friend of Perot's, used the vastly greater power of the White House to harass the people on his enemies list.

A fuller, more complicated picture of Ross Perot has begun to emerge. To date there is no single misdeed, no terrible indiscretion or any personal quirk that could be considered disqualifying. Rather, as is often the case, Perot's strengths are mirror images of his weaknesses. Is he a decisive, can- do, fiercely driven man who would help solve the nation's problems? Or is he an overly ambitious, thin-skinned tyrant who would only make things worse? * Beyond what he really is, there is also the question of how in the end he is seen by the electorate. Is public frustration running so high that faults crippling to a more conventional candidate will be overlooked? Whatever the answers to these questions, one thing is very clear: Perot will not have an easy time getting to the White House. George Bush and Bill Clinton will see to that. The American people are not likely to give the presidency to someone unless they know him -- or at least think they know him -- almost intimately. The U.S. political system is bizarre in many respects, but it does test the temperament and tenacity of the candidates. In the end it is likely that the Ross Perot of November will look a good deal different from the Ross Perot of June.

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett/Washington, Richard Behar/New York and Richard Woodbury/Dallas