There will never be another quite like the quiet man from Texas who turned the world of politics upside down. For several years between his first run for president in 1992 and second run for president in 1996 I had the pleasure of working for Ross Perot on his presidential campaigns and his efforts to unite the independents of America.
Perot was most likely everything everybody said about him because he was the stuff of legends, the subject of a feature film, and the friend of every family who lost a loved one in the Vietnam war. He became a billionaire by anticipating the sudden rise of the data processing field. Then he devoted his life to helping people, always with an engaging smile.
I could write a book about the experiences we had working with Mr. Perot but I could never do justice to describing the type of man he became. He was the most successful third party candidate in a presidential election since Teddy Roosevelt ran in 1912 and knocked an incumbent president out of office, as Perot did in 1992.
But that was a very small part of a mighty big man. A few highlights of the stories he shared with me.
Perot was the only individual who owned an original copy of the English Magna Carta.
He bought most of the historical artifacts of the Soviet space program after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When two of his employees were taken prisoner in the Iranian revolution and President Carter could do nothing to save them Peror created his own revolutionary force to go save them and bring them home.
Before he proposed public policy solutions he personally funded efforts to test his new concepts in the areas of health care and education where he underwrote a hospital and provided a high school for the low income and minority students to prove they were equal to the performance of other schools with high standards and success.
Everyone recognized him on the streets, even when he came for meetings in our New York City offices. Perot refused to ride in a limo and if one was sent for him he rode in the front seat with the driver.
He personally knew and remembered the names of the doormen, elevator operators, and maintenance workers in our 28 story building and would stop to ask them how their families were doing.
Untold thousands of children of soldiers missing in action or prisoners of war went to college through his generosity and dedication to the military.
His campaign charts and graphs became legendary yet were valuable in helping people understand the bureaucracy and politicians.
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| Perot and Steve Jobs |
A devoted friend of all military and veterans and their families, loyal to the point of risking his life to save his employees, and powerful enough to help control the agenda for the American political races, he is truly the last of the great prairie populists, political prophets, and thorn in the side of the political establishment.
He will be missed.
Following is an article about Ross I wrote, followed by tributes from the Associated Press and CNBC.
Coltons Point Times
Exactly 27 years ago George Bush, Sr., was running for re-election as president of the
For historians let me set the record straight. Yes Teddy was elected vice president in 1900 and became president when President William McKinley was shot September 6 and died September 14 of 1901, his first year in office. Teddy was then elected by a landslide in 1904.
In 1908 he supported his secretary of war, William Howard Taft for president and Taft won. By the end of Taft's first term Roosevelt felt Taft no longer served the people and when he failed to beat Taft at the GOP convention he started a third party, the Bull Moose (progressive) party to oppose the president.
This is where the parallels between Ross Perot and Teddy Roosevelt become intertwined as if history was simply repeating itself about 100 years later.
In the election of 1912 Republican President Taft got 23% of the vote, Independent Roosevelt got 27% of the vote, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson became president with just 42% of the vote. Thus Roosevelt blocked Taft from being re-elected and made Wilson President.
After his first term in office in 1992 President Bush was running for re-election riding the popularity of Desert Storm when Ross Perot, a former Republican like Teddy Roosevelt, came out of nowhere with his Independent campaign.
In the election of 1992 Republican President Bush got 38% of the vote, Independent Ross Perot got 19% of the vote, and Democrat Bill Clinton became president with just 43% of the vote. Thus Perot blocked Bush from being re-elected and made Clinton President.
During Clinton
He opposed NAFTA, an issue Clinton Clinton got it passed and the final nail was driven into the coffin of America
On health care Perot warned the lack of cost controls would bankrupt America US national debt was $107.4 billion under Clinton
Today the National debt stands at a record $17 trillion, thanks in large part to runaway entitlement costs as predicted by Perot. In fact America
Finally, Perot was so disgusted with the deficiencies in our education system that he started his own high school in Dallas
Sooo, Ross Perot, the caricature from Texas who dared challenge the American two-party system was a figment of historical déjà vu showing up 100 years after Teddy Roosevelt played the same role for America
More on the Prairie Prophet from Texas later as the story of Ross Perot and his unbending care for the nation, commitment to veterans, exceptional patriotism and whose incredible rescue of his employees from the prison of Iran after the failure of President Carter to protect our own embassy in the fall of Iran to the Ayatollah is one of the greatest stories of courage to ever take place in our nation.
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| US hostages in Iran 1979 |
Texas
billionaire H. Ross Perot dies at 89
DAVID KOENIG,Associated Press
DALLAS (AP) — H. Ross Perot, the colorful,
self-made Texas billionaire who rose from a childhood of Depression-era poverty
and twice ran for president as a third-party candidate, has died. He was 89.
The cause of death was leukemia, a family
spokesman said Tuesday.
Perot, whose 19% of the vote in 1992 stands
among the best showings by an independent candidate in the past century, died
early Tuesday at his home in Dallas surrounded by his devoted 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 went his own way — creating and building Electronic Data Systems
Corp., which helped other companies manage their computer networks.
Yet the most famous event in his business
career didn't involve sales and earnings; he financed a private commando raid
in 1979 to free two EDS employees who were being held in a prison in Iran. The
tale was turned into a book and a movie.
"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."
"He had the vision and the tenacity to
make it happen," Luce said. "He was a great communicator. He never
employed a speechwriter — he wrote all his own speeches. He was a great
storyteller."
Perot first became known to Americans outside
of business circles by claiming that the U.S. government left behind hundreds
of American soldiers who were missing or imprisoned at the end of the Vietnam
War. Perot fanned the issue at home and discussed it privately with Vietnamese
officials in the 1980s, angering the Reagan administration, which was formally
negotiating with Vietnam's government.
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. Some
Republicans blamed him for Bush's loss to Clinton as Perot garnered the largest
percentage of votes for a third-party candidate since former President Theodore
Roosevelt's 1912 bid.
During the campaign, Perot spent $63.5
million of his own money and bought 30-minute television spots. He used charts
and graphs to make his points, summarizing them with a line that became a
national catchphrase: "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% of the vote, and the Reform
Party that he founded and hoped to build into a national political force began
to fall apart.
However, Perot's ideas on trade and deficit
reduction remained part of the political landscape. He blamed both major
parties for running up a huge federal budget deficit and allowing American jobs
to be sent to other countries. The movement of U.S. jobs to Mexico, he said,
created a "giant sucking sound."
Perot continued to speak out about federal
spending for many years. In 2008, he launched a website to highlight the
nation's debt with a ticker that tracked the rising total, a blog and a chart
presentation.
Henry Ross Perot was born in Texarkana on
June 27, 1930. His father was a cotton broker; his mother a secretary. Perot
said his family survived the Depression relatively well through hard work and
by managing their money carefully.
Young Perot's first job was delivering papers
in a poor, mostly black part of town from his pony, Miss Bee. When the
newspaper tried to cut his commission, he said he complained to the publisher —
and won. He said that taught him to take problems straight to the top.
From Texarkana, Perot went to the U.S. Naval
Academy even though he had never been on a ship or seen the ocean. After the
Navy, Perot joined International Business Machines in 1955 and quickly became a
top salesman. In his last year at IBM, he filled his sales quota for the year
in January.
In 1962, with $1,000 from his wife, Margot,
Perot founded Electronic Data Systems. Hardware accounted for about 80% of the
computer business, Perot said, and IBM wasn't interested in the other 20%,
including services.
Many of the early hires at EDS were former
military men, and they had to abide by Perot's strict dress code — white
shirts, ties, no beards or mustaches — and long workdays. Many had crew cuts,
like Perot.
The company's big break came in the mid-1960s
when the federal government created Medicare and Medicaid, the health programs
for seniors, the disabled and the poor. States needed help in running the
programs, and EDS won contracts — starting in Texas — to handle the millions of
claims.
EDS first sold stock to the public in 1968,
and overnight, Perot was worth $350 million. His fortune doubled and tripled as
the stock price rose steadily.
In 1984, he sold control of the company to
General Motors Corp. for $2.5 billion and received $700 million in a buyout. In
2008, EDS was sold to Hewlett-Packard Co.
Perot went on to establish another
computer-services company, Perot Systems Corp. He retired as CEO in 2000 and
was succeeded by his son, Ross Perot Jr. In 2009, Dell Inc. bought Perot
Systems.
Forbes magazine this year estimated Perot's
wealth at $4.1 billion.
Perot was not immune to mistakes in business.
His biggest might have been a 1971 investment in duPont Glore Forgan, then one
of the biggest brokerage houses on Wall Street. The administration of President
Richard Nixon asked Perot to save the company to head off an investor panic,
and he also poured money into another troubled brokerage, Walston & Co.,
but wound up losing much of his $100 million investment.
It was during the Nixon administration that
Perot became involved in the issue of U.S. prisoners of war in Southeast Asia.
Perot said Secretary of State Henry Kissinger asked him to lead a campaign to
improve treatment of POWs held in North Vietnam. Perot chartered two jets to
fly medical supplies and the wives of POWs to Southeast Asia. They were not
allowed into North Vietnam, but the trip attracted enormous media attention.
After their release in 1973, some prisoners
said conditions in the camps had improved after the failed missions.
In 1979, the Iranian government jailed two
EDS executives and Perot vowed to win their release.
"Ross came to the prison one day and
said, 'We're going to get you out,'" one of the men, Paul Chiapparone,
told The Associated Press. "How many CEOs would do that today?"
Perot recruited retired U.S. Army Special
Forces Col. Arthur "Bull" Simons to lead a commando raid on the
prison. A few days later, the EDS executives walked free after the shah's
regime fell and mobs stormed the prison. Simons' men sneaked the executives out
of the country and into Turkey. The adventure was recalled in Ken Follett's
best-selling book "On Wings of Eagles" and a TV miniseries.
In later years, Perot pushed the Veterans
Affairs Department to study neurological causes of Gulf War syndrome, a
mysterious illness reported by many soldiers who served in the 1991 Persian
Gulf war. He scoffed at officials who blamed the illnesses on stress — "as
if they are wimps" — and paid for additional research.
Perot received a special award from the VA
for his support of veterans and the military in 2009.
In Texas, Perot led commissions on education
reform and crime. He was given many honorary degrees and awards for business
success and patriotism.
Former President George W. Bush said in a
statement that "Texas and America have lost a strong patriot."
"Ross Perot epitomized the
entrepreneurial spirit and the American creed. He gave selflessly of his time
and resources to help others in our community, across our country, and around
the world," Bush said. "He loved the U.S. military and supported our
service members and veterans. Most importantly, he loved his dear wife,
children, and grandchildren."
While he worked at Perot Systems in suburban Dallas,
entire hallways were filled with memorabilia from soldiers and POWs that Perot
had helped. His personal office was dominated by large paintings of his wife
and five children and bronze sculptures by Frederic Remington.
Several original Norman Rockwell paintings
hung in the waiting area, and Perot once told a visiting reporter that he tried
to live by Rockwell's ethics of hard, honest work and family.
___
Associated
Press writer Jamie Stengle in Dallas contributed to this report.
CNBC
Former presidential
candidate Ross Perot dies at 89
July
9, 2019
Billionaire businessman,
philanthropist and independent presidential candidate Ross Perot is dead at 89,
CNBC has confirmed.
Perot, who ran for
president in 1992 and 1996, died after a five-month battle with leukemia, said
James Fuller, a representative for the Perot family.
“In business and in
life, Ross was a man of integrity and action. A true American patriot and a man
of rare vision, principle and deep compassion, he touched the lives of
countless people through his unwavering support of the military and veterans
and through his charitable endeavors,” Fuller said in a statement.
Perot is survived by his
wife, Margot, his five children and 16 grandchildren.
Perot was an early tech
entrepreneur. He started his career in sales at IBM, where he excelled. In
1962, he founded his first company, Electronic Data Systems, with just $1,000
in savings. More than two decades later, he launched information technology
services provider Perot Systems, which was acquired in 2009 by Dell for $3.9
billion.
As a disruptive
third-party candidate for president, Perot ran on a platform of fiscal
responsibility and protectionism. He won nearly 19% of the vote in the 1992
race — by far the biggest slice of the electorate for a third-party candidate
since Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party in the 1912 election.
1968: American businessman H. Ross Perot
holding a business machine manufactured by his company, Electronic Data
Systems, Dallas, Texas.
Shel
Hershorn | Getty Images
Perot stood out from the
political crowd for his quirks as much as his business credentials and lack of
experience in establishment politics. “I don’t have any experience in running
up a $4 trillion debt. I don’t have any experience in gridlock government,
where nobody takes responsibility for anything and everybody blames everybody
else,” he said in a 1992 presidential debate. The shifting of U.S. jobs to
Mexico created a “giant sucking sound,” he famously said during the campaign.
Perot participated in
all three presidential debates in that election, and took a nontraditional
campaign route by booking lengthy time slots on network television to lay out
his political views.
He was “certainly the
most influential political force in the late 20th century from outside the
regular party system,” said Allan Lichtman, distinguished professor of history
at American University.
Lichtman told CNBC he
had been tapped to write a biography of Perot, and Lichtman had agreed. But
“quirky Ross Perot, just like he pulled out of the presidential race, he pulled
out of the biography,” Lichtman said.
Perot was a veteran, and
followed his service with a lifetime commitment to supporting U.S. veterans,
especially during the Vietnam War. He was honored in 2009 by then-Veterans Affairs
Secretary James Peake for his advocacy efforts.
Presidential candidate Ross Perot speaks
during the 1992 Presidential Debates.
Wally
McNamee | Corbis Historical | Getty Images
Perot’s death led to an
outpouring of warmth from figures in the political world.
Former President George
W. Bush said in a statement to NBC News that “Texas and America have lost a
strong patriot” in Perot.
“Ross Perot epitomized
the entrepreneurial spirit and the American creed. He gave selflessly of his
time and resources to help others in our community, across our country, and
around the world. He loved the U.S. military and supported our service members
and veterans. Most importantly, he loved his dear wife, children, and
grandchildren. Laura and I send our heartfelt condolences to the entire Perot
family as they celebrate a full life,” Bush said.
Former Vice President Al
Gore said that he “always had the utmost respect for Ross Perot, for his
patriotism, love of country, and extraordinary commitment to our veterans. I
send my deepest condolences to his family and to everyone who loved and admired
him.”
In his final interview
with the Dallas News in 2016, Perot shrugged off a
question about his legacy, saying “Aw, I don’t worry about that.”
His parting words in
that interview, however, were well considered: “Texas born. Texas bred. When I
die, I’ll be Texas dead. Ha!”
He died at his home in
Dallas, in the company of his family.
— CNBC’s Tucker Higgins contributed to this
report.
