millions of Americans protesting, not without justification, that the war
was wrong and should not be won. Then, one day in 1969, he had met little
Billy Singleton, a boy who did not know whether he had a father or not.
Billy's father had been missing in Vietnam before ever seeing his son:
there was no way of knowing whether he was a prisoner, or dead. It was
heartbreaking.
For Perot, sentiment was not a mournful emotion but a clarion call to
action.
He learned that Billy's father was not unique. There were many, perhaps
hundreds, of wives and children who did not know whether their husbands and
fathers had been killed or just captured. The Vietriamese, arguing that
they were not bound by the rules of the Geneva Convention because the
United States had never declared war, refused to release the names of their
prisoners.
Worse still, many of the prisoners were dying of brutality and neglect.
President Nixon was planning to "Vietnamize" the war and disengage in three
years' time, but by then, according to CIA reports, half the prisoners
would have died. Even if Billy Singleton's father were alive, he might not
survive to come home.
Perot wanted to do something.
EDS had good connections with the Nixon White House. Perot went to
Washington and talked to Chief Foreign Policy Advisor Henry Kissinger. And
Kissinger had a plan.
The Vietnamese were maintaining, at least for the purposes of propaganda,
that they had no quarrel with the American peopleonly with the U.S.
government. Furthermore, they were presenting themselves to the world as
the little guy in a David-andGoliath conflict. It seemed that they valued
their public image. It might be possible, Kissinger thought, to embarrass
them into improving their treatment of prisoners, and releasing the names,
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 53
by an international campaign to publicize the sufferings of the prisoners
and their families.
The campaign must be privately financed, and must seem to be quite
unconnected with the government, even though in reality it would be closely
monitored by a team of White House and State Department people.
Perot accepted the challenge. (Perot could resist anything but a challenge.
His eleventh-grade teacher, one Mrs. Duck, had realized this. "It's a
shame," Mrs. Duck had said, "that you're not as smart as your friends."
Young Perot insisted he was as smart as his friends. "Well, why do they
make better grades than you?" It was just that they were interested in
school and he was not, said Perot. "Anybody can stand there and tell me
that they could do something," said Mrs. Duck. "But let's look at the
record: your friends can do it and you can't." Perot was cut to the quick.
He told her that he would make straight A's for the next six weeks. He made
straight A's, not just for six weeks, but for the rest of his high school
career. The perceptive Mrs. Duck had discovered the only way to manipulate
Perot: challenge him.)
Accepting Kissinger's challenge, Perot went to J. Walter Tbompson, the
largest advertising agency in the worid, and told them what he wanted to
do. They offered to come up with a plan of campaign within thirty to sixty
days and show some results in a year. Perot turned them down: he wanted to
start today and see results tomorrow. He went back to Dallas and put
together a small team of EDS executives who began calling newspaper editors
and placing simple, unsophisticated advertisements that they wrote
themselves.
And the mail came in truckloads.
For Americans who were pro-war, the treatment of the prisoners showed that
the Vietnamese really were the bad guys; and for those who were anti-war
the plight of the prisoners was one more reason for getting out of Vietnam.
Only the most hard-line protesters resented the campaign. In 1970 the FBI
told Perot that the Viet Cong had instructed the Black Panther~ to murder
him. (At the crazy end of the sixties this had not sounded particularly
bizarre.) Perot hired bodyguards. Sure enough, a few weeks later a squad of
men climbed the fence around Perot's seventeen-acre Dallas property. They
were chased off by savage dogs. Perot's family, including his indomitable
mother, would not hear of him giving up the campaign for the sake of their
safety.
54 Ken Follett
His greatest publicity stunt took place in December 1969, when he chartered
two planes and tried to fly into Hanoi with Christmas dinners for the
prisoners of war. Of course, he was not allowed to land; but during a slow
news period he created enormous international awareness of the problem. He
spent two million dollars, but he reckoned the publicity would have cost
sixty million to buy. And a Gallup poll he commissioned afterward showed
that the feelings of Americans toward the North Vietnamese were
overwhelmingly negative.
During 1970 Perot used less spectacular methods. Small communities all over
the United States were encouraged to set up their own POW campaigns. They
raised funds to send people to Paris to badger the North Vietnamese
delegation there. They organized telethons, and built replicas of the cages
in which some of the POWs lived. They sent so many protest letters to Hanoi
that the North Vietnamese postal system collapsed under the strain. Perot
stumped the country, giving speeches anywhere he was invited. He met with
North Vietnamese diplomats in Laos, taking with him lists of their
prisoners held in the south, mail from them, and film of their living
conditions. He also took a Gallup associate with him, and together they
went over the results of the poll with the North Vietnamese.
Some or all of it worked. The treatment of American POWs improved, mail and
parcels began to get through to them, and the North Vietnamese started to
release names. Most importantly, the prisoners heard of the campaign-from
newly captured Amencan soldiers,---and the news boosted their morale
enormously.
Eight years later, driving to Denver in the snow, Perot recalled another
consequence of the campaign; a consequence that had then seemed no more
than mildly irritating, but could now be important and valuable. Publicity
for the POWs had meant, inevitably, publicity for Ross Perot. He had become
nationally known. He would be remembered in the corridors of powerand
especially in the Pentagon. That Washington monitoring committee had
included Admiral Tom Moorer, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
Alexander Haig, then assistant to Kissinger and now the commander in chief
of NATO forces; William Sullivan, then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of
State and now U.S. Ambassador to Iran; and Kissinger himself.
These people would help Perot get inside the government, find out what was
happening, and promote help fast. He would call Richard Helms, who had in
the past been both head of the CIA
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 55
and U.S. Ambassador to Tehran. He would call Kermit Roosevelt, son of Teddy,
who had been involved in the CIA coup that put the Shah back on the throne
/>
in 1953 ...
But what if none of this works? he thought.
It was his habit to think more than one step ahead.
What if the Carter administration could not or would not help?
Then, he thought, I'm going to break them out of jail.
How would we go about something like that? We've never done anything like
it. Where would we start? Who could help us?
He thought of EDS executives Merv Stauffer and T. J. Marquez and his
secretary Sally Walther, who had been key organizers of the POW campaign:
making complex arrangements halfway across the world by phone was meat and
drink to them, but ... a prison break? And who would staff the mission?
Since 1968 EDS's recruiters had given priority to Vietnam veterans--a pol-
icy begun for patriotic reasons and continued when Perot found that the
vets often made first-class businessmen-but the men who had once been lean,
fit, highly trained soldiers were now overweight, out-of-condition computer
executives, more comfortable with a telephone than with a rifle. And who
would plan and lead the raid?
Finding the best man for the job was Perot's specialty. Although he was one
of the most successful self-made men in the history of American capitalism,
he was not the world's greatest computer expert, or the world's greatest
salesman, or even the world's greatest business administrator. He did just
one thing superbly well: pick the right man, give him the resources, moti-
vate him, then leave him alone to do the job.
Now, as he approached Denver, he asked himself- who is the world's greatest
rescuer?
Then he thought of Bull Simons.
A legend in the U.S. Army, Colonel Arthur D. "Bull" Simons had hit the
headlines in November 1970 when he and a team of commandos raided the Son
Tay prison camp, twentythree miles outside Hanoi, in an attempt to rescue
American prisoners of war. Theraid had been a brave and well-organized
operation, but the intelligence on which all the planning was based had
been faulty: the prisoners had been moved, and were no longer at Son Tay.
'Me raid was widely regarded as a fiasco, which in Perot's opinion was
grossly unfair. He had been invited to meet the Son Tay Raiders, to boost
their morale by telling
56 Ken Folleu
them that here was at least one American citizen who was grateful for their
bravery. He had spent a day at Fort Bragg in North Carolina--and he had met
Colonel Simons.
Peering through his windshield, Perot could picture Simons against the
cloud of falling snowflakes: a big man, just under six feet tall, with the
shoulders of an ox. His white hair was cropped in a military crewcut, but
his bushy eyebrows were still black. On either side of his big nose, two
deep lines ran down to the comers of his mouth, giving him a permanently
aggressive expression. He had a big head, big ears, a strong jaw, and the
most powerful hands Perot had ever seen. The man looked as if he had been
carved from a single block of granite.
After spending a day with him, Perot thought: in a world of counterfeits,
he is the genuine article.
That day and in years to come Perot learned a lot about Simons. What
impressed him most was the attitude of Simons's men toward their leader. He
reminded Perot of Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Green Bay
Packers: he inspired in his men emotions ranging from fear through respect
and admiration to love. He was an imposing figure and an aggressive com-
mander-he cursed a lot, and would tell a soldier- "Do what I say or I'll
cut your bloody head off!"--but that by itself could not account for Ins
hold on the hearts of skeptical, battle-hardened commandos. Beneath the
tough exterior there was a tough interior.
Those who had served under him liked nothing better than to sit around
telling Simons stories. Although he had a bull-like physique, his nickname
came not from that but, according to legend, from a game played by Rangers
called The Bull Pen. A pit would be dug, six feet deep, and one man would
get into it. The object of the game was to find out how many men it took to
throw the first man out of the pit. Simons thought the game was foolish,
but was once needled into playing it. It took fifteen men to get him out,
and several of them spent the night in the hospital with broken fingers and
noses and severe bite wounds. After that he was called "Bull. -
Perot learned later that almost everything in this story was exaggerated.
Simons played the game more than once; it generally took four men to get
him out; no one ever had any broken bones. Simons was simply the kind of
man about whom legends are told. He earned the loyalty of his men not by
displays of bravado but by his skill as a military commander. He was a
meticulous, endlessly patient planner, he was cautious,--one of
ON WINGS OF EAGLES 57
his catchphrases was: "That's a risk we don't have to take"; and he took
pride in bringing all his men back from a mission alive.
In the Vietnam War Simons had run Operation White Star. He went to Laos
with 107 men and organized twelve battalions of Mao tribesmen to fight the
Vietnamese. One of the battalions defected to the other side, taking as
prisoners some of Simons's Green Berets. Simons took a helicopter and
landed inside the stockade where the defecting battalion was. On seeing
Simons, the Laotian colonel stepped forward, stood at attention, and
saluted. Simons told him to produce the prisoners immediately, or he would
call an air strike and destroy the entire battalion. The colonel produced
the prisoners. Simons took them away, then called the air strike anyway.
Simons had come back from Laos three years later with all his 107 men.
Perot had never checked out this legend-he liked it the way it was.
The second time Perot met Simons was after the war. Perot virtually took
over a hotel in San Francisco and threw a weekend party for the returning
prisoners of war to meet the Son Tay Raiders. It cost Perot a quarter of a
million dollars, but it was a hell of a party. Nancy Reagan, Clint
Eastwood, and John Wayne came. Perot would never forget the meeting between
John Wayne and Bull Simons. Wayne shook Simons's hand with tears in his
eyes and said: "You are the man I play in the movies."
Before the ticker-tape parade Perot asked Simons to talk to his Raiders and
wam them against reacting to demonstrators. "San Francisco has had more
than its share of anti-war demonstrations, -Perot said. "You didn't pick
your Raiders for their charm. If one of them gets irritated he might just
snap some poor devil's neck and regret it later."
Simons looked at Perot. It was Perot's first experience of The Simons Look.
It made you feel as if you were the biggest fool in history. It made you
wish you had not spoken. It made you wish the ground would swallow you up.
"I've already talked to them," Simons said. "There won't be a problem. "
That weekend and later, Perot got to know Simons better, and saw other
sides of his personality. Simons could be very charming, when he chose to
be. He enchanted Perot's wife, Margot, a
nd the children thought he was
wonderful. With his men he spoke soldiers' language, using a great deal of
profanity, but he was surprisingly articulate when talking at a banquet or
press conference. His college major had been journalism. Some of his
58 Ken FoUett
tastes were simple-he read westerns by the boxful, and enjoyed what his sons
called "supermarket music"--but he also read a lot of nonfiction, and had a
lively curiosity about all sorts of things. He could talk about antiques or
history as easily as battles and weaponry.
Perot and Simons, two willful, dominating personalities, got along by
giving one another plenty of room. They did not become close friends. Perot
never called Simons by his first name, Art (although Margot did). Like most
people, Perot never knew what Simons was thinking unless Simons chose to
tell him. Perot recalled their first meeting in Fort Bragg. Before getting
up to make his speech, Perot had asked Simons's wife, Lucille: "What is
Colonel Simons really like?" She had replied: "Oh, he's just a great big
teddy bear." Perot repeated this in his speech. The Son Tay Raiders fell
apart. Simons never cracked a smile.
Perot did not know whether this impenetrable man would care to rescue two
EDS executives from a Persian jail. Was Simons grateful for the San
Francisco party? Perhaps. After that party Perot had financed Simons on a
trip to Laos to search for MlAs-American soldiers missing in action-who had
not come back with the prisoners of war. On his return from Laos, Simons
had remarked to a group of EDS executives: "Perot is a hard man to say no
to."
As he pulled into Denver Airport, Perot wondered whether, six years later,
Simons would still find him a hard man to say no to.
But that contingency was a long way down the line. Perot was going to try
everything else first.
He went into the terminal, bought a seat on the next flight to Dallas, and
found a phone. He called EDS and spoke to T. J. Marquez, one of his most
senior executives, who was known as T.J. rather than Tom because there were
so many Toms around EDS. "I want you to go find my passport," he told T.J.,
"and get me a visa for Iran."
T. J. said: "Ross, I think that's the world's worst idea."
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