by Scott Farris
One sign of that political disenchantment was that fewer Americans identified themselves as either Republicans or Democrats. The growing number of unaffiliated voters seemed to create an opening for candidates outside the two-party system. Since its peak in the late nineteenth century, partisan political affiliation has been in a steady decline, a decline Perot’s candidacy would exacerbate. According to Gallup’s annual surveys, in 1988, 36 percent of American voters identified themselves as Democrats, 33 percent as Republicans, and 31 percent as independents. By 1993, the year after the Perot campaign, 32 percent of Americans considered themselves Democrats, 30 percent Republicans, and 38 percent as independents.27
Political parties were not the only institutions to lose the confidence of many Americans. Experts and professionals of all stripes were no longer given the deference they had enjoyed in previous times. There was a growing belief that the opinion of experts had no more validity than that of any reasonably educated, thoughtful person. Conservative journalist William F. Buckley, himself a Yale graduate, captured the sentiment when he said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
Deference to experts diminished also because more Americans were becoming better educated themselves. By the 1990s, two-thirds of adult Americans had attended at least some college and roughly one-third had earned a four-year degree. More importantly, new technologies allowed average citizens to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of information and have greater access to the public square. People who were used to being talked to could now talk back. After Perot would come the Internet and blogging, but shortly before Perot announced his candidacy, the rise of talk radio hailed the public’s new respect for the opinions (informed or otherwise) of the average citizen.
Talk radio had its origins in New York City in the 1940s as a local phenomenon, but it got a huge boost in terms of tackling political content in 1987 when the Federal Communications Commission repealed the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Without the requirement that broadcasters provide free airtime for a response to any controversial opinion that had been aired on the station, the door was opened for “increasingly partisan discussions without rebuttal.” Rush Limbaugh began his first national broadcast in late 1988, and by late 1990 he was the most popular figure on radio. Like Perot, the message of Limbaugh and a host of primarily conservative commentators who commanded the airwaves was that average citizens, usually defined as their followers, needed to take back the country from an ineffectual elite.
Yet, even as modern society celebrated the wisdom of the common man in the finest Jeffersonian tradition, there was also a new fascination with the uncommon man or woman, the celebrity. People magazine had debuted in 1974, the first of a variety of magazines, television shows, and websites devoted to celebrating the art of being famous for being famous. People was such a publishing success that its focus on personality was soon being mimicked even by business magazines, such as Forbes and Fortune. In 1989, television shows focused on celebrity, such as Inside Edition and Hard Copy, made their debut.
Perot had begun his career at IBM as a salesman, and through the years he remained a salesman whose favorite product was Ross Perot, but he was still an odd candidate for celebrity. He was, as a Newsweek reporter described him, “a banty rooster of a man with question mark ears, a mangled nose, a barber-college haircut, and an East Texas drawl as thin and sharp as wine gone to vinegar.” His life story offers few clues as to what fueled his massive ambitions or his need for public recognition. He was born June 27, 1930, in Texarkana, Texas, the son of a successful cotton broker and a mother who was a devout Methodist. By all accounts, it was a loving home where Perot received plenty of attention from his parents. Physically small, Perot played few sports but expressed his competitive nature in other endeavors, such as being the first in his Boy Scout troop to attain the rank of Eagle Scout. Even as a teenager, a friend recalled, Perot had “a very healthy ego.”
Perot attended the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was an average student academically but a champion debater, and his leadership skills were acknowledged by his election as class president in his final two years. Perot did not smoke, drink, or chase women. He loved the rigorous ethical standards at the academy, but when assigned to active duty, he professed to be appalled by the lax moral standards of what he termed the “fairly godless” regular Navy. His request for early dismissal was rejected. Later, as his naval commitment was ending, he met a touring IBM executive who was impressed by Perot’s confidence in directing a series of naval maneuvers. He offered Perot an interview, which Perot jumped at, telling the executive, “And I don’t even know what you do.”
Perot became one of IBM’s star salesmen, popular with managers, less so with co-workers. But he grew frustrated at IBM. He felt the company was capping his earning potential and was not interested in his ideas for IBM to move beyond selling computer hardware and begin offering computer services, such as helping companies with data management. In 1962, he made the decision to leave IBM and form his own company after reading a quote from Henry David Thoreau in the Reader’s Digest: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
His success at EDS garnered an introduction to Richard Nixon in 1968 when he was invited to give a presentation on how computers could enhance political campaigns. After Nixon’s election, the administration repeatedly turned to Perot as a potential donor for various administration initiatives, though Perot got the reputation of overpromising in order to gain access to the president and then underdelivering. Perot “actually thought he knew what to do, better than anyone else,” a Nixon aide said. “He never considered the possibility that anyone else could be right.”
In late 1969, Perot complained that the Nixon administration was ignoring the plight of U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam. He then gained international attention when he proposed to deliver Christmas dinners and other supplies to POWs. After weeks of negotiation, the North Vietnamese finally flatly refused to accept the supplies, though reports that treatment of POWs improved after the attempt greatly enhanced Perot’s reputation—but not at the White House. “Some of us started to think that the trip had been more about Perot than about the POWs,” a Nixon aide said.
While his POW gambit had made him a national figure, it was Perot’s upstaging of another president ten years later that would make his reputation as a man who could do what others—including presidents—could not. In late December 1978, two EDS employees were arrested in Iran as the Shah’s government was crumbling before the Iranian Revolution. The Shah’s government, which had demanded bribes from EDS in return for government contracts, reportedly made the arrests to demonstrate it was cracking down on the government corruption that was helping to fuel the revolution.
Perot was furious. Discounting the U.S. State Department’s struggle to evacuate twenty-five thousand other American citizens in Iran, Perot grew impatient with supposed government inaction and hatched his own plan to send a privately financed commando team to Tehran to break the men out of jail. EDS employees with military experience—“preferably in Special Forces–type action”—volunteered for a rescue team that was led by an old Perot acquaintance, Colonel Arthur “Bull” Simons, who had once led a celebrated attempt to rescue American POWs in North Vietnam and who had assisted in Perot’s ongoing quest to determine if any American POWs remained alive in Southeast Asia after the end of the war. Simons, by then sixty, was so eager to help with the Iranian rescue that he refused compensation for his services.
Seven EDS employees, all of them military veterans, all in their mid-thirties, and all who had worked in Tehran at one time or another for EDS, joined Simons on January 3, 1979, to begin a week of training before heading to Iran. The initial plan to break the EDS prisoners out of a Tehran jail was foiled when the prisoners were transferred
to Gasr, the main Iranian prison for political prisoners. But the revolution was gaining momentum, and Simons was an experienced hand, who knew that all revolutions feature a mob storming the toppled regime’s prisons in order to release its prisoners. He counseled patience. Perot, meanwhile, had personally traveled to Tehran with remarkably little difficulty, even using his own name and passport, to give instructions and advise his imprisoned employees that rescue was imminent.
On February 11, ten days after the Ayatollah Khomeini made his triumphal return from exile to Iran, a mob did storm Gasr. The two now freed EDS employees walked to a nearby Tehran hotel, the designated meeting place, where they were picked up by Simons and other members of the team and driven to safety in Turkey. The story was front-page news around the world. Perot deserved enormous credit for the effort and determination he showed in trying to protect and rescue his employees, yet he felt the need to embellish the story. He insisted that an Iranian EDS employee had instigated and fomented the mob’s storming of Gasr, which no independent report could verify. When U.S. undersecretary of state David Newsom telephoned Perot to question the facts of the operation relayed in news stories, Perot reportedly replied, “Well, the press never gets it right.”
Perot’s “can do” image was later contrasted with the agonizing 444 days U.S. Embassy employees in Tehran (a group Perot had consistently and unfairly maligned while plotting the rescue of his own people) were held hostage after having been captured by mobs sympathetic to the Ayatollah. President Jimmy Carter’s failure to secure the release of the hostages, either by diplomacy or military rescue, was a key reason he was defeated for re-election.
But Perot, ever the salesman, was not through embellishing his hostage rescue story. While retaining full editorial control, Perot hired Welsh novelist Ken Follett, and together in 1983 they published On Wings of Eagles. It became a number one best seller, selling more than three hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Three years later, NBC television produced a five-hour miniseries based on the book that drew an audience of twenty-five million. Perot demanded and received full script and casting approval. Perot was portrayed by Richard Crenna while Simons was played by Burt Lancaster. This newest version of the story included a shootout between the rescue team and the Iranian guards, and an Iranian prosecutor madly pursuing the rescued prisoners across Iran until Simons blows up an ammunition dump at the Turkish border. The story also had Perot greeting the rescued men at the border when he was, in fact, still in Istanbul. “Now, in creating a miniseries, there is always a little dramatization,” Perot explained, though the show’s producer noted that all the new drama had been inserted by Perot.
The book and the miniseries catapulted Perot’s fame to new levels and prompted dozens of people to begin writing Perot to suggest he run for president. “Do you think I should run for president?” Perot asked an employee. “President? No,” the employee replied. “King? Yes.”
Before he did either, Perot was busy with his business interests. In 1984, Perot sold EDS to General Motors, though Perot acted as if he had purchased GM. His battles with GM management, which he was happy to make public, led GM to pay him $750 million—twice the value of Perot’s stock—just to go away. GM executives considered it a bargain. To his admirers, it was another example of Perot battling a stagnant and entrenched bureaucracy.
This reputation was further enhanced when Perot was asked to chair two public policy commissions in Texas during the late 1980s, one on drug abuse and the other on education reform. One of Perot’s favorite phrases during his presidential campaigns was “It’s that simple,” and as chair of these commissions Perot was already demonstrating his faith that complex problems would yield to straightforward solutions. On drug abuse, Perot’s ideas, an aide said, were generally limited to “tougher and longer sentences and more aggressive law enforcement.” In coming to that view, Perot had at least gone through the motions of meeting with experts in the field. When he chaired the commission on education policy, Perot did not bother to meet with teachers or students. He dismissed the opinions of educators by claiming, “The dumbest folks in college are studying to be teachers.” Consultants hired by the commission did develop a plan that included such ideas as reduced class size, more preschool education, merit pay for teachers, and student achievement tests, but the only issue that really held Perot’s attention was his insistence that Texas adopt a program by which students could not play athletics unless they were passing all their courses. In football-mad Texas, Perot’s “no pass, no play” proposal created shockwaves, as it was something easily understood and easily implemented. When he ran for president, Perot would take the same approach.
Perot had also not abandoned his interest in whether the United States had left behind POWs still alive in Southeast Asia after the end of the Vietnam War, funding several missions that turned up no hard evidence. Still, he was convinced that the government was hiding the truth in order to protect its involvement in the region’s illicit drug trade. He also became convinced that the Reagan administration was spying on him and that elements within the government were plotting his assassination. He became so paranoid that when traveling to Washington, D.C., he would check into one hotel, then sneak out and register in another hotel, all while traveling around town in what he thought was the “perfect disguise,” a beat-up Volkswagen. He grew so frustrated by the administration’s failure to accept his conspiracy theories that he withdrew his $2.5 million pledge for President Reagan’s presidential library, and he concluded Vice President George H. W. Bush was “a wimp.”
Perhaps it was his enmity for Bush that led Perot to harshly criticize the then-president’s decision to rally an international army to oppose the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Perot charged the Gulf War was only a war over oil. “We rescued the emir of Kuwait,” he said. “Now, if I knock on your door and say I’d like to borrow your son to go to the Middle East so that this dude with seventy wives, who’s got a minister for sex to find him a virgin every Thursday night, can have his throne back, you’d probably hit me in the mouth.”
This unconventional candor earned Perot even more admirers, particularly from a growing group of individuals who hoped to find someone who could lead a challenge to the two-party political system. Perot was invited to speak at the 1991 convention of a group called THRO (Throw the Hypocritical Rascals Out). His speech electrified many in the independent political movement, and they began a months-long seduction of Perot to convince him that he was the man the country needed in the White House.
The idea of calling out a virtuous citizen who can rise up from outside an allegedly corrupt political system to lead a nation in time of peril—and then walk away from power once the crisis has passed—is one of the most cherished of all democratic myths. It is most closely associated with the myth of Cincinnatus, a real person who was a consul in the early Roman republic. Cincinnatus, an experienced general, was persuaded to abandon his farm and assume the power of a dictator in order to lead the army to repel the invaders. This Cincinnatus accomplished in just sixteen days, after which he voluntarily relinquished his power as dictator and quickly returned to his farm in time to bring in the harvest.
As the Founding Fathers struggled to build an enduring and functioning republic on the Roman model, George Washington was cast as the American Cincinnatus when he, too, had the opportunity to assume dictatorial powers at the end of the Revolutionary War. Instead, he resigned his generalship to return to his home at Mount Vernon—an act of faith in the fledgling democracy that led Britain’s King George III to reportedly acclaim Washington “the greatest man in the world.” Washington’s selflessness inspired his officers, among them Alexander Hamilton and Henry Knox, to form the Society of the Cincinnati, whose motto is “He relinquished everything to save the Republic.”
Perot was acting in the tradition of Cincinnatus by insisting that he, too, was a simple man reluctant to assume the burden of political power. Perot’s
own wife, unaware of the months-long recruitment of her husband to run, claimed to be “stunned” when Perot went on CNN’s Larry King Live show on February 21, 1992, to announce that he would become a presidential candidate—but only if his supporters could get his name on the ballot in all fifty states. If they could achieve that miracle, then Perot said he knew he was truly wanted and needed. As that process went forward, Perot continued to insist, “I don’t want to do the job” of president.
Perot’s reluctance seemed believable. He already had the fame, wealth, and honor that the cynical assume is the secret reason all politicians pursue high office, so the perception was that Perot would have no need to engage in the grubby behavior of the “typical” politician and would have no incentive to do anything but focus on the greater public good. Since Perot, this same rationale has been used to advance the political careers of a variety of other independently wealthy and famous candidates, including action movie star and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; media mogul and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg; unsuccessful California gubernatorial and senatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, both high-tech CEOs; and entrepreneur and reality television star Donald Trump, who toyed with running for president in 2000 and 2012. As a sign of the appeal wealthy celebrity business tycoons can hold for voters, Trump led in early polls for the 2012 Republican nomination before it became clear his candidacy was more a publicity stunt than a serious campaign and he again opted out of running.28