From: fierro@uts.amdahl.com (Doug Fierro)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc,alt.politics.elections
Subject: more info on Perot: article 2 of 2 (commentary)
Date: 13 Apr 92 06:20:32 GMT
Reply-To: fierro@amdahl.uts.amdahl.com (Doug Fierro)
Distribution: usa
Organization: Amdahl Corporation, Sunnyvale CA


  More info; this is a commentary from a local writer; don't worry about
the typos (it's late :-) ) .  The writer goes somewhat extensively into 
Perot's public service and business backround.

*******************
San Jose Mercury News
4/12/92
by Richard J. Rapaport

  On March 28, a billionaire Dallas entrepreneur named Henry Ross Perot
climbed to the podium of the National Press Club in Washington and gave
what may have been the best American political speech of the last decade;
in its own way as powerful a call to crusade as Ronald Reagan's stage-setting,
throat-catching 1980 Republic Convention acceptance address.

  Perot's was a speech by a man of immense drives and contradictions; at
once barnyard blunt and internationally savvy.  It made the ice-water-in-
the-veins suggestion that "if the chief financial officer of a publicly
owned corporation kept books the way our government does, he'd be sent to
prison."  It was the naive voice of heartland outrage thundering against
former government officials who "gain expertise and personal contacts in
our service, then enrich themselves afterward as agence of foreign countries."

  It was a Baptist preacher's homily warning that "We must as a nation learn
to think 10 years ahead, not 10 minutes ahead."  In total, it was
brilliant, complex, simple, scare, funny, and refreshing.

  As such, it was pure H. Ross Perot, whose seemingly quixotic third-party
bid for the White House is totally in harmony with an adult life that had 
been a series of cannily planned long-shot crusades; in computers, autos,
education, foreign affairs and, now, electoral politics.

  Only when viewed within the context of his at-once naive beliefs and 
sophisticated nature does it make sense that Perot would announce his 
willingness to spend $100 million of his own money to become president,
while at the same time hedging his bet by making the unheard-of demand that
citizens of all 50 states put him on the ballot before he will actually
consent to become their candidate.

  And yet the belief that he can successfully clean up the mess in Washington
is totally in character for this former star IBM salesman, who in the early
'60s literally invented the multi-billion-dollar computer systems integration
business.  Beginning with $1000 and a simple-minded notion to buy time and
sell services on the prohibitively expensive mainframe computers, Perot
out-maneuvered IBM and built the long-shot Electronic Data Services into a
multi-billion-dollar giant that dominated its field throughout the 1970s 
and '80s.

  But if Perot's zealous belief in his own way of doing business worked
brilliantly for him at EDS, these were times when it threatened to do him
in in other venues.  In the early '70s, Perot rode his high horse into New
York believing he could clean up the zoos on Wall Street.

  Believing that EDS could lead the stock market computer revolution,
Perot tried to transplant his crew-cut, lock-step, Annapolis-bred business
style to the old-line brokerage house, DuPont Glore Forgan, Inc.  At EDS,
Perot had found success hiring ex-military men.  As his stake in the DuPont
bailout grew, he began insisting that similar starch would work there as
well.  But Perot's heartland belief in teamwork never did play well on 
savagely individualistic Wall Street.  He poured nearly $100 million of 
his own money, most of which he lost before liquidating his holdings in 
1974.

  But if Wall Street is the early '70s proved too sophisticated a nut for 
Perot to crack, his artless patriotism and a canny sense of international
public relations led, soon afterward, to a successful private effort, at
Henry Kissinger's behest, to aide American POWs being held in North Vietnam.

  Dealing with the intractable Stalinists in Hanoi proved difficult even
for Perot, the son of a Texarkana, Texas, horsetrader.  But if his jet-load
of Christmans packages never reached American POWs, Perot's brilliantly
publicized activities, more than any other action, put Hanoi's treatment
of prisoners uncomfortably into the international spotlight.

  It also gave Perot a taste for international intrigue, which found its
most vivid expression in 1980, when he commissioned a successful rescue
mission into seething revolutionary Tehran, where EDS employees were being
held as hostages of a business deal gone bad.  Not one for half measures,
Perot hired former Green Beret commando leader Col. Bull Simon to break
his employees out of the toughest jail in Iran.

  An even more dangerous job was handed him in 1983, when Perot was appointed
the head of a commission to reform Texas' educational system.  People
who had classified Perot as a Darwinian superpatriot were shocked when he
began goring the most sacred longhorn in Texas: scholastic football.

  "I thought I was living pretty well until I found a school system that
had towel warmers and electric cleat cleaners for the football team,"
he would tell audiences in that aridly funny way of his.  Conservatives
began wondering if Ross Perot hadn't turned into a tax-and-spend bleeding
heart, and "I don't brake for Ross Perot" bumper stickers began sprouting
on Texas pickup trucks.

  Taking on high school football in Texas was a little like taking on 
General Motors in Detroit, which is exactly what Perot did in late June
1984, when he succumbed to the blandishments of the Salomon Brothers, 
Reagan-era money machine and sold EDS to GM for $2.55 billion.  Perot's 
share was slightly over one billion and as GM's largest shareholder, he
was given a seat on the board and on the all-important executive committee.

  In the back of his crusader's mind, Perot felt that his EDS model could
bring Roger Smith's GM out of the Detroit automotive Pleistocene and into
the sunlit uplands of fast-moving, computer-aided, entrepreneurial 
modernism.  But the idea that EDS could somehow swallow GM was perhaps
the worst miscalculation of his business career.

  After an initial honeymoon, relations deteriorated quickly.  The 
mandarins on the General Motors board recoiled from the plain-speaking
Perot, who was appalled at GM's inability, with all their billions and
layers of bureaucracy, to design or manufacture a winning automotive 
concept.  Perot quickly reverted to form, publicly suggesting that 
"Revitalizing General Motors is like teaching an elephant to tap dance.
You find the sensitive spots and start poking."

  The poking proved too much for the thin-skinned Smith, and in December
1986, GM forced Perot to take a $740 million buyout.  GM's flacks tried to
paint the deal as greenmail by Perot.  But Perot fought back, making a
last-ditch effort to leverage control away from Smith.  He failed and
found himself, in early 1987, one of America's richest, most bitter men.

  His GM experience had tuned Perot into terrible flaws that seemed
common to the auto industry and to American society and government as a
whole.

  It seemed to some analysts that with a Perot-run GM leading the way,
perhaps there would be no need, in Perot's eyes anyway, for a presidential
bid in 1992.

  But Perot is running what may be the most important third-party 
insurgency since Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party charged up the 
American electorate in 1912 and former Vice President Henry Wallace's 
Progressive Party and Strom Thrumond's Dixiecrats muddied the presidential
equation in 1948.  In both cases, the candidacies were seen as spoilers;
Roosevelt split the Republican vote and allowed Woodrow Wilson's election,
while Wallace and Thurmond won several million votes in what proved to
be Harry Truman's epochal upset victory over New York Gov. Thomas Dewey.
The 1948 election is especially relevant because George Bush will try 
very hard to emulate Truman's successful campaign agains the "do-nothing
80th Congress."

  Can Ross Perot, with his crusader's fire, alter the 1992 equation as much
as Roosevelt did in 1912 and more than Wallace and Thurmond in 1948?

  Like his General Motors crusade, Perot may not see his electoral labors
bear fruit immediately.  Brontosaurean General Motors may not really 
have received Perot's message of its primitive corporate spinal column until
half a decade later.  The genesis of the reorganization belatedly taking
place at General Motors began with Perot in 1986.

  The similarly primitive American electoral brain stem may not receive 
Perot's prodding for some years hence.  For one thing, there is a real
question if his businessman's skin is not too thin to absorb the proddings
of a press that will eventually try to make him tap dance the way he did
GM's Smith.

  But 1992 may very well be one of the most highly charged electoral
episodes of the century.  Disgruntled Americans are looking around and
may even be ready for the honest talk of Perot, ready or not, will certainly
will certainly provide.  In this respect, the 1948 election is an interesting
model.

  But unlike Truman, Bush is running at the dead end of an historical era.
Like Truman, he is the bearer of an ideology that is nearly moribund.  What
he needs is a message.  And Perot's message is sound, necessary and even
brilliant.  Perhaps as even Perot would admit, his first-time candidate's
drive to become the first non-partisan American president is a long-shot
crusade, the essence of which will sooner or later be picked up by another
messenger.
-- 
                                                     Doug Fierro
                                      |\             UTS System Software
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