It’s a Thankless, Slimy Job; So Why Is Perot After It? : Politics: He once derided Washington’s glass house. Now he talks candidacy as the binoculars swing his way.

All those times in the past--and there had been hundreds of them--H. Ross Perot had said that a stick of dynamite couldn’t get him out of the business world and into the public arena. Running for office was too messy. The rewards were too few. He didn’t have the temperament, experience or background to be a politician. He’d have to live under a microscope.

Not only did he say no, he said never.

Then a month ago he told a television audience he would run for President if the American people drafted him, if they could get it together and put him on the ballot in all 50 states as an independent candidate.

The story of how the switchboard lighted up is now firmly implanted in the Perot legend. The number of callers to Perot’s Dallas offices is closing in on the 2-million mark.

“The job is well on the way to being done,” Perot said last week of efforts to put him on the ballots for November’s presidential election. “It does look like this thing will fall together.”

So what caused this sea change in resolve? What made a 61-year-old billionaire entrepreneur decide to become a third candidate for the presidency, willing to spend $100 million or more of his vast fortune in the process? And what is the book on Henry Ross Perot?

Perot says it was the letters that made him do it. He was talking about it in his office last week, an office that in itself is an incredible display of wealth. He has the only Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington in a private collection, the original “The Spirit of ‘76” painting by Archibald M. Willard, a Frederic Remington bronze, and on and on. The Norman Rockwells were in the next room.

Perot held out a letter from a woman talking about how grateful she is that he is attempting to get on the ballot. He said that before he issued his conditions for running a race last month, he would take home a sackful of letters every night, hundreds of them at a time.

“Thousands of people have written and called me, month after month after month, urging me to run for President,” he said. “Most of these requests were handwritten letters from just good people who are really concerned about where the country is and where it’s going.”

Then came the calls from his former classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy, needling him about having become too soft for the job, reminding him that some of their mutual friends had paid the ultimate price of service. In short, they said it was his duty to run.

“Finally, taking the sum of all that, I just figured, well, if they want me to do it, I ought to do it,” he said.

If all this strikes a melodramatic chord, it is because this is only the latest chapter in the Perot melodrama. It is also the most dramatic to date--the call for him to prove that he is really a patriot and not a sideline-sitter, to do what he can to fix the ills of the country despite his own best advice that he is not the kind of guy who would do well in this line of work.

And it will also mean a political bloodletting that is almost certain to tarnish the image that he has carefully nurtured over the years. Perot the man who took on General Motors. Perot the philanthropist. Perot the daring rescuer. Perot the champion of education. Perot the bigger-than-life Texan who still puts his pants on one leg at a time, like everyone else.

The scalpels are already being sharpened for an examination of Perot and his life, as has become a rite of passage for every presidential candidate. A mountain of documents and lawsuits regarding his business dealings awaits examination. Stories are already circulating characterizing Perot as a man who built his empire and wealth on the back of government contracts.

Perot, who is so used to controlling his own environment, has not yet felt the aggravation of putting out political brush fires, a la Democratic candidate Bill Clinton. His longtime friend and associate, Morton H. Meyerson, believes that if Perot does indeed become an official candidate, the campaign process will be an extremely trying period for him.

“It’s going to be difficult,” said Meyerson, who has known Perot for 26 years. “He’s not used to people always looking for the negative things, which is what the press does to candidates. He will not be a happy camper in that environment. He has the capability; the question is, does he have the patience?”

In fact, patience and Perot are rarely, if ever, found in the same room. What there is instead, and what has worked all his life, is a tenacity, a laser-like focus, that has allowed him to wear down anything that has gotten in his way. His philosophy has always been to hit hard and keep hitting until the other guy’s got no juice.

It is that force that is so appealing to a public jaded by politics and anxious for answers to what looks like a mountain of problems. But it is also that part of Perot that raises the most questions about his suitability to be President.

“I’d make a terrible politician,” Perot said a few years back. “My orientation toward results would get me in deep, deep trouble. I have no patience.”

Perot has been a political gadfly for many years, lampooning the Inside-the-Beltway crowd when it suited him. Taking President Bush to task last year for going to war in the Persian Gulf (he called it unnecessary) was typical Perot. The Perot philosophy is if you think it’s stupid, say so.

Perot’s statements of recent months have little new in them that he has not said in the past. To deal with the federal deficit, he has been calling for at least five years for Japan and Europe to pay the U.S. for their defense, for the elimination of Social Security for the wealthy and for sophisticated computers to catch tax cheats.

He has said for years that this country’s declining industrial base is its chief problem.

He favors a woman’s right to an abortion and some form of gun control that will get firearms out of the hands of criminals. But he appears uncertain exactly what kind of gun control. Whatever form it takes, he said in an interview, his action would be swift, using pilot programs around the country to figure out the best solution for that and other social ills.

“You don’t have to take forever to do something significant,” he says. “Just grab it, move it, get the options out there, do the pilot program, figure out what works and what doesn’t work.”

He has called for the elimination of $180 billion in unspecified government waste. He favors electronic town meetings (how they would work is still fuzzy) to discuss issues directly with the people.

Perot describes himself as not so much a man who plumbs the depths of political philosophy but as someone adept at repair work.

“I have spent my life fixing things,” Perot said. “All these guys in Washington have spent their lives talking about things. They honestly think that if they hold a press conference on something, they’ve fixed it.”

He has, however, been somewhat prickly when asked to be more specific. Perot’s view is that he is being specific enough for the moment and that the Bush Administration is even less specific than he is on domestic issues.

“I have addressed them as specifically as I can at this point,” he said. “In four weeks, I have not had a chance to get it all written down.”

And he also said he sees the hand of the “Republican dirty tricks crowd” in questions he is being asked. During a question session with the American Society of Newspaper Editors this month, Perot took three of the terms that had been used to describe him in recent weeks--autocratic, thin-skinned, unable to deal with details--and laid them at the feet of the Republicans. The editors had been duped, he said, by the Republican operatives.

“They were all just weird, strange questions,” he said. “I defy anybody to find people who have worked with me or known me who would say I am autocratic,” said Perot, who compared the speech and the editors’ response this year to the reception he received from the same group a year ago.

“I had to laugh,” he said. “You get treated with a lot more dignity and respect when you are not a candidate.

“The Washington press corps surrounded me after I left, and if I had a video of that I could sell it to ‘Saturday Night Live.’ ”

Perot’s business dealings in the past have not been without their detractors, and his potential candidacy has only served to heighten that scrutiny.

In 1972, Electronic Data Systems, the computer service company he began in 1962 with only $1,000, was investigated by a congressional subcommittee because of questions about whether the company was reaping excessive profits from servicing Medicare contracts. No action was taken. Perot was later contemptuous of the probe, saying that “we painted a Rembrandt, and now we’re being attacked by those who can’t whitewash a fence.”

More recently, his motives have been questioned in the development of the Alliance industrial airport, a $900-million Perot project near Fort Worth. The Perot Group gave the federal government the land for the freight-handling airport, but benefited tremendously through ownership of surrounding real estate. Now the Perot Group is asking the federal government for $120 million to expand the runway, which, in turn, will reap the company millions of dollars more in profits from added business.

Perot responds that the federal investment to date is only $50 million and that the project had been touted in the past as a prime example of how the government and the private sector could work together on beneficial projects.

“The state of Texas has presented it as a showcase,” he said. “The federal government has presented it as a showcase. The President has made speeches about it.”

Perot said the proposed runway expansion now has been put on hold and that doing so was “Washington at its worst.”

“This is either a good thing or not a good thing. Please just remember where it started. The federal government came and asked if we would give land for an airport.”

The biggest business deal of Perot’s life came when EDS was purchased by General Motors in 1984 for $2.5 billion. The merger spurred hope that Perot could help the auto giant streamline its operations and mount a direct challenge to Japanese auto makers. Perot quickly antagonized GM management after making acidic comments about the company and its directors. One Perotism at the time was that when EDS employees found a snake, they killed it, but at GM “they hired a consultant, formed a committee, then built a zoo.”

Eventually the board bought him off with $700 million.

But his two-year tenure at General Motors could be a window to how Perot would work in the sprawling bureaucracy that is the U.S. government. Even his admirers say that in the end it was a volatile relationship. “He’s rather an impatient person,” said Don Ephlin, a former United Auto Workers vice president. “I think he found a big bureaucracy like General Motors very frustrating.”

Former General Motors Chairman Roger B. Smith said he had “taken a vow of silence” on the subject of Perot. And other GM officials, past and present, did not return calls.

For his part, Perot said General Motors was a perfect comparison to the government: slothful and unwilling to listen to him.

“When I look at our country, I can’t help but think of looking at General Motors in the mid-1980s. Still strong. Still have $1 billion in cash. Still time to fix it. Nobody had the will to do it. So they sat there and let it go to a point where General Motors is financially very, very weak. This is what our country is doing.”

While Perot has spent most of his life in the private sector, he has had experience in taking on public tasks. In 1979, Perot was asked by then-Gov. Bill Clements to spearhead a task force called the Texas War on Drugs. In typical fashion, Perot hired the best consultants and spent $2 million of his own money looking at what was needed by way of legislation. In the end, all five statutes of Perot’s proposed legislation, which centered on stiffer penalties for users and dealers, were adopted by the state Legislature.

In 1983, he was asked to head a similar commission on education, which drafted one of the most sweeping reform programs in Texas history. Included in that was the highly controversial “no pass, no play” ruling, which for the first time required students to making passing grades in all classes in order to participate in extracurricular activities. While putting together his proposals, Perot spent $500,000 of his own money.

Then there are the events that are now seen as political gold: His attempt in 1969 to deliver two planeloads of food, clothes and medical supplies to American POWs being held in North Vietnam. Throwing a parade in San Francisco in 1973 for returning POWs, even though it was a time when the American public had no stomach for the Vietnam War or things associated with it. His daring rescue of two employees imprisoned in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution, which was later celebrated in the best-selling book and movie miniseries “Wings of Eagles.”

Perot is obtuse when asked about Bush’s competence as President. On Bush’s personal traits, he will only say “good man, nice family.” But he has not been hesitant in the past to criticize the present Administration, particularly on how--in his view--the country is moving toward bankruptcy.

“I am not going to engage in mud wrestling,” he said. “I am not going to engage in this slick, sleazy stuff that permeates the campaign.”

But at the same time, Perot is sure that any negative publicity about him is being signed off by Bush himself.

“Everything you see the Republican Party doing to me is coming straight from the top,” he said. “If there is anybody who can’t believe that, I’d like to meet them because I could probably sell them a lot of stuff. The point is, it’s coming straight from the top.

“The one thing I hope the average citizen is smart enough to figure out: The President can’t pretend not to have anything to do with this. His fingerprints are all over this. This would not be happening unless it had his authorization.”

Meanwhile, Perot rocks along, preaching his message to those who ask to hear him. Former Texas Gov. Mark White maintains that the billionaire has a good shot at winning.

“I think the man has an excellent chance of being elected President,” White said. “I think he is being underestimated by the Washington political and media leadership.”

Perot leaned forward at his desk. Almost two hours had elapsed since he began talking. He said not to look for a cosmetologist or blow-dried hair or someone telling him what to say. No fake images in a country where image is everything, “where everybody thinks Tom Cruise is the hottest fighter pilot that ever lived. That’s America. That’s how we pick our presidents.”

“If that’s what the American people want this year, they don’t want me. And I don’t want to be there. If we’re not going to work on the problems, I don’t want to be there. I don’t want to be there in the first place. But I will be there for them.”

The Views of H. Ross Perot

Quotes on politics, the presidency and other issues, from H. Ross Perot.

* On entering politics:

“This country has enough trouble without having me in office. Seriously, I am not qualified for the job by background, experience or temperament.”

--Los Angeles Times, 8/13/80

* On being President:

“Anybody intelligent enough to do this job wouldn’t want it.”

--Dallas Morning News, 3/25/92

* On political image-making:

“As long as (Roger) Ailes or (Robert) Teeter can predict with 100% certainty that we are as dumb as they think we are, and . . . just like puppets we react like they predict we will, we are training our elected officials to trick us. We deserve what we get.”

--”Perot: An Unauthorized Biography” (1990)

* On government and business:

“Never forget, the United States government is the world’s largest, most complex business. With that thought in mind, ask yourself which of these candidates for president you would let run your business?”

--Speech to National Press Club, March, 1992

* On Washington D.C.

“This city has become a town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers and media stuntmen, who posture, create images and talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don’t ever accomplish anything.”

--Gannett News Service, 3/27/92

* On abortion:

“I think this is the woman’s decision. God knows what kind of demonstrations I’ll have outside my office now.”

--Dallas Morning News, 3/29/92

* On drugs:

“You can declare civil war and the drug dealer is the enemy. There ain’t no bail .. (drug dealers) go to POW camp. You can start to deal with the problem in straight military terms. We can apply the rules of war.”

--”Perot, An Unauthorized Biography”

* On the Gulf War

“We rescued the emir of Kuwait. 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 70 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.”

--Washington Post 3/23//92