Perot Withdraws Offer to Testify About MIAs

Prospective presidential candidate Ross Perot is still a long way from the White House, but on Tuesday he found himself in his first confrontation with Congress over its request that he testify before a committee investigating Americans missing in action since the Vietnam War.

Perot, who for years has been involved in behind-the-scenes efforts to find out more about American MIAs in Southeast Asia, had agreed to testify before the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs later this month.

But as the date for his eagerly awaited June 30 testimony drew near, Perot informed committee Chairman Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) that he had changed his mind because of concern that the event would turn into a “political circus.”

The “highly-emotional, pre-election atmosphere that now exists” in Washington makes it “impossible for the subject to be treated with the thoroughness and seriousness required,” Perot wrote, adding that he now will not consider appearing before the committee until after the November election.

Neither Kerry nor the committee’s other 11 Democrats and Republicans were amused by the suggestion that they could not conduct their hearings, which so far have been a model of bipartisan cooperation, without political bickering.

In a firmly worded three-page reply, Kerry said the committee had gone to extraordinary lengths to give the Texas billionaire the security clearances he needed to examine classified documents for the hearings and noted that he had already given Perot his “personal guarantee” that no political questions would be raised.

He said Perot’s testimony is “essential” to the committee’s investigation and that the senators would not take it kindly “if narrow political considerations were allowed to deprive the American people of a full airing of an issue as important and emotional as this.”

Kerry did not elaborate on his allusion to the “political considerations” that Perot may have had for changing his mind.

Although Kerry urged Perot to reconsider his decision, Perot wrote back Tuesday that he still feels his appearance could result in “a media circus” and “in the current political climate . . . a re-run of the Judge Thomas-Anita Hill hearings.”