Hey, Ross Perot, You’re No John Doe

Regarding “John Doe, Meet Ross Perot,” by Jack Mathews (June 14):

Mathews’ commentary draws a disturbing parallel between the Ross Perot phenomenon of today and the fictional John Doe Club movement in the 1941 movie “Meet John Doe,” directed by Frank Capra. But the parallel is not precise enough.

Perot is not the naive, good-hearted hobo John Willoughby, played by Gary Cooper. The Texas billionaire is much closer to D. B. Norton, the oil baron who buys a newspaper to manufacture Willoughby into John Doe, exploit the movement and propel himself into the White House.

Norton was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Perot, it seems to me, is a wolf in wolf’s clothing. He made his fortune on government contracts through shrewd lobbying in the shadows of Washington and thus is not the outsider he claims to be. But the electorate doesn’t seem to want to believe it.

Maybe because Perot has never been a politician, only used them to his own ends--occupying a much more slippery and shady world than the men and women under the public spotlight.

The irony of “Meet John Doe” is that the Cooper character, although manipulated by D. B. Norton, was exactly what he appeared to be: decent, honest and caring. What he said in simple terms is that people can achieve the best if they work together, ready to extend a helping hand to friends and neighbors. This character was in direct line of a certain strong strain of American democratic and religious idealism that goes back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. But idealism is too easily manipulated by tyrants, warned Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin.

What has changed since Capra and Riskin’s times so that the D. B. Nortons of the world no longer even need the John Does to take power? Values have changed.

Maybe what this country needs after all is a little more decency, honesty and caring. Maybe then we’ll see through fakes of every stripe and recognize the genuine decency, honesty and caring in others.

DAVID Z. WEINSTEIN

Santa Monica