The Runner Stumbles: Perot and the Gantlet of Politics : Candidate: He was swift and tough in his world of business, but on the campaign trail, he had feet of clay.

A faded masking-tape X on the floor of a Lansing, Mich., airport hangar marks the spot where the earth yawned and swallowed Ross Perot whole.

It was on that spot--placed there by one of the political professionals that Perot so loathed but hired to help him get elected President--that Perot held his first and last conventional Tarmac press conference.

He agreed to the July 10 appearance against all his instincts. Just a day before, his chief spokesman had promised that there would be no airport photo ops, no “dancing bears” in the Perot campaign. The banty billionaire strode up to the microphones and outstretched tape recorders and spat out non-answers to a half-dozen hostile questions. He then angrily loped off toward his waiting private jet, and before the door was even closed, told his staff: “Never again. I am not going to run that kind of campaign.”

Back in Dallas that night, he assembled his brain trust--longtime adviser Morton H. Meyerson, attorney and campaign manager Tom Luce, media counselor James Squires and his two hired political guns, Edward J. Rollins and Hamilton Jordan.

Rollins told Perot his drive was stalled, and he needed to take immediate action to restart it--a big image-making advertising campaign, direct-mail appeals, a dramatic public announcement of his economic program to upstage the surging Democrats, whose convention was to begin in two days. He had to pull out all the stops, Rollins said, use all the tricks of the political trade, in a massive counterstrike against all the negative publicity and his precipitous drop in the polls.

The only alternatives, Rollins said, were a lingering death or a quick withdrawal from the race.

Perot, whose business credo had always been “Ready, fire, fire, fire,” hesitated. Like so many green troops seeing combat for the first time, he couldn’t pull the trigger.

Six days later, it was all over. Perot chose to quit rather than conduct a conventional political campaign with its ceaseless interest-group demands, its unending press scrutiny, the slippery advertising and the necessary lies.

“He stared American politics in the eye,” said University of Texas historian Lewis L. Gould, “and he blinked.”

Ross Perot is different from you and me. He has more money. But his 147-day journey into the wasteland of American politics showed him to be neither the legend we created of him nor the myth he claimed to be. We built him up so large that we forgot that he was just a man, a man with fears and doubts and flaws like the rest of us.

He took upon his fragile frame all the hopes and resentments of a troubled nation, and for five remarkable months he offered a glimpse of an alternative future free of the sloppy compromise of conventional governance. But when the burden proved too great, the press seemed to take unseemly glee in the fall of this flawed political novice.

“What a Wimp,” screamed the New York Post.

“The Quitter,” Newsweek proclaimed on its cover.

Like Shakespeare’s Caesar, ambition was Perot’s grievous fault, and grievously has he answered it.

“For a man who started out to reduce the disillusion in American politics, instead he compounded it,” said Gould. “Like many businessmen, he thought it would be easy. He found out that politics is a profession and it takes a great deal of skill to go through the agony these people go through. We expect them to have the skin of a rhinoceros. He had the skin of a butterfly.”

John Jay Hooker, a savvy Nashville politico and one-time Democratic candidate for governor of Tennessee, started calling Perot last November to urge him to run for President. The calls continued through December and January and into February, three, sometimes four calls a week. But the answer from the computer service magnate who got his start as an IBM salesman was always the same: Forget it, pal. You’re asking me to be an astronaut, and I don’t know how to be an astronaut. I don’t have the temperament for this. I don’t have the desire to be President.

Hooker persisted. In early February, Perot met in Nashville for four hours with Hooker, Nashville Tennessean editor emeritus John Siegenthaler and a number of other local opinion leaders.

“I was really pleading with him to run,” Hooker recalled. “I told him he could be the Eisenhower of his generation. I asked him if there was any scenario under which he’d consider it, and the only way he’d agree to do it was if the people put him on the ballot in all 50 states.” The meeting and Perot’s condition for running were reported in the Tennessean, but it caused barely a ripple.

Hooker helped arrange Perot’s Feb. 20 appearance on CNN’s “Larry King Live” television call-in show and informed King that if he pushed Perot, he’d get the same answer about running that Perot gave in the Nashville meeting.

“If you really press him,” Hooker told King, “he’ll give down the milk.”

Near the end of the program, King asked if there was any conceivable scenario under which he’d run for President, and Perot gave his now-famous answer: “If you want to register me in 50 states . . . I’ll promise you this: Between now and the conventions, we’ll get both parties’ heads straight.”

In Dallas, Luce was exercising on his treadmill watching the show. He almost fell off when Perot dropped his bombshell.

Perot’s wife, Margot, had nearly the same reaction as she watched from the Perots’ suite at Washington’s luxurious Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Square from the White House.

“Don’t worry, honey,” Perot said when he returned to the hotel from the CNN studio. “There’ll be a few days’ publicity about this and it’ll amount to nothing.”

A few minutes later, an anonymous supporter slipped a $5 bill and a note encouraging Perot to run under their hotel room door.

Hooker spoke with Perot the next morning and Perot repeated his skeptical assessment of the likelihood of Americans organizing at the grass roots to elect a political nobody President. “I told him, they’ll do it,” Hooker said. “You don’t understand the depth of despair in America, the intensity of the desire for change.”

That morning, the telephones at Perot’s business headquarters in Dallas were ringing off the hook. Within a week, volunteers for Perot had formed organizations in 46 states to begin collecting signatures to win Perot a place on the November ballot.

Three weeks later, after the embryonic Perot for President campaign had established a toll-free number, as many as 500,000 calls a day were being logged from volunteers asking how they could aid the effort.

Ross Perot, the ungainly little salesman from Texarkana, was off and running.

In those first heady weeks as the grass-roots movements grew around the country, Perot hedged his bets. He discounted the chances of the petition drive succeeding in all 50 states and repeatedly stated that he was not driven by ambition to be President.

In private meetings with Luce and Meyerson, Perot expressed surprise at the groundswell building for his candidacy, attributing it not to the force of his personality but to a pervasive disgust with the American political process. He saw Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton as “crippled and unelectable,” according to a senior adviser, and believed strongly that President Bush had so badly mismanaged the economy and foreign affairs that he did not deserve reelection. Looking over this charred landscape, he thought a well-financed independent candidate could capture the White House.

On March 29, support for Perot stood at 16% in national polls. Clinton was at 31% and falling; Bush at 44% and dropping even faster.

The first week of May, Perot’s poll numbers topped Clinton’s for the first time. A week later, he passed the incumbent President at 30% and his support was still rising.

Things were getting serious. On April 21, Perot hired Squires, the crusty former editor of the Chicago Tribune, to answer the deluge of press queries pouring into his new North Dallas petition-drive headquarters.

“Perot was totally surprised by the reaction he got after that first Larry King appearance,” Squires said. “He started to run for office not of his own free will. He was swept into it.”

Squires said he was never sure exactly what his role was supposed to be. Perot didn’t want a speech writer; he composed his own remarks on yellow legal pads. He had no intention of conducting regular press conferences or catering to newspapers and television news operations--not when he could command huge audiences at will on Larry King and Barbara Walters and the network morning shows.

By late May, as volunteers were preparing to submit ballot petitions in the first few states, Squires and Luce began looking for professional advice on how to advance the insurgent Perot campaign. They found Rollins, the architect of former President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide reelection, and Jordan, who had managed ex-President Jimmy Carter’s 1976 and 1980 campaigns.

“We made a decision to bring these guys on for expert political advice. You’ve got to give them titles to make it worth their while,” Squires said.

On June 3, Perot shocked the political Establishment by announcing the hiring of the two big names. They assumed the titles of campaign co-chairmen.

By now it was clear that Perot was mounting a serious independent bid for the White House. He began to come under the kind of scrutiny all candidates for that office face, with all the resources of the nation’s media and the White House arrayed against him.

The details of Perot’s long and controversial presence in the public eye came under the intense glare of publicity. One after another, the critical stories came out on television and in the daily newspapers. They alleged that Perot was an unscrupulous businessman who had cheated rivals and the government out of millions of dollars in contracts and taxes; that Perot had cut improper business deals with the Vietnamese during his visits to Hanoi to investigate missing U.S. servicemen; that he had tried to weasel his way out of his four-year Navy commitment less than two years after graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy; that Perot had hired private investigators to spy on business rivals, on Bush, on members of Bush’s family, even on Perot’s own children; that he had advocated suspension of the Constitution to battle drug dealers in Dallas; that he had bullied, blustered and plowed under anyone and anything that got in his way.

He was a “monster,” said presidential spokesman Marlin Fitzwater from the podium of the White House briefing room. He was a “temperamental tycoon” with “contempt for the Constitution,” said Vice President Dan Quayle. He was Hitler, Mussolini and Atilla the Hun rolled into one, came the consensus from the opinion-meisters of the newspaper op-ed pages and the Sunday talk shows.

Even the gauzy memories of Perot’s childhood in Texarkana were investigated and questioned. Had he really delivered newspapers on horseback in the town’s black neighborhoods? Had he deliberately thumbed and re-thumbed his Boy Scout Handbook to make it look more used than it actually had been?

Perot read and watched this portrayal of his life in silence for weeks, speaking only to rallies of supporters as they turned in thousands upon thousands of petition signatures in state capitals around the country. He didn’t begin to answer the charges until June 24, when, in his first and only full-blown press conference, in Annapolis, Md., Perot lashed out against Bush for conducting an orchestrated campaign to destroy him with spurious charges.

Perot, who had perceived conspiracies in every business defeat and in the government’s failure to account for all the MIAs in Vietnam, now saw another conspiracy, directed by the President and carried out by a Republican Party “dirty tricks” squad.

Perot restrained his natural instincts to fight back and brushed off the GOP attacks as “Mickey Mouse tossed salad” and “animal crackers.” He forced a smile, but they weren’t smiling back.

Looking back, Luce now considers the hiring of Rollins and Jordan as the campaign’s fatal mistake. Perot was connecting with the volunteers, Luce said; he had tapped a deep vein of public disenchantment with politics and politicians. Then Perot made the error of hiring a team of political pros who did everything they could to tear him away from the grass roots.

“I specifically discussed numerous times with Mr. Rollins before he was hired that he was coming into a campaign where the candidate would not be handled nor would he take three-by-five cards” telling him what to say, Luce said this week. He said there was “tension and conflict” between Perot and his political advisers from the day they came aboard. “People kept trying to force him into a process that he thought was sick, that did not yield leadership.”

Rollins and his band of experts never really understood what Perot stood for and what he was trying to do, Luce said.

At the end of June, indecision gripped the Perot campaign. Perot continued to speak to friendly audiences at petition rallies, and his issues staff continued to work on an ambitious plan for correcting the nation’s economic problems. But Perot could not bring himself to authorize an advertising campaign, he waffled on a choice of running mate and a date and place for a national convention. And despite a promise to begin spelling out a specific platform by the beginning of July, Perot continued to deliver the same patriotic and inspirational platitudes that had sustained his campaign for the previous four months.

“Perot still hadn’t given the campaign the go-ahead. He was allowing his enemies to define him. The unanimous advice was to do something he had an aversion to”--launch a traditional media and public relations campaign, Squires said. “But there was total paralysis.

“We did a lot of things in the last three weeks to try to get Perot off dead center. We told him he could run either a campaign or a crusade--you decide--but here’s what you have to do to get it started. In the process, all of us resigned three times.”

Perot went to Lansing with this internal turmoil ringing in his ears and returned to hear that he had to act or quit. The next morning--Saturday, July 11--he flew to Nashville to address the convention of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. He discarded the suggested remarks Squires had prepared for him; instead, he offended many in the audience by referring to African-Americans as “you people” and saying that his cotton-trader father had treated his black employees generously because “they are people too.”

Perot was forced to apologize before he got in his car to leave the convention hall and appeared twice more on television that afternoon to express regrets for any inadvertent offense he might have caused.

Sunday night in Dallas, Perot again got an ultimatum from his advisers: Go all-out in a conventional campaign and maybe win, continue your halfhearted efforts and surely lose, or quit.

Wednesday morning, July 15, Rollins announced that he was leaving the Perot campaign, saying the candidate had repeatedly rejected his advice. That night, in a meeting at his walled mansion with Luce and Meyerson, Perot decided that he, too, was pulling out.

He announced the decision the next morning--Thursday, July 16--the day Clinton accepted his party’s nomination for President and rocketed to nearly a 30-point lead in the polls.

Appearing on television the night after he announced his departure from the race, Perot offered this assessment of America’s electoral process: “It’s interesting, but it’s irrelevant. The political process to select a President has nothing to do with picking a good President. It has everything to do with keeping people who might be qualified from ever wanting to get within a thousand miles of it, because of the nature of the process. . . . It’s probably the dirtiest, most thankless, brutal job in the world. And when you look at it up close, it doesn’t get any prettier.”

Nearly a week later, Perot had not softened his view. “We’ve lost sight of what’s good for the country,” he said in an interview with The Times. “I marvel that anybody would put up with it. . . .”

Times staff writer Edwin Chen contributed to this story.