NEWS ANALYSIS : Perot May Be Banking on a Zigzag Course to Success

Ross Perot’s quixotic quest for the presidency is so implausible as to seem, by conventional standards, mad.

He decides not to run in July, saying he can’t win and doesn’t want to disrupt the political process. He fires most of his staff and goes to ground for two months to write a punitive political manifesto almost certain to alienate the vast majority of the electorate.

Then in October, he drops back in with a torrid attack on the established parties and a vow to win by running a campaign based on a secret but highly unconventional plan hatched solely from his own fertile businessman’s imagination.

He spends this weekend--with the election a scant 30 days away--closeted in his office dreaming up ways to get his message across without having to face the voters in person.

Many members of the press make no secret of their distaste for him, and he returns the sentiment. Nearly three-quarters of the public say they won’t vote for him under any circumstances. He tells associates that “of course” he doesn’t expect to win and doesn’t want to actually be President.

Yet Perot persists, running on a lopsided smile and a shoeshine and an inexhaustible personal fortune.

Although this be madness, there is method in it.

Perot’s behavior is part of an established pattern that has served him well throughout a long and phenomenally successful business career.

Those who know him and have dealt with him over the years say that he has used his unpredictability as a weapon to keep opponents off guard. His frequent changes of course are a source of astonishment and frustration even to his allies.

He has discarded countless friends along the way while building a fanatical following who have no idea where he will lead them. The man inspires devotion that few in politics have ever claimed.

Those who have had the privilege or the pain of watching Perot at close quarters suspect that his seemingly lunatic lunge into, out of, and back into politics is part of a master plan understood only by the billionaire himself.

They say his withdrawal from the race in July was merely a tactical retreat, a chance to regroup, purge his organization of the disloyal, husband his resources, reload and prepare for the main engagement.

There is ample evidence to support this theory.

Two days after he abandoned his campaign on July 16, he told a private meeting of his supporters that he could yet be “the 800-pound gorilla in this race.” At the meeting, held in a Dallas hotel ballroom, he told his 50 state volunteer coordinators that he might well have an “October surprise” planned.

In July and August, he spent millions to irrigate his “grass-roots” organization and aid their efforts to put him on all 50 state ballots. In New York alone he spent more than $1 million of his own money to hire temporary workers to circulate petitions to ensure that his name would appear on that state’s ballot.

He published his platform, “United We Stand,” in paperback form and ordered hundreds of thousands of copies printed. It shot to top of the bestseller list and remains there.

And on Aug. 30, he published an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times criticizing the two parties for failing to heed his “wake-up call,” again hinting that he might be reconsidering his decision not to run.

Was Thursday’s announcement that he was rejoining the campaign the culmination of a carefully scripted plot known only to Perot?

“It is entirely possible,” said Perot’s former press secretary, James D. Squires, who stays in close contact with the tycoon.

“Almost immediately after he quit, he dropped hints that he was coming back. Tom (Tom Luce, Perot’s longtime legal and business adviser) and I were astounded. A couple weeks later, he made promises to the volunteers that almost ensured that this would happen,” Squires said.

Squires said Perot’s reappearance was made inevitable by three factors: He needed to formally declare his candidacy in order to run his television advertisements, he failed in his effort to get President Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton to admit the depth of the economic crisis the nation was facing, and he felt he had to rejoin the race to fulfill his February promise to run a “world-class” campaign if volunteers put his name on all 50 state ballots.

He’s not crazy, Squires insisted. He’s crafty.

“No one can make a judgment of Perot from the outside. Most observations about Ross Perot’s psyche are uninformed and unfortunate,” he said. “I think the political behavior you’ve seen on the part of Ross Perot was very well thought out, designed to provoke a response from the system, designed to touch vulnerabilities.”

John Jay Hooker, a Nashville businessman and sometime confidant of Perot, said Perot told him on July 17 that he was not really quitting.

“He told me: ‘Hooker, I’m out of the game, but I’m still in the stadium. I’m just going to be on the sidelines for a while,’ ” Hooker said. “He never changed his mind about running.”

Those who have done business with Perot tell similar stories about the billionaire’s habit of abruptly changing course in various enterprises to try to gain advantage. He has often quit deals, or threatened to quit them, to get a better bargain.

One vivid example is in his relationship with Steve McElroy, a 33-year-old Austin, Tex., inventor who has wrestled with Perot for five years as 50-50 partners in a start-up company that makes one-size-fits-all plastic container lids.

Often using a sort of psychological warfare to shock McElroy into submission, Perot has made about 10 major changes in the terms of their deal, McElroy said in an interview this week. Perot has flip-flopped on many decisions two or three times, he said.

McElroy said Perot insisted on changing the management structure of the new company, and changing the nature of McElroy’s compensation. He tried to buy out McElroy, then tried to get McElroy to buy him out. At one point, he proposed to McElroy that they should agree on a price for the company, then decide by a flip of the coin who should buy out whom. Several times, he told McElroy he no longer wanted anything to do with the project--only to change his mind a few days or weeks later.

McElroy’s view is that Perot planned in July to drop out and later re-enter the race. The goal, McElroy believes, was to save money and end the cascade of negative publicity about his career and character.

“Personally, I think he planned the whole thing,” McElroy said. “He likes to follow his own rules; he doesn’t like to hear it from a bunch of alleged experts. As a businessman, when you’ve done so well in the past without the experts, the question is, why continue to pay for something that isn’t working out?

“You’ll find that he has surprisingly few partners. He hates partners. He likes to control his own destiny.”

McElroy added: “He believes that everyone, every businessman and everyone else, has the right to get the best deal they can within the confines of the law. Period. There are no other rules.”

Perot followed the same quirky pattern in his 1970s foray into the oil business, which was one of his less successful business ventures.

Perot entered a partnership at one point with Robert A. Mosbacher, now the general chairman of the Republican National Committee. They struck oil on two wells, but then hit a series of dry holes. The partners planned to borrow more and drill several new wells.

Abruptly, Perot announced that he wanted to buy the producing properties, while leaving the others--the dusters--to Mosbacher, and dissolving the partnership, according to a source familiar with the deal.

Mosbacher, flabbergasted, said Perot could buy all the wells or none of them. Later, after Mosbacher became convinced that Perot’s real goal in the partnership was to get a cheap tutorial on the oil business, Mosbacher insisted on ending the relationship.

In the final stages of his most celebrated business transaction, his deal with General Motors, Perot also maneuvered one way, then another, to gain the upper hand.

General Motors bought Perot’s first computer services company, Electronic Data Systems, in 1984. After two years of trying to reshape GM in his own entrepreneurial image, however, Perot decided to call it quits and sell out. After weeks of negotiation, the two sides settled on a price of $700 million.

But on the day GM announced the buyout, Perot called his own news conference to denounce the deal as bad for General Motors, and to publicly pledge that he would put the proceeds in escrow while GM reconsidered whether it shouldn’t invest the money to help better compete with the Japanese.

He apparently hoped the move would prompt an outcry from investors and the public that would force the automotive giant to reform to mirror his views.

But it didn’t happen. And despite his pledge, Perot never put a cent in escrow, according to court papers that later became public.

Perot applied similar tactics in some of his philanthropic efforts.

In 1988, Perot agreed to donate $8 million to the Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Society to pay part of the cost of expanding the city’s big White Rock Lake Park. But Perot quickly came into conflict with others involved in planning the park, who, among other things, resisted Perot’s suggestion that all park visitors should carry portable alarms to enable them to alert security guards of any crime or danger.

Perot declared that he was abandoning the project and demanded that the $2 million he had given be returned with interest. Some construed this as a pressure tactic aimed at winning him his way. Ultimately, the two sides reached an agreement under which Perot donated a total of $2 million.

Squires said Perot may have zigzagged once too often in his first foray into elective politics. He said he advised Perot against quitting the contest in July, and he supports his decision to re-enter. However, he thinks Perot substantially damaged his credibility by his actions.

“His chances of success are significantly diminished compared to the chances he had in July,” Squires said. “Winning has to be the goal, but winning isn’t everything. There are many advantages, to the country and to the system, to have an unencumbered voice in the debates.”