NEWS ANALYSIS : Perot Plays Hunches With Mixed Results

Why did he do it?

Ross Perot left behind one of the enduring mysteries of the 1992 campaign this week when he charged that Republican dirty tricks aimed at his family and business forced him out of the presidential race last July. He says he made the explosive charges only because he was forced to respond to media inquiries.

But some people who know the candidate say that in this extraordinary move they saw Perot playing roles he has taken on again and again in his career: Perot the Hunch-Player, Perot the Vigilant Protector, Perot the Crusader.

The billionaire Texan, they say, is a man who has forever ignored others’ advice to follow his gut feelings--often to glory, sometimes to disaster. Perot is a shrewd businessman who is nonetheless highly credulous when it comes to threats against his family and himself.

And he is a man who is always eager to convince the world--and perhaps himself--that he is following the best of motives as he struggles in a glorious and dangerous cause.

Last week, those tendencies combined to persuade Perot to finally go public with reports he had heard about Republican plans to disrupt his daughter’s wedding and wiretap his offices. By doing so, he may have hoped he could help build his growing momentum, show the maliciousness of his foe and finally give supporters a more convincing--and nobler--explanation of why he abandoned their cause for 11 weeks.

“He has a champion complex,” says Todd Mason, author of “Perot: An Unauthorized Biography.” “He wants to lead a disenfranchised group to prosperity and vanquish an uncaring bureaucracy that’s trying to keep them down.”

This year’s campaign demonstrates why Perot believes that he should go with his hunches--and why sometimes that is a bad idea.

Perot guessed right when he thought that with a single potent issue, his feedlot humor and Red River twang he could mobilize a volunteer army. He was right again in his convictions that he could shine at the three-way debates and that with TV advertisements that defied all conventional wisdom he could attract an audience of millions.

His habit of going with his gut was probably reinforced when he saw that he seemed to be better off without a huge and costly campaign apparatus.

“He followed his own counsel in the beginning, and he was on a roll,” said Steve McElroy, an Austin entrepreneur who is a partner with Perot in a beverage-lid business. “He hired a bunch of experts and it was a disaster.” Then, “he cleaned the slate--and suddenly he was on a roll again.

“He has every reason to believe he should follow his own counsel.”

But other impulsive decisions have blown up in Perot’s face, some close associates acknowledge.

Some advisers still believe that his July departure was a mistake. Some say his choice of retired Vice Adm. James B. Stockdale for a running mate was also an exploding cigar. And then there was the dirty tricks charge, which polls now suggest has halted Perot’s momentum.

Some associates confess privately that they believe Sunday’s move was a blunder and worry that his habit of rejecting advice has led him to a dangerous isolation.

Since his July 16 exit from the race, Perot has stayed at arm’s length from the two people he once heeded: Tom Luce, his lawyer and former campaign manager, and Morton H. Meyerson, who runs Perot’s computer business and formerly chaired his campaign.

In their place is a small staff of inexperienced aides. Most do not seem to even talk regularly with Perot, much less give him advice.

At a recent press briefing, Orson Swindle, director of Perot’s United We Stand organization, was asked what Perot thought of Gov. Bill Clinton’s 1969 trip to Moscow. Swindle responded by asking the reporters in the crowd whether Perot had made any comment on the trip.

One member of the Perot circle this week confessed his nervousness at Perot’s lack of outside input. “I don’t think he asked anybody about this last decision,” the friend said.

The dirty tricks charges resurrected the old assertions that Perot is a paranoiac or a wild man. “A hand grenade with a bad haircut,” former White House speech writer Peggy Noonan called him.

But even people who dispute charges that Perot is paranoid acknowledge that he is so sensitive to threats that he is willing to listen to wild-sounding accusations from quarters that others would dismiss out of hand.

This is partly because billionaires are people who must spend much of their time fending off those who would separate them from their money--through fraudulent business deals, dubious charities, even outright theft. “He’s got to keep his guard up,” one friend said.

As aides have noted, there is some objective reason for Perot to fear the Republicans. They, after all, were the party of Watergate. This year, they were the ones who evidently rifled the State Department files of Clinton’s mother. And earlier this year someone leaked Navy records on Perot showing that at the end of his active duty some officers considered him too immature to captain a ship.

Yet there is abundant evidence that this fear is exaggerated.

Perot has contended that in 1970 the FBI told him he was the target of plots conceived by the North Vietnamese to be carried out by the Black Panthers. But an FBI official said this week that FBI files from the time show that, although there were general rumors that the panthers might try to hit prominent American businessmen, Perot was never mentioned by name in such reports. “We didn’t reach out to warn him,” an FBI source who has searched the files said.

Perot’s credulousness was also demonstrated in his reliance on the information of Scott T. Barnes, a gadfly with low credibility, as the basis for his allegations of GOP dirty tricks.

Don Hewitt, executive producer of “60 Minutes,” said that, when Perot urged him to check out his allegations of Republican plotting, Perot cited a videotape of Barnes and Bush’s Texas campaign chief, James Oberwetter, apparently having an amiable conversation on a park bench as his “single most damaging piece of evidence.”

“Here’s something intriguing about Perot’s personality: He’s this very shrewd person, this very shrewd businessman,” said Mason, the author. “Yet there are times when he proves to be so naive . . . .He can be had surprisingly easily.”

But Perot’s anxieties may not have been his only reason for wanting to publicize his anxieties about Republican dirty tricks.

Since he re-entered the race, Perot and his aides had continued to search for a satisfactory way to explain the departure that had broken the hearts of so many of his followers.

He originally said he dropped out because of a revitalized Democratic Party and because he did not want to deadlock the presidential race and force it into a vote in the House of Representatives.

A smorgasbord of explanations has been offered: Perot preferred to wait until he was on all 50 state ballots; he wanted to junk his useless campaign staff; he needed to short-circuit the attacks from the press and the opposition and to reposition himself for a splashy fall re-entry.

But as press interviews with alienated ex-followers have continued to demonstrate, none of these had completely washed away the quitter stigma that Perot may have feared would follow his name into the history books.

With the dirty tricks story, Perot could finally lay to rest those doubts. And he could put his campaign into proper context as an epic struggle against the oppressive forces of the status quo.

“We’re talking about somebody who wants to be in the history books,” Mason said. With the story of GOP tricks, Perot would establish himself as a man of noble deeds and “as an important person with important enemies,” he said.

Perot’s contention that he wanted to keep the story bottled up is not entirely borne out by the facts.

Hewitt, the “60 Minutes” producer, acknowledges that he told Perot that CBS intended to go with the story on the allegations whether or not Perot cooperated--a standard journalistic maneuver to force a source’s cooperation. But Perot, far from trying to hide the story, had for weeks been directing Hewitt to the videotape of Barnes and Oberwetter he thought would prove the Republicans’ malicious intent, Hewitt said.

“I’ve got to say to myself, ‘Why is he waving me off with one hand, and egging me to go see a tape that he says is the definitive proof of what has happened?’ ” Hewitt said in an interview.

Perot also trotted out the dirty tricks tale at the end of a three-hour interview with editors and a reporter of the Boston Herald, as they met with Perot last week to consider a possible endorsement. “He brought it up,” said Ken Chandler, executive editor of the newspaper.

And at a rally Sunday in Flemington, N.J., Perot again promoted the story, perhaps more than he needed to if he did not intend to emphasize it.

He urged the New Jersey audience to watch the “60 Minutes” broadcast so they would understand why he withdrew. And he described the alleged dirty tricks not as simply one of the reasons, but as the reason for his departure.

Today on the Trail . . .

Gov. Bill Clinton campaigns in East Rutherford, N.J., Pittsburgh, Pa., Springfield, Ohio, and Atlanta.

President Bush campaigns in Nashville, St. Louis and Milwaukee.

Ross Perot has no public events scheduled.

TELEVISION

C-SPAN will air viewer call-in show from New Hampshire with Sen. Al Gore at 5 a.m. PST.

James B. Stockdale is a guest on ABC’s “Good Morning America” at 7 a.m. PST.

Clinton is a guest on “Good Morning America” at 8 a.m. PST.

Bush is a guest on NBC’s “Today” show at 7 a.m. PST and on CNN’s “Larry King Live” at 6 p.m. PST.

Gore is a guest on “Today” at 7:30 a.m. PST.

Barbara Bush is a guest on “CBS This Morning” at 8 a.m. PST.

Bush, Clinton and Perot are interviewed on PBS’ “Talking with David Frost” at 9 p.m. PST.