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Perot knows his reputation for being hypersensitive to criticism -- and last week went out of his way to gush over how much he enjoyed Dana Carvey's impersonation of him on Saturday Night Live. But he also took pains to stop visitors to his 17th-floor office suite before a portrait of himself, commissioned and autographed by former Vietnam prisoners of war, so he could * say, "I don't think the POWS would have given me this if they thought what I had been doing for them was a publicity stunt." Like a salesman whose primary product is his own reputation -- as it was, in a sense, when he created EDS, the computer-services firm that made his fortune -- Perot hates adverse comment. He remembers the tiniest unintended factual errors by reporters and delights in haranguing them, and anyone else in earshot, about them. One can imagine President Perot keeping the White House switchboard busy all night tracking down out-of-town editorial writers to complain about errant sentences.
Throughout his career, Perot has endeared himself to Main Street America partly by the enemies he has chosen. The son of a small-town cotton broker in Texarkana, Texas, Perot attended the U.S. Naval Academy, spent four years in the Navy and then in 1957 joined the white-shirted brigades of IBM as a computer salesman. The Perot myth was born when he broke with the rigid corporate culture and inflexible commission system of IBM in 1962 to found EDS -- and became a just-folks billionaire seven years later, shortly after he took his company public. During the 1970s, Perot tangled with North Vietnam on behalf of the POWS, the Iranian revolutionaries and naysayers in the Carter Administration who objected to his lone-wolf style of high-profile private diplomacy.
But this real-life Crusader Rabbit was just getting warmed up. General Motors -- that ossified symbol of America's industrial decline -- volunteered for the Perot treatment when the giant automaker bought EDS in 1984 and GM chairman Roger Smith looked to this take-no-prisoners Texan to shake up the hidebound hierarchy. Within two years, Perot was going public with his bitter and prophetic denunciations of the GM bureaucracy ("I could never understand why it takes six years to build a car when it only took us four years to win World War II"), and the company ultimately paid him $700 million just to go away and, it was hoped, shut up. (Perot characteristically took the money and kept on talking.) The Reagan Administration went from friend to bitter foe over the issue of the missing in action allegedly still in Vietnam, as Perot kept hinting that some broad and ill-defined conspiracy was preventing America from repatriating the MIAS. Texas Democratic Governor Mark White in 1984 recruited him to head a statewide commission on educational reform. Perot responded by taking on that ultimate Lone Star icon: the cult of Friday-night high school football. And with the cry "No pass, no play," he boldly proposed barring failing students from extracurricular activities.