(6 of 7)
When cornered, Perot can be as fierce as the rattlesnake whose fangs he keeps preserved in a glass bowl in his office. When EDS lost part of the lucrative Texas Medicaid contract to a rival firm in 1980, Perot employees promptly dug up enough dirt on the winning bidder to overturn the contract award. One of Perot's current business ventures, run by his son Ross Jr., is to develop the land around Fort Worth's new Alliance Airport, which sits on property that the Perot family shrewdly donated (thus vastly increasing the value of the adjoining acreage they kept for themselves). Perot tried to persuade the state legislature to put up $500 million in bonds to lure a giant McDonnell Douglas facility to the new airport. Blocked by a committee chairman, Perot's top lieutenant, Tom Luce, tried to induce the committee vice chairman to act in the chairman's absence. Luce failed, but the committee chairman, Steven Wolens, howls, "They came in and tried to hijack our committee without regard to protocol or the Texas constitution."
Richard Connor, publisher of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, recently charged that Perot in effect tried to blackmail him back in 1989 after the paper ran articles critical of his son's management of the airport. Perot angrily suggested in a phone conversation, according to Connor, that he possessed compromising photographs of a newspaper employee and a city official. Perot acknowledges that he did talk with the publisher, but denies any hint of blackmail or mention of compromising photos.
Connor said news accounts of an analogous incident from Perot's past helped prompt his public charges. In the mid-1980s, when Perot was feuding with Richard Armitage, then Assistant Secretary of Defense, the Texan tried to convince Washington reporters that the U.S. Defense Department official was in no position to press the Vietnamese on MIAS. Perot's weapon: an old snapshot of Armitage at a party with several men and women, one of whom he alleged was Armitage's Vietnamese girlfriend.
Do any of these stories, if true, disqualify Perot from the White House? Probably not, since the presidency was not designed for the fainthearted. Perot's will to win is indeed intense but presumably no greater than that of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson or, more ominously, Richard Nixon. Perot may be mulishly stubborn when he thinks he is right, but then so were Reagan and Harry Truman. A presidential election is, after all, a choice among available alternatives -- and right now Perot is not exactly competing against an all- star team from Mount Rushmore. Says political analyst Kevin Phillips: "If Bush is re-elected, I don't think he'll have a successful four years. I'm not sure Clinton would do better. So in my mind the threshold of successful governance is lower."