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Perot's political opponents are rushing to fill in the blanks. The Bush campaign, in particular, has pushed the theme that Perot was right when he told the New York Times in 1969 that "I'm a direct, action-oriented person, and I'd be terrible in public office." Bush's people portray him as a thin- . skinned and ruthless man who tends to take his goals as holy objectives to be reached by any means available, who sees rivals as evil conspirators to be crushed, and who pursues astonishingly meanspirited vendettas against anyone who crosses him, even in petty matters. Vice President Dan Quayle even warned that "it would be a very bad idea to replace a genuine statesman with some temperamental tycoon who has contempt for the Constitution of the United States."
Reporters have been digging into Perot's carefully tended story about his dramatic transformation from obscure computer salesman into proprietor of one of the nation's largest fortunes. Already some cracks are beginning to appear in the facade. Perot, like some of the mainstream politicians he derides, does have a credibility problem. He once remarked that "I'm not a living legend. I'm just a myth." Which sounds disarming -- except that some parts of the myth appear to be self-created. Even some admirers concede that Perot is an inveterate embroiderer of good stories. A less sympathetic way of putting it is that for a supposedly down-to-earth, homespun character, Perot is extremely conscious of his image and prone to inflate it. Separating the facts from the exaggerations and inventions is no easy task. But it needs to be done so that the many Americans who look to Perot as a savior from incompetent, self- serving politics can judge whether his image squares with the facts.
SELF-MADE MAN -- AND MYTH
By now many elements of Perot's biography have become a standardized recitation: the son of a Texas horse trader (yes, literally) and cotton dealer, Ross learned Norman Rockwell values at home in Texarkana and as an enthusiastic Boy Scout. An Annapolis graduate, he lost his zeal for the Navy because its bureaucracy was stifling, and he tried to get out early. He became a top salesman for IBM, but the company cut his commissions so that he would not earn more than his managers; worse, when he fulfilled his annual quota by Jan. 19, 1962, he was forced to sit idly for the next six months. The computer giant rejected his idea for a computer-service company. Disgusted, he founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in June 1962 with $1,000 put up by his wife Margot. Only six years later, a public sale of the stock made Perot a multimillionaire at 38.
Trouble is, much of this story is open to dispute. Take the tale that as a preteen Perot delivered the Texarkana Gazette in a dangerous neighborhood, riding a horse so that he could escape from customers who might try to mug him. In his 1990 book, Perot: An Unauthorized Biography, journalist Todd Mason suggests that Perot actually rode a bicycle.
A trivial matter? Not to Perot. For six months he bombarded Mason and his editor, Jeffrey Krames, with letters and phone calls from himself, his sister Bette and boyhood acquaintances who insisted Perot did so ride a horse. He even sent Krames a poster-size map of Texarkana, with his route outlined block by block, and pretyped letters of retraction, needing only a signature. He never got one.