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Reporters have dug up a 1955 letter from Ross to his father, asking the senior Perot to use his influence to get his son out of the Navy before the four-year hitch standard for Annapolis graduates was over. Reason: he found the Navy "fairly Godless" and was constantly offended by the blasphemous language and moral laxity of his shipmates. Perot blithely ignores the question of whether he could really have been that naive and, as he often does when one of his stories is not believed, produces another. The real reason he wanted out of the Navy, he says, is that his commander pressured Perot to use part of a sailors' recreation fund to decorate his quarters (the commander has turned up and insists that he did no such thing). Critics suspect that Perot simply thought he could make more money as a civilian.
He certainly did; he was in fact a whiz-bang salesman for IBM and really did fulfill his annual quota for 1962 on Jan. 19 (by, he says, selling a single giant IBM 7090 computer). But fellow IBM salesmen from that period say the rest of the story is fantasy. IBM had no objection to salesmen earning more than managers, they say, and many did -- with the blessing of the managers, whose own incomes rose the more their salesmen produced. Moreover, they say, IBM was not so stupid as to deny itself revenue by forcing its best salesmen to sit idle. Says Henry Wendler, who was Perot's branch manager in Dallas: "If you sold 100% of your quota, you didn't stop there. You could go to 200%, 300%, 500% and get more commissions."
Perot has acknowledged lately that Margot's $1,000 check to get EDS started, which he keeps as a memento, represented only the registration fee Texas required to charter a new corporation. He and his wife had, and used, a great deal more than that to launch EDS. Perot was making $20,000 a year as a part- time employee of Texas Blue Cross-Blue Shield, and Margot brought home a second salary as a full-time schoolteacher. This, however, is a rare case of Perot deflating a tall story; more distressing than any of the disputes about individual incidents in his early career is his seeming ability to convince himself of the truth of whatever he wants to believe. Mason quotes EDS general counsel Richard Shlakman as saying, "A part of his genius is that he can be self-delusional when most of us are only hypocritical."
CHARISMA OR TYRANNY -- OR BOTH?