(7 of 8)
Perot last week canceled a scheduled appearance before a Senate committee to tell his side of the story; the committee is now trying to decide whether to subpoena him. But Perot, a confirmed conspiracy theorist, has made it plain that he believes government officials have been engaged in a far-ranging plot to prevent an honest investigation into whether American POWS are still being held in Vietnam, for fear it would expose drug-smuggling operations they conducted to finance a secret war in Laos. Perot may have got that idea from Christic Institute, a leftish public-interest law firm that filed a suit making similar charges (the suit was dismissed in 1988 by a federal judge in Miami, who forced Christic to pay $1 million in court costs as damages for making frivolous charges). The generally conservative Perot and the left- leaning Christic are the oddest of allies. Nonetheless Christic general counsel Daniel Sheehan confirms that he drove Perot around Washington in a battered blue Volkswagen to call on secret sources.
A special target of Perot's has been Richard Armitage, at the time an Assistant Secretary of Defense, now a State Department official. In 1986 Perot called on both Vice President Bush and President Reagan to urge them to fire Armitage. Just what Armitage did to arouse the Texan's wrath, other than blocking Perot, is not clear. He was named in the Christic suit but produced a factual refutation of several charges; among other things, he proved that he was in Washington at a time when Christic and Perot said he was in Bangkok arranging drug smuggling. Armitage did once have a Vietnamese mistress and years later used Pentagon stationery to write a character reference for her when she was convicted in Washington of running a gambling operation, which he concedes was a stupid move. It may also have aroused Perot's moralistic antagonism. Perot to this day keeps a picture of Armitage and the woman and shows it to visitors, without making clear what relevance it might have to drug smuggling or pows.
MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY
Armitage is certainly not the only person subjected to the lash of Perot's righteous wrath. Perhaps the most frightening of Perot's characteristics is his tendency to use all his wealth and influence to conduct vendettas against those who cross him. Critics contend that on most occasions Perot is so convinced he is absolutely right that he believes those who oppose him are not just mistaken but evil, and feels perfectly justified in going after them hammer and tongs. Some examples:
-- In 1980 Perot, vacationing in London, got news that Bradford National Corp., a New York-based firm, had wrested a Texas Medicaid contract away from EDS. Perot could not accept the idea that EDS had lost fairly. He flew back to convene an EDS meeting in Dallas, at which, says author Mason, "eavesdroppers outside the third-floor conference room heard him shouting, 'I want to find the son of a bitch who let this happen and get him out of the company!' " Though the principal question was whether EDS or Bradford had submitted the lower bid, Perot and his aides dug up and deluged the state with an enormous amount of negative information about Bradford and Arnold Ashburn, the Texas bureaucrat who awarded the contract. The state eventually gave the contract back to EDS but absolved Bradford of any wrongdoing and paid it $3.1 million to walk quietly away.