Ross Perot obit

Billionaire Ross Perot dead

He was not on the list.

Ross Perot was not the first tycoon to think about running for president. Wendell Willkie, a New York utility executive who gained fame on a popular radio program, actually won the Republican nomination in 1940 before losing to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Perot ran twice on an independent ticket and, on his first try in 1992 against the incumbent George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, earned a little under 19% of the popular vote.

By any measure, it was a remarkable accomplishment. The experts remain undecided about whether Perot's campaign cost Bush the White House, but his candidacy was the best performance by a third-party nominee since ex-President Theodore Roosevelt's 27% in 1912.

Of course, the contemporary candidate who most resembles Perot, who died at age 89 on July 9 in Dallas, learned a few useful lessons from his predecessor. A quarter century after the Perot insurgency, Donald Trump was shrewd enough to run not as an independent but as a bull in the Republican china shop.

It is possible that Perot's brand of populist nationalism was ahead of its time. But it's interesting to speculate what might have happened if, instead of announcing his 1992 candidacy on Larry King Live, and relying on a haphazard army of "volunteers," Perot had chosen to run as a Republican or Democrat.

Then again, Perot was an independent by nature. The son of a Texarkana, Texas, cotton broker and horse trader, the slender, 5-foot-6 Perot was one of those aggressively industrious lads who used to be celebrated in popular fiction. He delivered the local newspaper and squashed the competition, sold seeds door to door, broke horses for his father, and earned his Eagle Scout badge at 12. After two years at Texarkana Junior College, he gained an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1953. But the peacetime Navy seems to have been torture for someone so driven, and resigning his commission at the earliest opportunity, Perot jumped into the business world, selling computers for IBM in Dallas.

This was the Eisenhower-era equivalent of Silicon Valley, but Perot was soon fidgety again. Unable to persuade IBM to branch out into the emerging service economy, Perot in 1962 founded his own software and computer-services firm, Electronic Data Systems, which handled clerical tasks for banks and small businesses and insurance companies before striking gold servicing Medicare and state Medicaid programs. The federal government that Perot derided for its bloat and inefficiencies made him a multimillionaire in his 30s.

Yet the restless impatience which had made Perot his fortune never subsided. He first came to national attention in 1969 when, upset about the plight of American prisoners of war in North Vietnam, he organized an elaborate airlift of food and medicine, which Hanoi refused to accept. In the 1970s, he lost hundreds of millions of dollars on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he sold his company to General Motors for $2.5 billion in cash and stock. As GM's new principal shareholder, he joined the board and clashed immediately with colleagues and management. "Revitalizing GM is like teaching an elephant to tap dance," he complained, and GM bought him out two years later.

In that sense, Perot was adept at identifying problems, rather less successful when attempting to solve them. Inevitably, politics beckoned. When he ran for president in 1992, he got himself on the ballot in all 50 states and, at one point, led Bush and Clinton in the polls. But then he unexpectedly dropped out — and a few months later dropped back in, claiming that the Bush campaign had sought to "sabotage" his daughter's wedding and warning that a Mexican assassination squad was on his trail.

Perot's life was a great and picturesque American success story. When he died last week, it was peacefully, and in bed.