Billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot dies at 89.
I always wanted to pronounce his name ‘pee-rott’. (But then, I want to pronounce Hercule Poirot’s ‘poy-rott’.)
Rest in peace, Ross. You had the unique ability to shake up the status quo during your lifetime. I’m sure the next life will hold countless opportunities for you to continue that practice!
~VOW
The raccoon came back for revenge?
I actually met him once at an engagement party in about 2010 or so, and for someone of such exalted status, he was awfully polite, nice and pleasant to me and my wife. Definitely an old-school gentleman in that regard.
The story is that a friend of my wife’s from law school was marrying the nanny of some super-wealthy Highland Park family, and the Perots were friends of the family or something. Anyway my wife spotted her friend’s sister, and popped into that room and more or less interrupted the sister’s conversation with a kindly old couple. So while my wife and the sister talked, I introduced myself to the old couple. The response I got was “Hi. I’m Ross Perot. Nice to meet you. This is my wife Margot.” . I was a little bit gobsmacked, but ended up talking with them for 15-20 minutes.
His ears weren’t that big, and for a 78-ish year old man, he was very trim and fit looking, without being frail or stooped.
Wouldn’t be right not to post this interview.
If we are going to discuss his legacy, we should include his efforts to rescue two employees from Iran after the revolution in the late 1970’s (It should be noted that much of the rescue has been considered exaggerated, but that shouldn’t stop a good story).
Rest in Peace, Henry Ross Perot. You were right on so many fronts. Thank you.
Former MTV VJ Kurt Loder was once asked (okay, probably more than once, but this specific time) what the strangest interview he ever did was. Most people would think Ozzy, or Marilyn Manson, or the members of GWAR, or something along those lines.
Nope, you already guessed it - Ross Perot. :eek:
During the 1992 election, I had a professor who looked like a cartoonist’s rendition of him, and one morning, some (we found out later) medical students had gone in and written the alphabet on the top of the chalkboard, a la primary school classrooms. He walked in, pointed at it with a meter stick that was about 2/3 as tall as he was, tapped on the stage, and said, “It’s good to see that y’all haven’t lost your sense of humor.” That stayed up until the end of that semester.
One of the odd things about the '92 race is that both Perot and Clinton came from the same area. Born in towns 35 miles apart. And we’re not talking about major metroplexes either.
To a certain extent American voters like the appeal of people from someplace like Texarkana, Texas.
Or so I thought …
I truly believe that the one person who would’ve made a worse president than Trump was Ross Perot. Trump is a blithering idiot and a narcissist, but Perot was a paranoid little bastard. More than once, he talked about being stalked by death squads sneaking around his house. Some security officer said it was probably a raccoon that set off an alarm trigger on his lawn.
That, and the whole ‘I’m dropping out of the race because Republican spies are planning to disrupt my daughter’s wedding with naughty pictures’ bit convinced me American Democracy dodged a bullet there.
He’s not dead. His pie chart shows a 130% chance he’s alive.
I remember him being demonized by my peers when I was a teen. Can’t remember what for though.
I think he wanted to do away with summer vacations from school.
There were aspects of this in his politics as well. He was a proponent of the POW/MIA conspiracy theory, which was an idea that Vietnam had secret prisons full of good old corn-fed American boys who had been selected to receive life-long torture at the hands of the communists.
Unlike many rich people, he seems to have given very little (well millions) to charities. The Failing New York Times’ front-page obit was very nonspecific. He died with about $4B. Shame on him.
In 1992 I was considering voting for him. After the first debate I remember thinking “This guy’s nuts”. And that ended that idea.
One of my favorite Ross Perot stories is from Molly Ivins. I think this happened before she became a nationally syndicated columnist. She wrote a column about him for a Texas newspaper in which she said he was so rich he probably made a million dollars a year. As soon as the column was published, she started hearing from her colleagues that her estimate was really, really low. He made something like a million dollars a day, not a year. She took a lot of teasing about this. Then her phone rang. It was Ross Perot calling collect.
I think Perot would have been an awful president. In addition to his paranoid beliefs about things like North Vietnamese assassins trying to invade his home and Republican operatives conspiring to ruin his daughter’s wedding, he was an autocrat by nature (as one might expect a billionaire CEO to be). I don’t think he’d have been able to deal with Congress constructively. Also, one of his standard tactics was to walk away from any situation where he didn’t have the upper hand (something he did in the middle of his campaign). There are plenty of things a president can’t walk away from.
That being said, there were things about him that I admired. He was interested in education reform, and he backed a bill in Texas that would have (among other things) required students to pass their classes to participate in athletics. It was controversial: in Texas, high school football is almost a state religion.
One of Perot’s most famous statements was about NAFTA. He predicted a “giant sucking sound” as jobs went over the Mexican border. I think he got this wrong. There was a sort of giant sucking sound, but it wasn’t to the south, and it wasn’t caused by NAFTA. It was upwards, as wealth and income inequality increased.
When Perot was campaigning, one commentator noted that while each generation cohort normally produces as least one President, there had not yet been a President born in the early 1930s and whose early adult life was in the 50s, like Perot.
Instead, the generation before that, whose formative adult years were WWII, had had a lock on the presidency from JFK onwards, and now, if Perot was not successful, the Presidency would jump from the war generation (Bush I) to the baby boomers (Clinton).
And that’s what happened. The 1930s cohort never got a President.
Long live Ross Perot!
Seriously, nobody beat me to it??
While the Vietnam generation produced presidents, no Vietnam veteran ever became president. By the 1960s, the Ruling Class was generally opting out of America’s wars.
I remember when his company, EDS, changed their dress code, and women were allowed to wear pants to work.