Ross Perot Recordings

Ross Perot
(1930 – 2019)

Henry Ross Perot was born in Texarkana, Texas on June 27, 1930.  At the age of eight he started his first job as a paperboy delivering papers for the Texarkana Gazette.  In 1942 he joined the Boy Scouts and after 13 months made Eagle Scout receiving the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award.  After graduating from Texas High School in 1947, Perot attended Texarkana Junior College for two years before being accepted to the US Naval Academy in 1949.  While a student at the Naval Academy, Perot helped establish an honor system.

From 1953 to 1957, he served as a junior officer on a destroyer and then an aircraft carrier.  Having only owned one pair of shoes at a time as a boy, Perot claimed how shocked he was when the Navy issued him multiple pairs of shoes.  This was the first time that he thought was his first example of government waste.  He would finish out his military career in the Naval Reserves in 1961 having obtained the rank of Lieutenant.

In 1957 after his stint in the Navy, Perot went to work for IBM where he quickly became a top employee.  Because he was such a hard worker he once met his one year sales quota in two weeks.  Perot would try to pitch ideas for IBM to his employer, but it turns out that he was largely ignored.  He would leave IBM in 1962 to found Electronic Data Systems in Dallas, Texas.

At EDS, Perot would try and court some of the largest contracts, being denied seventy-seven times before landing his first contract.  One of his most lucrative contracts came from the United States government where in the 1960s, Medicare records were computerized.

Six years after its founding, EDS went public in 1968 and Perot saw the value of his company's stock go from sixteen dollars a share to one hundred sixty dollars a share almost overnight.  Also in 1968 Fortune Magazine wrote a cover story about Ross Perot titled "THE FASTEST RICHEST TEXAN."  However, in April 1970, he had lost in a single day on the New York Stock Exchange four hundred fifty million dollars.  This prompted some in the press to call Perot "the biggest individual loser ever on the New York Stock Exchange."

If you've ever read the book, ON THE WINGS OF EAGLES by Ken Follett or watched the two part television movie, TEHERAN starring Burt Lancaster as Colonel Arthur D. Simons, that is based on events where two of Perots EDS employees were imprisoned in 1979 by the Iranian government over a contract dispute.  Led by Colonel Simons, Perot organized and sponsored a rescue of the imprisoned employees, but at the time the team was able to find a way to extract the employees from prison.  So the plan then was to wait for pro-Ayatollah revolutionaries to storm the jail and free all ten thousand prisoners held captive.  The two EDS employees eventually met up with the rescue team and they crossed the border into Turkey.

Perot would sell a controlling interest of EDS in 1984 to General Motors where he made $2,400,000 dollars from the deal.  Also in 1984 the Perot Foundation acquired an early copy of the Magna Carta where he had it displayed at the National Archives displayed between the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.  David Rubinstein of the Carlyle Group purchased the Magna Carter from Perot in 2007 for twenty-one million three hundred thousand dollars in 2007.  The Perot Foundation would use that money to help fund medical research, improve public education, and help assist wounded soldiers and their families.  The Magna Carta is still on display at the National Archives.

When Steve Jobs left Apple he founded NeXT.  Perot, not wanting to miss out on this investment like he did with Bill Gates when he started Microsoft invested over twenty million dollars in Jobs' new business.  Perot would also found Perot Systems in 1988 where by 2009 Dell purchased it for three billion nine hundred million dollars.

One of the issues very close to Ross Perot was that of the POW/MIA during the Vietnam War.  After visiting the White House and at their request,  in 1969 Perot took a trip to Laos where he would meet with North Vietnamese officials.  Perot was convinced that the US government left American servicemen behind to help fund a secret war in Laos where had it been known, revelations of secret drug smuggling would be exposed.  Because of some back channel dealings with the Vietnamese government in the 1980s, Perot had soured relationships with the Reagan and George HW Bush administrations.

With the passage of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment to the Constitution, advertisements went out in 1990 campaigning on throw the hypocritical rascals out.  This was in response to members of Congress getting guaranteed pay raises while American workers' wages remained flat.  Ross Perot was a big supporter of this campaign.

With his opposition to the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Perot had thought about challenging President George HW Bush in the Presidential Election of 1992.  He went on the Larry King Show in February 1992 to talk about his intentions to run for President as an Independent.  The deal was that if his supporters could get his name on the ballot in all fifty states, he would run.

Throughout that winter and spring, and into the summer, Perot was doing quite well in the polls.  But during the Democratic National Convention in July, after the Democrats nominated Bill Clinton for president and Al Gore for vice president Perot went before the press declaring, "Now that the Democratic Party has revitalized itself, I have concluded that I cannot win in November."  In his Acceptance Speech at the Democratic National Convention, Governor Clinton reached out to the Perot supporters for their support.

By September 1992 though, Perot had qualified to be on the ballot in all fifty states.  He was back in the race by October 1st, qualifying for he and his running mate, Admiral James Stockdale to participate in the Presidential and Vice Presidential Debates.

In the end, Ross Perot lost the president but did receive 19,741,065 popular votes, or just under 19%.  It was also enough for President Bush to lose re-election, thus moving Bill Clinton into the White House.

Perot would spend the next three years campaigning against the North American Free Trade Agreement, most memorable was his 1993 debate on Larry King Live with Vice President Al Gore.  He also created with the clout from his strong Independent run in 1992 created the Reform Party to fun again in the Presidential Election in 1996.

In that election, because of ballot laws in many states, Perot had to run as an Independent.  Besides choosing Pat Choate as his 1996 running mate, Perot did not qualify for participation in the Presidential Debates between President Bill Clinton and Former Senator Bob Dole.  Maybe he was just a novelty in 1992 proving such a strong showing for an Independent candidate for President, but in 1996, Ross Perot earned nearly 10% less support in popular votes than four years earlier.  Bill Clinton was re-elected for four more years.

After 1996, Perot refused to back Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan in 2000 and supported George W. Bush for president.  He would then support Mitt Romney over John McCain in 2008 and again in 2012, he supported Romney.  By 2016, Ross Perot would not endorse any candidate for President.

Ross Perot would die of leukemia on July 9, 2019 in Dallas, Texas.  He was less than two weeks past his eighth-ninth birthday.