Personality: The Odyssey of Ross Perot

His odyssey of good will had taken him 35,000 miles, but when Texas Billionaire H. Ross Perot, 39, came home to Dallas last week, he had little to show for his trip. Twelve days earlier, Perot had loaded a chartered Boeing 707 jet—christened Peace on Earth —with Christmas presents and messages for American G.I.s held captive by the North Vietnamese. Another jet, named Goodwill Toward Men, waited vainly in Los Angeles for his call to follow.

Perot’s first stop was Bangkok, where he arranged to meet with Hanoi officials in Vientiane, Laos. They refused to allow delivery of the cargo to the American prisoners, so Perot tried another good-will tactic, offering “traditional Christmas dinners” for North Vietnamese war orphans. Rebuffed again, the persistent Perot went to the Russian embassy in Vientiane to try to get the packages delivered via Moscow.

Nyet. Perot was a paradox to the Communists, who could not conceive of one man having so much power. To them, it was almost like dealing with a small, well-financed country. When the Viet Cong complained of civilian bombing by U.S. planes, Perot offered to make good the damages. When Hanoi said that if Moscow agreed, the packages would have to be delivered by Dec. 31, Perot, clad in light blue jump suit and sick with a virus, loaded his troupe of newsmen and Red Cross workers aboard the 707, chartered for $1,450 an hour, and set off for Europe. He wanted to be close to Moscow. Told by India and Burma that he could not fly over those countries, he turned around and flew over the top of the world.

Peace on Earth set down briefly at Anchorage, Alaska, where about 1,000 volunteers repacked the cargo in 6.6-lb. bundles to meet Moscow’s postal specifications. But when Perot arrived in Copenhagen, the message from Moscow was nyet. He even tried a desperate call to Russian Premier Alexei Kosygin at home, to no avail.

Highly Motivated. Despite his widely publicized, seemingly quixotic journey, Ross Perot is a modest, if highly motivated man. The son of a cotton broker, he neither smokes nor drinks, drives a five-year-old car and buys his conservative suits off the rack. He met his wife Margot while he was an Annapolis midshipman, and they and their four children live in a relatively modest four-bedroom house in Dallas.

Only eight years ago, Perot was a salesman for IBM. He used $1,000 to form the Electronic Data Systems Corp., and in what FORTUNE called “perhaps the most spectacular personal coup in the history of American business,” he made it an incredibly successful computer manufacturing company whose stock is now worth about $1.7 billion; Perot holds 83% of it. A political independent driven by a sincere love of country, Perot says: “I’ve always tried to use my money for programs for young people so they can lead the country in the next generation.”

Toward this end, Perot has given away fortunes. He anonymously contributed $2.4 million to form an experimental elementary school for 1,000 poor Dallas black and Mexican Americans. An Eagle Scout during his Texarkana youth, Perot gave $1 million to the Boy Scouts to investigate ways of taking scouting into the ghetto. He gave a ranch to the Girl Scouts for a part-time boarding school for the underprivileged, and a Dallas high school gets $50,000 annually to subsidize tuition for poor Mexican Americans.

On Viet Nam, Perot observes: “I want the killing stopped and the energies and creativity devoted to building America.” So Perot formed an organization called United We Stand, whose guiding philosophy he describes broadly as “concern for all people.” He believes that only a President can bring about peace and strongly backs Richard Nixon’s plan to end the war. He would do the same for Hubert Humphrey if he were President, says Perot, who also defends the rights of dissenters. Recently, he financed Paris trips by wives of missing G.I.s in an unsuccessful effort to learn from the Hanoi delegation if their husbands are among the 1,400 prisoners believed to be in North Viet Nam.

Town Meeting. Perot is deeply concerned that many Americans do not become involved with vital problems of the country. To help change this, he is negotiating with the TV networks for hour-long discussions of national issues. The programs will have an electronic town-meeting format: 20 minutes of impartial background and 20 minutes each for two exponents of differing viewpoints. Printed ballots will appear in newspapers for viewers to mail in, giving their responses to the debates.

“I don’t care where they stand,” insists Ross Perot. “The man I worry about is the one who hasn’t taken any position.”