Almost President (36 page)

Because McGovern challenged this fundamental American belief, some challenged his masculinity.
First Monday,
the now-defunct conservative magazine, called McGovern “a sort of benign political Liberace.” Matching McGovern with the flamboyant entertainer who most assumed was gay was hardly subtle. The supposed effeminacy of being a peace candidate was reinforced by McGovern's outreach to women and his support of gay rights, which further alienated those who want our leaders to possess a machismo that Barry Goldwater flaunted but that McGovern lacked. Like AFL-CIO president George Meany, they expressed disgust that McGovern's convention had attracted “people who look like Jacks, acted like Jills, and had the odors of Johns about them.”

The year before McGovern's presidential campaign, the movie
Patton
won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It was Nixon's favorite film. He watched it many times and ordered his staff to watch it too. To prepare for Nixon's visit to China, Premier Chou En-Lai watched
Patton
to better understand his guest. It was also the fourth-highest grossing film of 1970 at more than sixty-one million dollars.

Some critics, perhaps because a young Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay, have argued that
Patton
can also be seen as satire, but it is safe to say that neither Nixon nor the vast majority of other Americans who viewed the film saw it as such. In the iconic opening scene, George C. Scott portrays American World War II general George S. Patton, standing before a massive flag, and offers Patton's take on the American attitude toward war:

Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle. . . . Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.

If the screenwriters for
Patton
accurately captured an essential part of the American character, and the success of the movie suggests they did, then McGovern's antipathy toward war put him at odds with the feelings of many voters. In a nation where the first president was the former general of our national army and our greatest presidents are those who led us to victory in great wars, it is a routine test for every presidential aspirant to demonstrate that they are “tough enough” to order our troops into war.

McGovern aspired to a different kind of toughness, a toughness that enables leaders to avoid and to end wars, even when the end means withdrawal without the victory Americans crave. Woodrow Wilson, the fellow moralist whom McGovern aspired to emulate, had said in trying to avoid American entry into World War I, “There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight.” Public opinion led Wilson to abandon that noble sentiment and seek a declaration of war.

Perhaps, as the movie
Patton
suggests, Americans do love “the sting of battle.” For while much of McGovern's critique of the Vietnam War has, in hindsight, been proven correct, as author Bruce Miroff noted, “it has been the heirs of Nixon who have had the upper hand on national security issues in subsequent presidential campaigns, and it has been the heirs of McGovern who have been caught up in an identity crisis of American patriotism.”

CHAPTER TEN

ROSS PEROT

1992, 1996

It's that simple.

For a nation so enamored with capitalism and industry, it is striking that so few businessmen have been tapped to be president. No person has moved directly from the business world into the White House. Of those presidents who had a background in business before they entered politics, there were as many business failures (Grant, Truman, George W. Bush) as successes, and those who enjoyed success in business before entering politics—and none could be labeled tycoons—had unsuccessful presidencies (Harding, Hoover, and George H. W. Bush).

The bulk of our presidents and presidential candidates have been attorneys, generals, or educators. Perhaps, as Harry Truman noted, the reason more business executives don't enter politics is that “after they've had a successful business career . . . they want to start at the top.” Most businessmen scorn the drudgery of practical politics and conclude that the worlds of politics and business, however entwined they may be, have different purposes and require different skills.

The business titans of America's past, such as John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan or Henry Ford, thrilled the nation with their exploits, but no one seems to have thought that the skills that created their extraordinary fortunes were transferrable to politics. Even without elective office, these men were politically powerful, of course, and used sympathetic and often indebted politicians to protect their corporate interests. As Vanderbilt once exclaimed, “What do I care about the law? Hain't I got the power?”

A few tycoons dabbled in broader issues of public policy; Andrew Carnegie tried to purchase the independence of the Philippines from the U.S. government, and Ford led a much-ridiculed civilian delegation to Europe to try to end World War I. But when someone with a name renowned in business, like Rockefeller or Kennedy, does run for office, it is usually a second- or third-generation family member who did not build up the family fortune themselves but turned to public service relatively early in life.

The handful of moguls who have entered politics have come from the news media.
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Perhaps William Randolph Hearst, James M. Cox, or Michael Bloomberg simply thought public office was good business since politics and the media often seem one industry. But generally, businessmen find the compromises and general messiness of electoral politics unappealing—and unprofitable. A business executive might accept the occasional Cabinet post, but he shuns too much involvement in partisan politics for fear of offending customers, shareholders, or powerful public officials. As one automobile executive explained to
Time
magazine in 1956, “We sell cars to both Republicans and Democrats.”

Not until the 1980s were prominent businessmen pushed to consider national office. Then, admirers touted as possible presidential candidates both Lee Iacocca, who had reversed Chrysler's sagging fortunes as its CEO, and Peter Ueberroth, the travel industry executive who managed the successful 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. The two demurred from running at the time, though each remained an active commentator on current events, and Ueberroth, after serving as commissioner of Major League Baseball, did eventually run for governor of California during the 2003 recall election but finished sixth out of 135 candidates.

Then came Ross Perot, incongruously described by his admirers as a “down to earth . . . billionaire,” who became the most successful third party candidate for president since Theodore Roosevelt bolted the Republican Party in 1912. While Perot is a unique personality, what truly separates him from the industrialists of yore is the time in which he has lived. Perot arrived on the scene when businessmen and those of great wealth were held in high public esteem, which has not always been the case in our history, and he entered politics when new technologies allowed those who could afford it the opportunity to bypass the traditional political process. Perot also offered himself as a candidate for president when people had lost faith in traditional political institutions and the wisdom of experts, and when the end of the Cold War made foreign policy experience less important in selecting a president.

The Cold War had established an easily understood framework—“us vs. them”—that defined our politics for a half century. The collapse of the Soviet Union thrust a new set of issues before the nation, which made the world seem a much more complicated place. Many voters yearned for simpler times and for a “man on horseback” who could come in and solve our problems with a minimum of fuss. Perot, as one scholar noted, was more than happy to sell himself as “a political Lone Ranger, a lonely hero able to ride into Washington and single-handedly clean up the mess.”

Perot's 1992 campaign for president occurred at a time when businessmen were as exalted in America as they had been at any time in history. Unlike previous business booms, such as the Gilded Age of the late 1800s, there was no accompanying backlash against the rich. The excesses of the Vanderbilts, the DuPonts, and the other so-called robber barons, when contrasted with the misery experienced by much of the working poor, led to the reforms of the Progressive Era. The “Roaring Twenties, when President Calvin Coolidge had said, “The man who builds a factory builds a temple,” was followed by the Great Depression and the reforms of the New Deal. Businessmen blamed for the crash were considered near criminals, and some were criminals, such as Richard C. Whitney, the president of the New York Stock Exchange, who ended up in prison for embezzlement and fraud. President Franklin Roosevelt regularly castigated “blind economic forces and blindly selfish men,” as he did in his second inaugural address, for leaving “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.”

But by the time Perot became part of the national consciousness, World War II had allowed the corporate world to rehabilitate its reputation by once again demonstrating the United States' industrial genius, which was crucial to the Allied victory. The following decades witnessed continued economic growth that seemed, except for the occasional hiccup of a mild recession, to have no end. Moreover, social programs first implemented during the New Deal began to ensure that the new wealth was no longer contrasted with widespread poverty, and there had been no severe economic contraction that would, have caused a backlash against business. Business seemed to have mastered the business cycle; great wealth was tolerated because it occurred in a time of general prosperity.

Meanwhile, new industries were emerging, exciting the public imagination. They were led by men who had the cachet of being entrepreneurs and innovators, not bland corporate managers. Perot was an early pioneer in the high-tech business world, and he demonstrated, to great public fascination, that this new industry allowed those who mastered it the opportunity to amass extraordinary fortunes.

Perot had begun Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1962. As late as 1965 the company's annual earnings were still less than one million dollars, and even though it was a computer company, it still didn't own a single computer. But then Perot secured government contracts to manage data for Medicare and Medicaid, and revenues soared. The company made its first public stock offering in 1968, and the share price rose to $23 on the first day, meaning that Perot, who owned ten million shares in the company, became worth $230 million literally overnight. A year-and-a-half later, the share price peaked at $162.50—an extraordinary 50,000 percent of earnings—and Perot was now worth $1.5 billion. Since he had accumulated that wealth primarily by providing data services to the government in support of social programs, one wit noted he was America's first “welfare billionaire.”

By the 1970s (and especially by the 1980s), there were some who began to think that such spectacular success in business promised similarly spectacular results in public service. With government becoming ever more complex financially, there were also those who argued that government could and should be operated like a business. Meanwhile, as the attitude toward business was ascendant, the reputation of public service was in decline. A succession of calamities, among them the supposed shortcomings of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon's Watergate transgressions, and Jimmy Carter's warnings of a national malaise had badly discredited government. An indicator of the positive status of business in the public mind has historically been the election of a Republican president, and Carter was followed by Ronald Reagan, who declared government was no longer the solution to the nation's problems, but in large measure the cause. The answers to America's increasingly complicated problems (or so it appeared) now seemed to lie in the dynamic private sector as Americans were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the static political system.

One sign of that political disenchantment was that fewer Americans identified themselves as either Republicans or Democrats. The growing number of unaffiliated voters seemed to create an opening for candidates outside the two-party system. Since its peak in the late nineteenth century, partisan political affiliation has been in a steady decline, a decline Perot's candidacy would exacerbate. According to Gallup's annual surveys, in 1988, 36 percent of American voters identified themselves as Democrats, 33 percent as Republicans, and 31 percent as independents. By 1993, the year after the Perot campaign, 32 percent of Americans considered themselves Democrats, 30 percent Republicans, and 38 percent as independents.
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Political parties were not the only institutions to lose the confidence of many Americans. Experts and professionals of all stripes were no longer given the deference they had enjoyed in previous times. There was a growing belief that the opinion of experts had no more validity than that of any reasonably educated, thoughtful person. Conservative journalist William F. Buckley, himself a Yale graduate, captured the sentiment when he said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”

Deference to experts diminished also because more Americans were becoming better educated themselves. By the 1990s, two-thirds of adult Americans had attended at least some college and roughly one-third had earned a four-year degree. More importantly, new technologies allowed average citizens to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of information and have greater access to the public square. People who were used to being talked
to
could now talk
back
. After Perot would come the Internet and blogging, but shortly before Perot announced his candidacy, the rise of talk radio hailed the public's new respect for the opinions (informed or otherwise) of the average citizen.

Talk radio had its origins in New York City in the 1940s as a local phenomenon, but it got a huge boost in terms of tackling political content in 1987 when the Federal Communications Commission repealed the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Without the requirement that broadcasters provide free airtime for a response to any controversial opinion that had been aired on the station, the door was opened for “increasingly partisan discussions without rebuttal.” Rush Limbaugh began his first national broadcast in late 1988, and by late 1990 he was the most popular figure on radio. Like Perot, the message of Limbaugh and a host of primarily conservative commentators who commanded the airwaves was that average citizens, usually defined as their followers, needed to take back the country from an ineffectual elite.

Yet, even as modern society celebrated the wisdom of the common man in the finest Jeffersonian tradition, there was also a new fascination with the uncommon man or woman, the celebrity.
People
magazine had debuted in 1974, the first of a variety of magazines, television shows, and websites devoted to celebrating the art of being famous for being famous.
People
was such a publishing success that its focus on personality was soon being mimicked even by business magazines, such as
Forbes
and
Fortune
. In 1989, television shows focused on celebrity, such as
Inside Edition
and
Hard Copy,
made their debut.

Perot had begun his career at IBM as a salesman, and through the years he remained a salesman whose favorite product was Ross Perot, but he was still an odd candidate for celebrity. He was, as a
Newsweek
reporter described him, “a banty rooster of a man with question mark ears, a mangled nose, a barber-college haircut, and an East Texas drawl as thin and sharp as wine gone to vinegar.” His life story offers few clues as to what fueled his massive ambitions or his need for public recognition. He was born June 27, 1930, in Texarkana, Texas, the son of a successful cotton broker and a mother who was a devout Methodist. By all accounts, it was a loving home where Perot received plenty of attention from his parents. Physically small, Perot played few sports but expressed his competitive nature in other endeavors, such as being the first in his Boy Scout troop to attain the rank of Eagle Scout. Even as a teenager, a friend recalled, Perot had “a very healthy ego.”