TEMPERAMENTAL TYCOON

Then he explodes. “I think that’s just an absolutely irresponsible question to ask,” he snaps. “Absolutely irresponsible.” Silence. He keeps staring intently, as if he’s trying hard not to throw a punch. Verney is so convinced of his boss’s sanity that even to ask about it is repugnant to him, practically sacrilege. “Instead of talking about the ideas Ross Perot has,” Verney says, explaining why reporters ask questions like the one he just heard, “they call him crazy.”

Certainly Perot himself has made a compelling case that he is unbalanced, at various times charging unnamed villains with everything from slander to trying to disrupt his daughter’s wedding for political gain. During the third presidential debate in 1992-before millions of television viewers — Perot claimed that 20 years before, “the Vietnamese had sent people into Canada to make arrangements to have me and my family killed. The most significant effort they had one night is five people coming across my lawn with rifles.” As Perot later explained, the Communist insurgents were expelled from suburban Dallas by his own crack security team using only a German Shepherd, which “worked them like a sheep dog,” biting one of them as he ran off into the night. In retrospect, it is surprising Perot did not see the assassins with his own eyes since, as his former security consultant told the New York Times, Perot “would sometimes prowl the grounds himself, armed with an automatic rifle.”

Both the local police department and the FBI subsequently dismissed the Vietnamese-killers story as ridiculous. “It did not happen,” said the head of Dallas police intelligence. “If five members of the First Baptist Church with rifles had come onto his lawn, we would have found out about it.”

According to a number of people who have worked with and for him, it doesn’t end with assassins in the front yard. Ross Perot isn’t just kooky, he’s dictatorial and duplicitous. Nevertheless, if his Reform party gets off the ground in the 50 states (which is likely) and nominates him at its convention at the end of the summer (which is certain), Ross Perot could also be a significant factor in the 1996 presidential election.

To the world beyond his friends and employees in Dallas, the unpleasant side of Perot’s personality first became starkly obvious during his 1992 bid for president. Contrary to the myth he helped construct, Perot seems to have been interested in political power, even in the idea of running for president, long before he announced his intentions on the now-famous Larry King show in 1992. More than two decades ago, a Nixon aide wrote in a memo that Perot’s “major complaint” about the administration was that he was “never called by [the] president.” By the 1980s, Perot was talking about the pressure he had come under to make a bid for the White House. In 1987, it was an admiring Bill Clinton, then the chairman of the National Governors’ Association, who publicly urged Perot to run.

Forethought, however, is not the same as planning, and once in the race Perot soon discovered he could not control his diffuse and growing campaign, despite the fact it was being run largely by trusted acquaintances. (Some of the first organizers in the states were Perot’s former bodyguards.) Perhaps as a result, spreading from the top of the campaign downward, Perot ’92 became infected with a sometimes hysterical paranoia. One of the early victims of that paranoia was a middle-aged volunteer named Larry Way.

Way began working for Perot shortly after the Larry King appearance and in a short time became co-chairman of the campaign in his hometown of Frederick, Maryland. Way worked uneventfully as a volunteer for about six weeks until late April, when he was contacted by state headquarters in Annapolis and told he had been fired. The reason: Campaign officials had become convinced that Way was a high-ranking member of the Ku Klux Klan bent on committing acts of violence.

It is still unclear how this impression developed. Way, the owner of a home improvement business in his late 50s, hardly fits the profile of a dangerous politcal extremist. Plus, to observers of local politics, Way was not an unknown or sinister figure, having been the mayor of Burkittsville, Maryland, for eight years in the 1970s and a candidate for county commissioner in 1990. Yet days later, when he tried to retrieve belongings from his campaign office, Way was confronted by security guards hired by Perot headquarters in Texas and told he would be arrested if he returned.

Larry Way never went back to the campaign, but the campaign did not forget about him. In Dallas, the head of the Perot Petition Committee, Mark Blahnik, retained the Callahan & Gibbons Group, Inc., a private detective agency in San Francisco that also provided security for the Perot campaign (and which seems to have gone out of existence when Perot lost), to investigate Way. Blahnik’s instructions to the head of the agency, it was later revealed in a deposition, were to “do whatever he felt was appropriate” to uncover information about the former volunteer. Callahan & Gibbons did just that, hiring in turn two other private detective agencies, one in New York, one in Maryland. Before it was over, the investigation of Larry Way cost the Perot campaign a total of $ 18,000, more than $ 16,000 of it in billing hours. In a subsequent attempt at cover-up, the expenses were described in FEC filings as “legal fees.”

For its money, the Dallas headquarters got a fairly detailed accounting of Way’s life. In addition to tracking down his previous address and Social Security number, the investigators checked paternity records, his file at the Department of Motor Vehicles, and federal, state, and local law enforcement lists for evidence of a criminal history. (He had none.) An assignment sheet from Montgomery Investigative Services, the private detective agency in Maryland, has “RUSH!” written at the top of the page and describes the search into Way’s background as pertaining to a “criminal” case. Yet, as it turned out, there was nothing criminal about Larry Way. No evidence ever surfaced tying him to white supremacist groups.

Still, the Perot campaign remained unconvinced. Joan Vinson, the Perot official who fired Way (and who is now head of the Reform party in Maryland) continued to tell people, among them a local radio talk-show host, that Way was a bigot. And Way continued to be investigated. Acting on a tip from another Perot volunteer, Way called three different credit-reporting companies, including Equifax, to see if his credit history had been requested recently. In all three cases, it had (probably illegally, as it turns out).

Larry Way later sued Perot campaign officials, and Perot himself, on the grounds his privacy had been invaded. He lost when a judge decided it hadn’t. Other plaintiffs, however, may be luckier. Officials in Dallas have admitted hiring at least four different private detective agencies to investigate volunteers, and a number of those volunteers have filed suit. In one instance from the 1992 campaign, all 11 of Perot’s electors in the state of Missouri found their computer files had been searched by investigators retained by Dallas headquarters. Asked if the new Reform party will continue in the Perot tradition of management by private detective, Russell Verney replies cryptically, “I’m not going to prejudge that. Every circumstance brings out its course of action.”

Nor is Larry Way the only Perot worker to find himself the subject of strange allegations. Other volunteers say it is not uncommon for those who tangle with Dallas headquarters or its representatives in the states to be accused of embezzlement or sexual harassment. Still others have reported being pressured to sign “confessions” of their misdeeds. One former official in United We Stand America, the non-profit group Perot started after the 1992 campaign, was summoned before a gathering of his colleagues and humiliated after he made the mistake of arguing with a loyal Perot employee. His ostensible offense, denied by the alleged victim: groping a female member of Congress while appearing with her on a television show.

Stories like this help account for the paranoia one often encounters among people associated with Perot. Many volunteers for the Reform party are leery of being asked even the most simple questions; some won’t talk to the press at all without permission from Dallas headquarters. But there is another reason for the skittishness: One of the major tenets of the Perot faith holds that the media intentionally distort coverage of”Ross.” For Perot’s followers, it is a natural conclusion. Perot, they believe, is a threat to the cabal they call “The Establishment,” of which the mainstream press is a central conspirator. As one Reform party organizer in Omaha put it, explaining her unwillinness to speak to a reporter, “big corporations own almost all of the big media anymore and they have a slant that they want.”

This conspiratorial understanding of the press extends even — perhaps especially — to the Dallas head-quarters of the Perot organization. For instance, when comments that Perot made during a question-and-answer period after a speech at the National Press Club last year mysteriously failed to appear on C-SPAN, Perot employees knew exactly what had happened “I don’t think it is an accident,” campaign head Verney told volunteers at a meeting in April 1995. “Political operatives manipulate the information that you are exposed to.” And, Verney explained, that applies to C-SPAN, which is “not immune to political leaders calling them up and saying, “If you want access, make sure that this doesn’t happen.” In the world of Ross Perot, even Brian Lamb can end up looking like a political operative.

No one is more suspicious of the media than Perot himself, and since entering politics he has been particularly reluctant to grant interviews to print reporters. Instead, Perot prefers to appear on television — a medium he is better able to dominate and control — where the questions tions are apt to be softballs or at least easily ignored. As a matter of public relations it’s not a bad strategy. When Perot strays from it, the results can be embarrassing. Reporter Dan Balz of the Washington Post tried for longer than a year to secure an interview with the selectively reclusive billionare. Perot finally acquiesced last month, then proceeded to tell Balz a bizarre story — “You’re not going to believe this,” Perot cautioned-about how one of the two major political parties had “called up” in 1993 and asked him to donate $ 1 million for a “dirty tricks” campaign against the other. Needless to say, the heads of both parties vehemently denied having done any such thing, and Perot was forced to “clarify” his previous statement.

Perot doesn’t make the mistake of meeting with news outlets like the Washington Post often. Fortunately, you don’t need to talk to Ross Perot to catch a glimpse of his personality — it saturates everything he touches, particularly his two political organizations, United We Stand America and the Reform party.

A visit to the Reform party headquarters in Maryland one recent weekday shortly before noon found the spacious offces, located above an Italian restaurant in Annapolis, almost deserted. The sole occupant happened also to be the party’s one full-time employee in Maryland, state coordinator Joan Vinson. And yet the empty offce space still seemed full — of Ross Perot. As in his Dallas headquarters, Perot’s face appears everywhere, accessible from every vantage, peering forth from photos on the walls, grinning from the covers of books, handouts, and videotapes stacked on the shelves. A diminutive (but still life-size) cardboard cutout of the candidate stands in the corner, seemingly keeping watch. Strangest of all, the only other live human being in the offces, Joan Vinson, herself comes off as a kind of female Perot impersonator, punctuating her sentences with a nasal “Right? Right?” and holding forth on the evils of “the pundits” in Washington. Close your eyes as she speaks and you can almost hear Larry King in the background taking a call from Sioux City.

But it is more than Perot’s physical likeness that pervades his organizations. His control does, too. For a public persona rich in contradiction, this may be the greatest irony: that a man ostensibly committed to radical populism is also something of a dictator.

“I’m Ross, you’re the boss,” Perot is fond of saying, and it is clear that to his followers, this is the candidate’s strongest selling point. The Reform party’s platform, known as the “Principles of Reform,” calls among other things for the elimination of the Electoral College, which Perot considers a useless structure designed to keep citizens — “You, the owners of America” — from exercising real control. At the Reform party’s convention, which will be held at an undetermined location around Labor Day, party members will be able to put that principle into action by voting directly for their choice of presidential nominee (not that there is much question who will win), as well as for House and Senate candidates who will then receive the party’s endorsement. There will be no delegates at this convention. Reform party members who can’t make it to the event can cast their ballots electronically, though the Internet.

Democracy made pure by computers makes for great populist rhetoric. Yet it is not clear that Perot has ever been very attentive to the desires of his beloved People. In September 1992, the candidate, fears about his daughter’s wedding apparently assuaged, asked his followers to help him decide whether to rejoin the presidential race. To make the process easier, Perot advertised an 800 number that citizens could call to weigh in on the subject. Except, it turned out, there was no weighing in allowed. Those who dialed the number were simply thanked for calling, their calls taken as proof of their support for Perot.

Orson Swindle, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam who acted as Perot’s adviser and principal spokesman in the 1992 campaign, also found out the hard way what little interest his former boss has in dissenting opinions. Swindle, who now lives in Hawaii where he is running for Congress as a Republican, was invited to Dallas last August to speak at a convention held by United We Stand. Slated to sit on a panel that would discuss the idea of a third political party, Swindle was promptly bumped from the speakers list when it became clear that his views on the subject differed from Perot’s. His seat on the panel remained empty. “I had been asked to be there,” Swindle says, “but when I got there I was told, “Well, maybe not.'”

Evidence of his anti-democratic impulses notwith-standing, Perot was able shortly after the 1992 election to rally more than a million people to his United We Sand America organization, mostly on the promise that by joining him, they would increase their power in the political process. As the vast majority of them later found — the group’s membership has dropped to 100,000 or fewer — it didn’t turn out that way. When the will of the people contradicted his own, Perot simply bulldozed the people.

In October 1994, an offcial in the Florida chapter of United We Stand named Sally Bell polled members of the organization and asked which candidate they planned to vote for in the upcoming governor’s election. The results were definitive: By a large margin, Florida’s Perot voters preferred Republican Jeb Bush to incumbent Lawton Chiles. There was only one problem: Perot himself disagreed. A long-time enemy of the Bush family, Perot adamantly favored Chiles and at one point considered traveling to Florida to throw his weight behind the governor. (Around the same time, Perot also came out in favor of Texas governor Ann Richards in her race against Jeb Bush’s brother George W.) A bitter, if mostly silent, battle ensued between Perot headquarters in Dallas and the rank and file they purported to represent in Florida. It didn’t take long for Perot’s side — those insistent critics of ” dirty politics” — to get out the big guns.

Ten days before the election, members of the state’s United We Stand offce mailed the latest edition of the group’s newsletter, which contained the results of Sally Bell’s poll. Before postal workers could send them out, however, a Perot loyalist showed up at the Daytona Beach post office and demanded the newsletters. Intimidated employees in the bulk-mail department turned over all 8,000 copies, still in federal mail bags. Bob McNatt, the editor of the newsletter, managed to track down the stolen publications days later and re-mail them, though it is not clear whether they reached United We Stand members before the election.

Pat Muth, the Perot employee (and now Reform party coordinator for the state of Florid) who encouraged the confiscation of the newsletters, refuses to answer questions about the episode — and at one point refused even to acknowledge her own identity, pretending when reached by phone to be “just a volunteer who came to pick up a package.” Many members of United We Stand, fed up with Perot’s efforts to control “their” organization, didn’t wait around for confirmation of the episode. The Florida chapter all but disbanded shortly after the 1994 elections. “Perot turned out to be worse than the people he was fighting,” says Sally Bell.

Duane Schooley shares the sentiment. For 16 months, beginning in May 1994, Schooley, a 62-year-old delivery-business owner in Seattle, was the chairman of United We Stand in Washington state. By the winter of 1995, Schooley and some of his colleagues were curious about what was becoming of all the money their organization had raised. At $ 15 per membership — plus the brisk business United We Stand was doing in Perot-related paraphernalia such as posters, books, videos, pamphlets, and phone cards — there were many dollars to be accounted for. During a video-taped meeting at the Marriott Hotel in Seattle with Russell Verney, Schooley raised the question. “Basically, Verney told us it was none of our business — to go take a flying leap,” Schooley says. “We have never gotten an accounting of where the money went from an organization that was supposed to be ours.”

Anne Saucier, secretary of the United We Stand America chapter in Ohio, believes some of that money went to build the Reform party. Like many volunteers, Saucier is upset that United We Stand, a nonpartisan, tax-exempt organization, has been effectively transformed into a vehicle for Perot’s presidential ambitions. When Saucier saw that, in violation of federal election law, assets from United We Stand — “the databases, the personnel, all the equipment, the fax machines, telephones, Xerox machines” — were being used to build the Reform party (a charge confirmed by volunteers in other United We Stand offices), she and other volunteers filed a complaint. The FEC is now investigating.

In Dallas, Verney responds by claiming that Saucier, a 74-year-old retired social worker, is waging a campaign of “harassment.” “I don’t know who they’re operating on behalf of,” he says conspiratorially.

But it is Saucier who appears to feel harassed. Perot’s lawyers are now attempting to have her and her colleagues deposed, a process sure to be intimidating to retired volunteers. “People are very fearful of their phones” being tapped,” Saucier says. “Perot could teach dirty tricks to the Republicans and the Democrats.”

For all of Perot’s obvious flaws, many of his former followers are crestfallen when they find that he is unable to fulfill their desires or assuage their inadequacies. “When Perot says, ‘It’s not about me,’ trust me, it’s about him,” says Marilou Stanley, former state director of United We Stand in Arizona.

Russ Lucas, a 40-year-old Dallas machinist who once volunteered to man United We Stand’s computer system, is one of the sadder one-time Perotistas. Lucas says he stopped going to Perot headquarters when it dawned on him that the new Reform party was not an exercise in rejuvenating democracy, but just ” a platform for Perot to step up to the White House.”

Like others in his position, Lucas sounds a little like a veteran of cult deprogramming, as he describes the time he spent involved with Perot. When he first joined United We Stand in March 1992, Lucas says, “I was fresh out of a divorce. I was looking for something to do.” Before long, he was spending 20 hours a week at Perot headquarters . Yet despite all he was giving to the organization, Lucas insists, “I didn’t want anything back. I didn’t want any money. I felt bad about eating snacks there, to tell you the truth. They had me bad.” When he left, “I felt like there was a death in the family. I was really depressed. And there’re a lot of people like me.” Lucas stops speaking. The telephone connection has gone bad for a moment, and a buzzing sound comes over the line. “I hope that’s not Ross,” he says.

Of course, by comparison, Russ Lucas is in pretty good shape. Some of his former co-workers still haven’t caught on, and theirs may be most depressing plight of all. These are Perot’s true believers, for whom nothing Perot does or says, no matter how strange, seems amiss — or, if necessary, goes undefended.

These are people like Tom Overocker, a 48-year-old professional Reform party organizer from Virginia who quit his job as a real estate appraiser in 1992 after seeing Perot on Larry King. “Working for him has given me the freedom to do things that I never dreamed I could do,” says Overocker mistily. “I have a lot of faith in him.”

Or like Sharon Holman, Perot’s longtime spokes-woman, who seems almost bewildered when told that some people consider her boss’s story about Vietnamese soldiers on his front lawn a sign of mental illness “Why do they think that’s delusional?” she asks without a hint of sarcasm.

Of course, Perot’s political ventures have always drawn more than their share of the credulous. Orson Swindle remembers the 1992 campaign as being heavily populated by oddballs. The Republicans and Democrats, Swindle says he told Perot at the time, “have a party structure that does a pretty good job of keeping [such people] on the fringes. Our train came through town and they all jumped on it.”

One who never got off the train is the conductor himself, Ross Perot. Instead, Perot keeps chugging along, running his latest campaign, shaking up the dreaded establishment. And, as always, confusing those who listen closely to what he says. In late March, Perot made yet another addition to his growing list of statements to ponder when he told Larry King, “The last time I was on your show, we got 800,000 calls.”

It was quite a claim, considering that during the appearance on Larry King Perot was referring to — November 8, 1995 — the program had only 800, 000 viewers. On the other hand, details like how many calls Perot actually got don’t appear to bother followers like James Wilson, a retired volunteer who roans the phone bank at Reform party headquarters.

Wilson isn’t sure how many calls came in after Larry King. But he is sure he likes Ross Perot. Since August 1993, he has spent at least three days a week volunteering for the Cause. Though it is tempting to ask Wilson why one of the richest men in the world would rely on the free labor of lower- income people like him to achieve a vain personal ambition, it doesn’t seem like a very nice question under the circumstances. Wilson seems content enough. “We’re going to be the majority party,” he says hopefully. “If I didn’t think that, I wouldn’t be here.”

By Tucker Carlson