Octopus Overlords

H. Ross Perot, an eccentric Dallas billionaire whose two independent runs for president in the 1990s tapped into voters’ frustration with the major political parties and foreshadowed the rise of the tea party two decades later, died July 9 at his home in Dallas. He was 89.

The family announced the death in a statement but did not provide a cause.

The son of a politically connected cotton broker, Mr. Perot followed a long tradition of buccaneering Texas entrepreneurs. Following an unhappy stint in the peacetime Navy of the 1950s, he became a top salesman at IBM and was such an exhaustive peddler of computer hardware that he once met an annual sales quota in less than three weeks.

Mr. Perot went into business for himself in 1962 and made a fortune twice over, starting two software companies that each sold for billions of dollars. He received national attention for showering his largesse on efforts to aid or free U.S. hostages in conflict zones from Vietnam to Lebanon.

Most memorably, Mr. Perot claimed to have deployed a commando team to rescue two of his employees from an Iranian prison around the time of the revolution in 1979. According to participants and U.S. officials, the two, who had been jailed during the shah’s regime, actually were freed when revolutionaries opened the capital’s prisons, but the episode nevertheless played a sizable role in mythologizing Mr. Perot. It formed the basis of Ken Follett’s 1983 novel “On Wings of Eagles” and a subsequent TV movie.

dbt1949 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 09, 2019 12:46 pm I voted for him the first time. Instead we got Clinton.

dbt1949 wrote: ↑Tue Jul 09, 2019 12:46 pm I voted for him the first time. Instead we got Clinton.