When Ross Perot Calls.
The former presidential candidate blasts John McCain, and gets an education
about Barack Obama‘s religion.
By Jonathan Alter | Newsweek Web Exclusive 

Jan 16, 2008 | Updated: 9:25 p.m. ET Jan 16, 2008

The phone rang and it was Ross Perot, who hasn’t given an interview in
years. Perot, who won 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential
election, making him one of the strongest third-party candidates in American
history, got straight to the point.

“Remember what you wrote about John McCain in the March 13, 2000, NEWSWEEK?”

“Sure,” I lied.

“When McCain called Perot ‘nuttier than a fruitcake’?”

The Texas billionaire, now 77, still has some scores to settle from the
Vietnam era, and his timing is exquisite. Just days before the South
Carolina GOP primary, he wants me to know that McCain “is the classic
opportunist–he’s always reaching for attention and glory. Other POWs won’t
even sit at the same table with him.”

Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime top aide, says the Arizona senator has plenty
of veteran support and many close friendships among other former POWs.

The Perot-McCain relationship goes back to McCain’s five and a half years of
captivity in Hanoi. When McCain’s then-wife Carol was in a serious car
accident, McCain’s mother called Perot for help. “She asked me to send my
people to Philadelphia to take care of the family,” Perot says. Afterwards,
McCain was grateful. “We loved him [Perot] for it,” McCain told me in 2000.

Perot doesn’t remember it that way. “After he came home, he walked with a
limp, she [Carol McCain] walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a
poster girl with big money from Arizona [Cindy McCain, his current wife] and
the rest is history.”

Perot’s real problem with McCain is that he believes the senator hushed up
evidence that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam and even transferred to
the Soviet Union for human experimentation, a charge Perot says he heard
from a senior Vietnamese official in the 1980s. “There’s evidence, evidence,
evidence,” Perot claims. “McCain was adamant about shutting down anything to
do with recovering POWs.”

Not surprisingly, McCain sees it differently. He has told me several times
over the years that the myth of live POWs was a cruel hoax on the families.
He chaired hearings into the issue in the 1990s and found nothing. “The
committee did an exhaustive job and pored over thousands of records and
every claim of a sighting, no matter how outlandish,” says Salter. “It was
all untrue.”

Perot says he intends to vote for Mitt Romney in the Texas Republican
primary on March 4, citing Romney’s experience in business and his family
values. “When I went to the Naval Academy and met my first Mormons I asked
why so many were excellent officers,” Perot recalls. “I learned it was
because of their strong family unit.”

When I asked about Barack Obama, Perot said he admired his eloquence but
thought it “a little odd that we would be less concerned about his
background than being a Mormon.” Perot was pleasantly surprised when I told
him that Obama was a Christian, not a Muslim, and relieved when I informed
him that the e-mail Perot (and untold others) received about Obama not
respecting the Pledge of Allegiance was a fraud.

Perot isn’t a Hillary hater, but he’s not a fan either, relating the bumper
sticker he received that reads: “Monica Lewinsky’s Ex-Boyfriend’s Wife for
President.”

The founder of a data-processing empire is still sharp in diagnosing what
ails the United States. “The situation in 1992 was not nearly as bad as it
is now,” he says. “If ever there was a time when it was necessary to put our
house in order, it’s now.

“It’s like having cancer and being in denial. The conduct of the House and
Senate is an embarrassment to the nation.” President Bush, Perot says, is a
“decent person, but you can’t say the same thing about the people around
him.”

Perot is appalled at the specter of big banks having to borrow from
foreigners to stay afloat: “We have to go around the world with a tambourine
and a tin cup.”

He attributes the success of China to the fact that even uneducated Chinese
must learn 3,000 characters early in life, compared to the 26 letters in the
English alphabet. “Their hand-eye productivity is incredible because of
drawing the symbols,” Perot says, noting that most of today’s Ph.D.s in
engineering are from China and India, and only a small percentage from the
United States.

Perot offers no easy solutions, instead emphasizing “a strong moral and
ethical base, strong homes and the finest schools.” He says he’s
disappointed that big textbook companies successfully lobbied in the Texas
state legislature to reverse his landmark school reforms.

The pint-size Texan with the funny voice and the big ears isn’t planning to
run for president again, but says he will launch a Web site next month with
plenty of the charts and graphs he made famous when explaining the deficit
in 1992.

Before hanging up, Perot asked me to read the books he recommended on live
POWs. I promised him I would.

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https://www.newsweek.com/id/94827

C 2008