Obituary: Ross Perot

Billionaire and eccentric H. Ross Perot, 89, who parlayed a modest investment into a billion-dollar corporation called ETS, being one of the few billionaires in the world at the time he made his first billion, has died.  He was also known as having run for president on the Reform Party ticket.  In 1992, he got 19 percent of the vote, which, contrary to myth, took more votes away from Bill Clinton than Bush because the vote for Perot was a vote against the incumbent Bush.

Perot might be best remembered as having made the statement of the "giant sucking sound," referring to NAFTA, in the 1992 presidential debate with fellow left-handers Bill Clinton and then-president George H.W. Bush:



He was right about NAFTA, but the die had been cast.  The neolibs carried the day, and they damaged the country with their idiotic trade policies.

New York Times:

He was born Henry Ray Perot on June 27, 1930, in the East Texas border city of Texarkana to Gabriel and Lulu May Ray Perot. His father was a cotton broker and a horse trader. The boy did well in local schools, but teachers said his good grades had more to do with persistence than with superior intelligence.

He began working at 7, selling garden seeds door to door and later breaking horses (and his nose) for his father at a dollar a head. When he was 12, he began delivering The Texarkana Gazette on horseback in poor neighborhoods, soliciting subscriptions and building his route from scratch for extra commissions. He did so well his boss tried to cut his commissions, but he backed off when the boy went to the publisher.

He changed his name to Henry Ross Perot in honor of a brother, Gabriel Ross Perot Jr., who died, just a toddler, in 1927. The family pronounced the surname PEE-roe, but in his 20s he changed that, too, making it puh-ROE, because, he said, he got tired of correcting people. He called himself Ross; years later, the news media added the initial “H” at the beginning of his name, but he never liked it.

He joined the Boy Scouts at 12 and in little more than a year was an Eagle Scout, an extraordinary achievement that became part of his striver’s legend. After two years at Texarkana Junior College, he won appointment to the United States Naval Academy, where, despite academic mediocrity, he was elected class president and graduated in 1953.

Perot might not have been book smart, but he was street smart.

He made another attempt at running for president in 1996, but he was shut out of the debates and garnered only 8 percent of the vote.