POLITICS Out of Control

As Ross Perot’s poll numbers took off in the spring of 1992, Tom Luce and Mort Meyerson, Perot’slongtimefriends and advisers, decided to hire professional political consultants. They eventually settled on Hamilton Jordan, the Democratic consultant who had been Jimmy Carter’s campaign manager, and Ed Rollins, who was credited with Ronald Reagan’s suecessful re-election effort. Press secretary Jim Squires had misgwings about Rollins. Perot needed “self-effacing, anonymous guys… ” around him, Squires warned. “And Rollins was just the opposite. ” Luce also had mixed feelings about Rollins. “I was concerned about him being a leaker and about his judgment, ” he says. Rollins, too, had bis doubts-he feared that if he worked for Perot be could lose substantial Republican business in the future. Against that uncertain backdrop, one of the strangest presidential campaigns in history began to take shape.

BEFORE MEETING PEROT, Ed ROLLINS AND HAMILTON JORDAN again met with Tom Luce and Mort Meyerson, There, accord ing to Rollins, “we told them a final time what we needed to do to run a modern-day campaign. They didn’t have a pri mary, they didn’t have a political party, so to make up the dif ference, we talked in the neighborhood of a $150 million bud get. It was important that they begin an advertising campaign in June or July, and run it through the summer, to define him, since no one knew who he was. The potential with Perot was real, and the potential to win, given the unique set of circumstances in 1992, was very real. We were both very insistent that we did not want to be part of anything less than that, because it just wouldn’t work.”

However, Luce and Meyerson deny that Rolins or Jordan ever mentioned such a large sum. “Neither mentioned $150 million, never,” Luce says. ” No way. That statement is not true. If it had been mentioned, it would not have stopped the conversation, but I would have remembered it, and I would have thought that was crazy. Ross Perot didn’t get to be a billionaire by giving people blank checks.”

Instead, Meyerson and Luce tried to impress on the two professionals that they needed advice on how to run an unconventional campaign. Luce remembers saying, “You must understand that this will be an entirely different presidential campaign than has ever been run, and if you think you are going to prepare cue cards for Ross Perot, forget it.” Rollins and Jordan wondered whether Perot might still veto “their hiring, Yet, when they finally met for five hours, * Perot was gracious and likable. “He was in his saies mode, He agreed to everything,” Rollins remembers. “We put the $150 million figure on the table. ’I will spend whatever it takes,’ Perot said. ’I have never swam halfway across the-river.’ He said all the right things.

Rollins was impressed by Perot. “There was a Reagan quality to him and a Nixon quality to him, the two presidents I bad worked for. The Reaganesque quality was when he spoke of Americana and POWs. He started telling some of his great stories about these POWs, and he had obviously done some wonderful things. The Nixon part was the paranoia, the sort of ’They are out to get me,’ I can’t tell you precisely what it was, but there were little tilings that warned me even then about his paranoia-this whole thing, ’The Republicans are out to get me, the opposition research,’ and all this horseshit. Then we spent some time talking about my wife; he was very concerned about that.”

Perot also said several things that led Rollins to believe that Perot had had him investigated prior to the meeting. “He talked about my health, and no one really knew much about my health,” says Rollins. “I had a stroke in 1982. He talked about my first marriage, and said, ’You’ve already had one failed marriage; we wouldn’t want you to damage this one.’ No one, anywhere, knew about my first marriage. It happened before I came to Washington; you would just never have found it in the Lexis/Nexis clips. No one thought of me as someone divorced.”

But Perot told Rollins and Jordan they could run a campaign that might change political history. They left feeling comfortable with their decision to come aboard. They were not aware that Perot was not especially impressed with either of them. Less than a week later, Rollins further dampened any enthusiasm Perot may have had when he appeared on a Sunday morning television show talking about his new job. “He didn’t clear that with Perot first, ” says Jim Squires, “and Perot was on the phone chewing him out and critiquing his performance immediately.”

“Rollins ignored direct instructions,” says Luce. “He had agreed not to go on television. Then he goes right on and purports to speak for Ross Perot. Ross said, ’I am not going to have Rollins speak for me when he doesn’t know me from Adam. He doesn’t know what I think, He doesn’t know what I say.’ “

It almost made Perot feel that he had made a mistake by agreeing to any professionals coming aboard. ” I should have said absolutely no [to their hiring], ” he says. “Within three days after [Rollins] was on board, I felt it was a serious mistake and wondered if he was really on board to represent me.” (Meyerson later told Rollins that he had considered the possibility that Rollins was a “double agent” for the Republicans. When I asked Perot if he thought Rollins could have been a plant, he was firm: “Of course. A plant? No team could have been that destructive by chance.”)



Perot’s uneasiness worsened when other political professionals began joining the team, among them Charlie Leonard, a young adviser at the political con-sultingfirm of Sawyer-Miller, who had been the campaign director for the House Republicans in the 1990 elections. Leonard quickly clashed with Mark Blahnik, Perot’s personal security chief and man Friday, who had been responsible for the field operations. Also joining the effort were Sal Russo and Tony Marsh, two of the Republican Party’s most experienced media consultants, and Boh Barkin, a media strategist. None were initially aware that many of the volunteers who had flocked to the Perot effort feared that their arrival would further stifle the grass-roots spirit and turn the campaign into a traditional one.



PEROT, ONLY DAYS AFTER THEY WERE hired, tried to downplay any excitement about the professionals, as well as reassure his core supporters, in an interview with CNN’s “Morning News,” “Tom and Mort felt it would be wise to get the two best people in the business….[but] this will not be a conventional campaign. What we’re trying to do is get the talent in here to make sure we can deliver on my commitment to run a world-class campaign. They will not be my handlers. They will not get me up in the morning, dress me, give me words to say, tell me what to do and where to go. That’s not their role. Their role is to bring the experience of what’s involved in the massive campaign, in terms of getting it organized, and making it work. “

The day of Rollins’ arrival, he had scrawled two words on a blackboard: HOPE and KOOK. “This is our challenge,” he told Charlie Leonard. “Depending on what we do here, is how Perot will emerge from this campaign.” That night Leonard and Rollins had dinner. “Charlie started to tell me the horror stories of what had happened that week [with Blahnik] and it emphasized to me that this thing might be going nowhere,” says Rollins. “I had bad vibes from that first day. “

Rollins soon found that he could not easily get answers from Luce and Meyerson about what Perot wanted to do. Perot often would not talk directly to the professionals, but instead only through his trusted aides,

“And nobody really had the ability to go to Ross and talk to him straight,” says Joe Canzeri, a Republican advance man who came to the campaign in early June. “The only two who could do it were Meyerson and Luce, but they had the least campaign knowledge.”

There was also a problem in that Meyerson admittedly had no interest in politics.

“What do you think of this?” Leonard asked Meyerson at a dinner party.

“Not much.”

Leonard, knowing that Mort Meyerson considered himself a renaissance man, interested in philosophy and history, rephrased the question: “I mean, the campaign, the per-spective in terms of politics and this moment in history. “

“I could care less about politics,” Meyerson told him. “I rarely read a newspaper and I don’t vote.”

“You are kidding me,” said a startled Leonard. “You’ve got to be joking.”

“I’m not kidding.”

But while the professionals had early complaints about the Perot team, Luce and Meyerson were also displeased with their new consultants. “I thought Ed and Hamilton did a disservice to Ross,” says Luce. “They had no campaign plan. Ross Perot is a very businesslike guy. He kept saying, ’Give me the plan.’ And I would tell them, ’Guys, that is not the way you deal with Perot. You must give him a specific proposal. He is not going to give you a blank check. You must give him a proposal.’ “

But there were actually several early suggestions by Rollins that Perot rejected. One was to send personal thank-yous to the people who had called in to Perot headquarters. “They had 4 to 5 million names, all volunteers who wanted to get out and do something for them,” says Rollins. He told Perot that the campaign should mail a package to each volunteer, thanking them for their support, asking them if they wanted issue papers to give to their friends, and checking on whether they would make phone calls, put up signs, and do other campaign jobs.

“You mean like the junk mail that comes across my desk?” Perot asked Rollins. “I don’t read that crap.”

“If it comes from you they will read it,” said Rollins. “We will put a certificate in there, and they will , not only read it-they will save it. ” ;

“What will this cost me?”

“Maybe 50 to 60 cents each.”

“Well, that’s just a waste of ; money, spending $2 million to $3 million. That’s just a waste.”

“But you would be getting 3 million people working for you,” Rollins implored.

“I won’t spend that type of money to say thank you. Forget it.”

But the more serious issue that immediately confronted Rollins and the rest of the professionals was to change the way Perot dealt with the media, which angered many journalists. Rollins told Perot that in order to stem the tide of negative stories, it was best to feed the press some fluffier pieces so that they kept busy. The fact that Squires was largely ignoring media requests was another part of the problem. Rollins wanted to handle the press directly, but Squires kept that responsibility.

“That was a major mistake,” says Rollins, “because Squires, who had been a young star at the Chicago Tribune, was bitter because he had been fired. He had this tremendous resentment toward television, the new press, and the modem campaign. He basically would leak shit to his buddies from the Watergate era and piss all over everybody else. The new generation just drove him nuts. And the whole idea of manipulating the press, which he considered people like me to want to do, was just so foreign to him, The reality of it is that they are going to write a story, and you basically have to get them to try and write your story. Squires didn’t want to do that, nor did Perot.”

Almost all of the professionals thought Squires was wrong for the press job, but the most important opinion belonged to Perot. He liked the way Squires dealt with the press.

“The press was going to chew Perot up any way you dealt with them,” says Squires. “Do you chew him long-distance, or do you chew him up close? It would have been a pipe dream to think you would avoid all that bad coverage. The Washington axis, the Elizabeth Drews, Bill Safires, the Katherine Graham group basically thought Perot was a dangerous man. And Perot had a temper, he’s a volatile kind of guy, and having the press in close proximity to him was inviting disaster.”

“Perot has a mistrust of the media in general,” says former television anchor Murphy Martin, a longtime friend of Perot. “Rollins did not understand that.”

Realizing he could not generate better stories by having Perot change his dealings with the media, Rollins then proposed that Perot start running television advertisements in June to counter the largely Republican efforts to negatively identify him. “When I went into public life,” says Perot, “I had to be redefined [by the major parties] because the person they denned in private life would have been an attractive candidate.”

The problem was deciding when the commercials would run. “Perot was convinced that elections are decided in the last 30 days,” says Squires. “Voters don’t pay attention until then.” Perot refused to budge, despite repeated entreaties from Luce and Meyerson. “I never succeeded in getting Ross to sign off on the strategy that I thought was winnable,” says Luce, “I was pushing very hard to go on television, to define Ross before the Republicans could define him….Perot had it in his mind that that approach was politics….”

Hamilton Jordan, as eager as Rollins to run early ads, put together rough cuts of some biographical segments in the hope of convincing Perot that advertisements could be a valuable tool. When Jordan made his presentation, Ross hated them, especially die way his wife Margot appeared, and that his days at the Annapolis naval academy had been virtually ignored. Suddenly,jordan discovered howvolatile Perot could be. “Mort Meyerson and I came into the meeting late,” recalls Rollins, “and Perot was yelling and screaming at Hamilton, calling him unprofessional and incompetent. Perot was really going nuts.”

Jordan went back to his office, where he had an anxiety attack. “I walked in on him,” says Rollins, “and thought he was having a heart attack. ’Ed, I have never been talked to like this. Jimmy Carter and I had differences of opinion, but nobody has ever yelled and screamed at me and treated me like a piece of shit. I am leaving, I won’t take it.”

The next morning, Jordan told Luce he was leaving. He asked Rollins to leave with him, but Ed told him no, that he had formed a team and felt an obligation to them. By midday, Luce and Meyerson had talked Jordan out of resigning. “I didn’t want to beseenjumpingship,”Jordan later said. He largely stayed away from the office for two weeks, calling Charlie Leonard two or three times a day for a briefing, and occasionally dropping in. Even after his full-time return, the other professionals noticed that Jordan stayed quiet in most conflicts, instead using Rollins as his proxy.

But Jordan’s treatment convinced Rollins mat he would rather leave than be spoken to the same way. His already fragile relationship with Perot was soon further strained. “See, I wouldn’t take it,” Rollins says. “When I started, I had told him I was not a yes man, but a street fighter who had worked for three presidents. ’I don’t take any shit from anybody. I am going to tell you exactly what you need to hear, and you may not like it, but you have got to know it is what I think is best for you.’ He told me that’s what he wanted. It turned out, of course, that he didn’t like it. A couple of times, shortly after the Jordan incident, he started yelling and screaming at me, and I said, ’I am not going to be treated like one of your busboys here. If you want me out of here, then I’ll leave, but I am not going to tell you that you are right when you are wrong.’ “

“But the key, by then,” says Luce, “is that Rollins is out. Perot isn’t paving one minute of attention to what he is proposing. Perot has already written him off within the first two weeks. “

Although Perot rejected ideas from Rollins and Jordan regarding press relations, he continued to field television producers’ calls on his own and, without telling anyone else in the campaign, would suddenly fly off to appear on a show. One of the most frequent was the “Today” show, on which he appeared seven times, once for the entire two hours.

“We would say, ’Where is Perot?’ and then turn on the TV and find him on ’Today,’ ” recalls Squires. “He thought that was better than paying for commercials. There was one producer on NBC who could always talk Perot into going on. And there were half a dozen others- Ted Koppel could always get to Perot, Jack Nelson from the Los Angeles Times could always get through, and so could Bob Woodward. And, of course, Larry King.”

Although Perot paid little attention to the Rollins group, he did become preoccupied with the growing number of negative stories about him in the press. There were reports that he had investigated President Bush and his sons; that he used private detectives against competitors and employees; that he benefited at public expense over Alliance Airport; that he had threatened to “nuke” General Motors; and that he had blown up a coral reef at his Bermuda home so he could dock his boat closer to his house. “You could not believe the amount of time he would spend trying to track down the sources of those stories,” says Rollins. “And the crazier the story, the more it bothered him. The coral reef made him go ballistic.’’

At times the campaign could be diverted by trivial issues. Liz Noyer, a Republican media consultant who arrived in July, was surprised at how much time was wasted on such issues. “For instance, reporters would call and ask, ’Does he wear boxers or briefs?’ ” she says. “Then there would be a two-hour discussion about it. ’Don’t talk to this person, we are not allowed to talk about it,’or’You can’t ask him about it.’ ’The amount of time wasted on a non-issue like that was the same as given every other issue-all issues seemingly had the same gravity, except that personal issues were the highest priority.’’

Rollins and Jordan were concerned that since Perot would not allow them to run a television campaign ?promote his image, the unanswered press stories would be hard to counter prior to the election. In fact, Perot actually blamed the professionals for the poor press. He told them that he had received only good coverage before they arrived. “He did not understand that it took a couple of months for the press to take him seriously and start the investigations that were now resulting in stories,” says Rollins,

Rollins brought in a prominent television adman from San Francisco, Hal Riney, in the hope of building a positive Perot image. Rollins and his team remained convinced that if Perot was shown the right material, he would go along with an early ad campaign. Riney had done the “Morning in America” series for Ronald Reagan, as well as the critically acclaimed series for GM’s Saturn. There were almost a dozen commercials planned for the Perot campaign.

Perot, meanwhile, wanted to see a detailed budget for the entire campaign. Charlie Leonard worked on it, and used the $150 million figure that Rollins considered critical. While preparing the budget, Leonard discovered that campaign spending was “out of control- they had no idea of what was going on. ” He found that campaign workers were renting offices, buying computers, leasing phone Unes, and hiring workers without checks and balances.

“I knew how bad it was when we had a meeting of the field people, about 40 of them,” says Leonard. “My first clue was, we were at a hotel and took a break, standing in front of a bank of pay phones. They were all on their cellular phones. I went back and asked for die cellular bills, and we had a kid who had a $30,000 cell-phone bill in one month I brought it to Mort Meyerson, and he flipped.”

Leonard, not wanting to upset Perot with too large a figure, devised the first budget so that some costs were hidden. Among them was the expense of die nearly 75 professionals who had come onto the staff by the third week in June. Another was the hiring of a pollster, former Pat Buchanan bean counter Frank Luntz. The pros needed polling data, and wanted Luntz to do in-depth focus groups in New York. Perot was against both, so although Perot knew Luntz worked for him, he did not want to know the specifics.

Leonard’s budget had general figures and categories, including $60 million for an ad campaign, $13 million for direct mail, and other large sums for regional phone banks, satellite uplinks, staff and travel. It was presented to Perot by Luce, Meyerson and Rollins in the second week of June. Perot hit the ceiling. He want ed to eliminate some parts of the campaign (like the group working on issue papers) and wanted to know why other things, such as a fund-raising plan, were not included. Rollins thought it a poor idea for a billionaire to solicit contributions, but Perot wanted everyone “to get a little skin into the game.”

“Perot had this feeling we were trying to rip him off or something,” says Rollins. “It was very strange. And meanwhile, Luce and Meyerson, who said, ’Don’t worry, we’ll translate for you and get Ross’ approval,’ were useless on this one.”

Former EDS executives Bill Gayden and Tom Walter came in to help Leonard completely redraft the budget and put it in terms Perot would accept. “Gayden and Walter told me how nutty Ross is with money,” recalls Leonard, “that he doesn’t understand money, and he doesn’t understand budgets. They said, ’Your work is thorough, but it’s not the way to sell it to Ross.’ ” Instead of presenting Perot a budget for the entire campaign, they brought it to bare bones and calculated it for just 45 days. Advertising was broken away from the ￡ main numbers and placed g into its own category. Even without advertising, it was close to $40 million. Gayden and Walter pitched it to Perot, and got it approved.

Perot’s antagonusm toward the professional staff was growing. “You’ve got more damn desks in here than the Pentagon,” Perot mumbled on one of his infrequent visits to the campaign floor. “Perot used to be in the headquarters every day, and then started coming in less frequently,” says Sal Russo. “Then he would just come in for meetings, and then he had the meetings at his office. He became more estranged and distant, almost on a daily basis. You could sense that things were going straight downhill. Plus the fact that every single day he was rejecting ideas one after the other. Every day it was a new batch of rejections. You couldn’t get a decision made.”

Meanwhile, the professionals were increasingly bypassing Luce, the campaign chairman, and appealing instead to Meyerson for help in dealing with Perot. “Ultimately, we were all reduced to using Mort,” says Squires. “We all agreed that Mort was the only one that could have any influence with him. Tom got really undercut and hurt during this campaign. Even Tom started relying on Mort.”

Not even Meyerson, though, was able to resolve the impasse over the question of the advertisements. So Rollins took Ross Perot Jr. to dinner and enlisted his help. Ross Jr. went to his father and tried to persuade him to accept Riney’s ideas and start an early ad campaign. “All that happened,” says Squires, “was that Ross chewed out Ross Jr. and banned him from the campaign and told him to stay the hell out of it. Ross Jr. didn’t come back until the fall. And once you manipulate Ross’ children, you are a dead man. Boy, they killed themselves.”

The professionals sat there daily with nothing to do. “The work area had no buzz,” says Liz Noyer, “as opposed to any other campaign headquarters I had worked in. It was sterile-no camaraderie, and a general feeling that people were just spinning their wheels. ” Still, they met daily, and continued planning an entire campaign, down to the schedules, appearances, and the platform and issues. The campaign had been mapped out through the end of August, Perot appearances were settled into early October. “We did it to occupy ourselves,” says Bob Barkin. “That’s how bad it was. Ed would say we were all going to get fired, and we would say, ’Please God, sooner rather than later.’ “

“We would get weekly summations of each candidate’s electoral votes potentials,” recalls Barkin. On Friday, June 25, Perot had 408 electoral votes. Barkin looked at Rollins. “My God, we are going to elect this guy president.”

Rollins did not even look up from his paperwork. “Do we really want to?” he asked.

As the atmosphere worsened, the professionals began to feel that the heavy security at the campaign headquarters might be directed against them. “We all thought our phones were tapped,” says Charlie Leonard. “We heard clicking on our phones. There were always security people walking around. Blahnik told me that Perot would not have Secret Service protection because they all worked for the White House and the Secret Service was close to the CIA. I heard all the time from the Perot people that Rollins was a Republican plant. It got kind of spooky.” (Leonard actually tried to obtain a device to check if the phone lines were tapped.)

Sal Russo, who had been around every presidential campaign since the 1960s, could not remember any with such stringent security. “Every time you turned around you had to carry cards or talk to someone for permission to go anywhere.”

“These guys with Ross Perot haircuts,” says Bob Barkin, “and white shirts and polyester ties, and carrying cellular phones and walkie-talkies, would always be in the comer of your vision, walking around, lurking around. They never said anything. You always felt like you were being watched. Who knows what they did?”

At the end of June, Rollins decided to bring the unsettded issues to a head with Perot. He asked Leonard to give him one page on the major outstanding problems. Leonard turned in a single-spaced typewritten page with 10 issues. Among them were “No Strategy” and “Decision Making Too Cumbersome.” Sal Russo prepared his own three-page sheet of issues that had to be resolved quickly.

Rollins thought Perot was at a critical juncture and that the top priority was still to convince him that he had to start running advertisements, and almost immediately. Much to Rollins’ frustration, Perot had begun relying for media advice on Murphy Martin, the former news anchor who had known Perot since the 1969 Christmas trip to Vietnam and now had his own media consulting business in Dallas. Rollins thought Martin was “clearly in over his head.” But Perot liked Martin and trusted his opinion.

On Thursday, July 9, Rollins and Riney met with Perot. Murphy Martin was there. Riney started presenting his concept for the campaign commercials, when Perot interrupted him.

“What does it cost to make one of these things?” he asked.

“Well, it depends. You don’t just go out and shoot rallies,” Riney told Perot. “First, you have a meeting and talk about concepts. Then you write a script, and then I bring in storyboards. At that point, we sign off on the concepts. Then we go out and shoot film and then take film and try and edit it. That’s the way we do it. So it depends on all that goes into that,”

“So you can’t tell me then what one costs?”

“Well, we just shot 15 commercials for Saturn, and it cost $12 million. So I would say the commercials you see on television are $400,000 to $800,000. The top-notch ones are a million to a million and a half.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous,” said Perot, waving his hand as if to dismiss Riney. “That’s not at all what I had in mind.”

“But you asked me what a commercial could cost,” Riney said, “and lam telling you.”

“Could you make them for $80,000 to $100,000?”

“Sure, I could probably make one for that. It depends on what you want to create and what type of impact you want to have, “

“Could you do one for $5,000?”

“If that s what you wanted. I could go down to a store, get a Betamax, shoot you, and that’s it. Is anyone going to watch it or care? Probably not.”

Murphy Martin says that Perot had told him before the meeting that he intended to fire Riney. And now he did.

“Hal, I appreciate all you have done, but I don’t think we need to go down this road any further. You are trying to put me in a Rolls-Royce and I want to be in a Volkswagen.”

Then Perot turned toward Martin. “Murphy, what can you get local crews for?”

“Well, I can get them for $1,500 to $1,800 a day [Riney had told Perot his crews would cost up to$175,000 a day]. They aren’t the Cecil B. DeMiUes, but they are good.”

Rollins and Riney were taken aback. “Riney’s eyes popped open,” recalls Martin. “Rollins tried to say that something could be worked out, but it was too late. The handwriting was on the wall for Rollins.”

As they walked back to their offices, a glum Rollins told Riney, “Tell your kids this is the day the Perot campaign ended.”

The day after Perot dismissed Riney, he left for Lansing, Mich., where volunteers were to turn in the petitions that would place Perot on their state ballot. Squires had convinced Perot that it was possible to control the press coverage if the campaign developed specific issues for appearances like the one in Michigan. Lansing was the test case. Squires developed a theme (Perot always wrote his own speeches) for a car-producing state: “Japan should give us the same deal we are giving them, and we would make Detroit the No. 1 auto city in the world again. * Squires ensured that a copy of the speech was given to the press beforehand, with the hope that subject would dominate reporters’ questions.

At the end of a day of rallies with his volunteers, Perot returned to the airport. Advance man Joe Canzeri had arranged for the press corps to be on the side of the tarmac. Perot refused to stand on an X marked for him on the ground. He walked over to the reporters, expecting they would talk about the auto business. The very first question was from Morton Dean of ABC News, who wanted a comment about a New York Times story concerning Perot’s policy on gays. Perot was furious, would not answer any more questions, and got on his plane to return to Dallas.

“That is the day it all came apart,” says Jim Squires. “If you are looking for the incident or the time when the real Perot comes into conflict, a direct conflict, with the managed candidate Perot, it was on that tarmac in Michigan. And we were gone from that moment on. We did not have a chance after that.”

Perot was so angry that the next day, Saturday, July 11, he flew to Nashville on his own for a speech to the NAACP. Squires was accustomed to getting calls from Perot while he was en route to his next engagement. “But he didn’t call that day,” remembers Squires. “He was mad at Eddie and Mort and Canzeri, and he went off to Nashville and did his own thing. ” In that speech, Perot referred to his black audience as “you people” and told them how they could help “your people. ’ Although the NAACP and prominent black spokesmen like Jesse Jackson tried to play down the incident, it was an embarrassment that prompted Perot to issue a statement the same day from Dallas saying he had meant no offense.

“We sat around and watched the NAACP talk,” remembers Charlie Leonard, “and it confirmed to all of us that this guy is just not going to listen to anyone. He is not going to let anyone write a speech. He is just going to keep doing it his way until he implodes. It was the final straw that broke the camel’s back after 20 Jitde events that led up to it.” Rollins turned to the group of professionals and said, “We’ve got to figure a way out of here.”

On July 10, the same day as the Lansing incident, Rollins had submitted a memo to Perot listing three options: to run a proper campaign; to continue his current pattern, in which case he did not need Rollins and Jordan; or to quit. Meyerson responded to Rollins’ memo to Perot: “He is not going to do it your way, and he is not going to quit. “

On the Sunday, July 12 talk shows, there was considerable discussion that either Rollins or Jordan would soon leave. The next day. The Wall Street Journal reported that Riney had been dismissed. Perot blamed Rollins for the leak. On July 15, Perot met with Luce and Meyerson in the morning. When the two left Perot, they went to a lunch they had scheduled with Rollins. Rollins expected that either the meeting would result in a breakthrough or he would be finished. Bob Barkin wrote in his notes: “D-Day.”

The purpose of the lunch wasactually to fire Rollins. “Ed, you know, we’re swimming upstream,” said Tom Luce. “You’re miserable. This isn’t working. You’re having no impact. The campaign is in two armed camps. Perot will not listen to you. It’s best if you leave.’ “

“It was not confrontational,” recalls Meyerson. “Rollins did not throw a temper tantrum. Instead, he said, ’You guys don’t know what you are doing, you surround yourselves with losers, you don’t get it. I am a professional.’ We told him that we would work something out with him but that we didn’t want him going around bad-mouthing Ross. ’We would not feel good about being nice to you, helping you in your personal situation, if meanwhile you turned around and lobbed grenades at us.’ He understood that.”

When Rollins returned to campaign headquarters, he gathered his staff together to tell them that he was finished. Within a few minutes, the main area on their floor filled with security people. “It was like the Gestapo had swept down on us,” recalls Bob Barkin. “It was incredible. One minute they weren’t there, and the next moment they had swept in and somebody was standing over each of our shoulders. Rollins’ secretary came running in, in tears, saying that some guy wanted to get what was in Ed’s computer.”

“They came around and started confiscating people’s papers and turning off computers,” says Liz Noyer. “My computer had been turned off, and I wasn’t at it. When I asked what had happened, some security fellow said I had been neutered. And they were trying to turn off some of the phones.”

Reporters were calling to obtain a comment on the rumor that Rollins was gone, but they could not even reach the answering machines. Charlie Leonard ran into Tom Luce’s office, yelling, “This is an outrage! ” Luce was genuinely surprised. As he tried to put a stop to it, Joe Canzeri walked up and down the aisles. Rolling a piece of paper into a makeshift megaphone, he barked, “They’re boarding the buses for Buchenwald. They are taking us to Buchenwald.” Tony Marsh stood on the side laughing. Jim Squires just glared from his office.

The next day, July 15, Ross Perot withdrew from the presidential race.