at the age of thirty-nine; Bill Lawrence was a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. Perot found it hard to watch his country, the greatest country in the world, losing a war because of lack of will, and even harder to see millions of Americans protesting, not without justification, that the war was wrong and should not be won. Then, one day in 1969, he had met little Billy Singleton, a boy who did not know whether he had a father or not. Billy's father had been missing in Vietnam before ever seeing his son: there was no way of knowing whether he was a prisoner, or dead. It was heartbreaking.
For Perot, sentiment was not a mournful emotion but a clarion call to action.
He learned that Billy's father was not unique. There were many, perhaps hundreds, of wives and children who did not know whether their husbands and fathers had been killed or just captured. The Vietnamese, arguing that they were not bound by the rules of the Geneva Convention because the United States had never declared war, refused to release the names of their prisoners.
Worse still, many of the prisoners were dying of brutality and neglect. President Nixon was planning to 'Vietnamize' the war and disengage in three years' time, but by then, according to CIA reports, half the prisoners would have died. Even if Billy Singleton's father were alive, he might not survive to come home.
Perot wanted to do something.
EDS had good connections with the Nixon White House. Perot went to Washington and talked to Chief Foreign Policy Advisor Henry Kissinger. And Kissinger had a plan.
The Vietnamese were maintaining, at least for the purposes of propaganda, that they had no quarrel with the American people--only with the U.S. government. Furthermore, they were presenting themselves to the world as the little guy in a David-and-Goliath conflict. It seemed that they valued their public image. It might be possible, Kissinger thought, to embarrass them into improving their treatment of prisoners, and releasing the names, by an international campaign to publicize the sufferings of the prisoners and their families.
The campaign must be privately financed, and must seem to be quite unconnected with the government, even though in reality it would be closely monitored by a team of White House and State Department people.
Perot accepted the challenge. (Perot could resist anything but a challenge. His eleventh-grade teacher, one Mrs. Duck, had realized this. 'It's a shame,' Mrs. Duck had said, 'that you're not as smart as your friends.' Young Perot insisted he was as smart as his friends. 'Well, why do they make better grades than you?' It was just that they were interested in school and he was not, said Perot. 'Anybody can stand there and tell me that they could do something,' said Mrs. Duck. 'But let's look at the record: your friends can do it and you can't.' Perot was cut to the quick. He told her that he would make straight A's for the next six weeks. He made straight A's, not just for six weeks, but for the rest of his high school career. The perceptive Mrs. Duck had discovered the only way to manipulate Perot: challenge him.)
Accepting Kissinger's challenge, Perot went to J. Walter Thompson, the largest advertising agency in the world, and told them what he wanted to do. They offered to come up with a plan of campaign within thirty to sixty days and show some results in a year. Perot turned them down: he wanted to start today and see results tomorrow. He went back to Dallas and put together a small team of EDS executives who began calling newspaper editors and placing simple, unsophisticated advertisements that they wrote themselves.
And the mail came in truckloads.
For Americans who were pro-war, the treatment of the prisoners showed that the Vietnamese really were the bad guys; and for those who were antiwar the plight of the prisoners was one more reason for getting out of Vietnam. Only the most hard-line protesters resented the campaign. In 1970 the FBI told Perot that the Viet Cong had instructed the Black Panthers to murder him. (At the crazy end of the sixties this had not sounded particularly bizarre.) Perot hired bodyguards. Sure enough, a few weeks later a squad of men climbed the fence around Perot's seventeen-acre Dallas property. They were chased off by savage dogs. Perot's family, including his indomitable mother, would not hear of him giving up the campaign for the sake of their safety.
His greatest publicity stunt took place in December 1969, when he chartered two planes and tried to fly into Hanoi with Christmas dinners for the prisoners of war. Of course, he was not allowed to land; but during a slow news period he created enormous international awareness of the problem. He spent two million dollars, but he reckoned the publicity would have cost sixty million to buy. And a Gallup poll he commissioned afterward showed that the feelings of Americans toward the North Vietnamese were overwhelmingly negative.
During 1970 Perot used less spectacular methods. Small communities all over the United States were encouraged to set up their own POW campaigns. They raised funds to send people to Paris to badger the North Vietnamese delegation there. They organized telethons, and built replicas of the cages in which some of the POWs lived. They sent so many protest letters to Hanoi that the North Vietnamese postal system collapsed under the strain. Perot stumped the country, giving speeches anywhere he was invited. He met with North Vietnamese diplomats in Laos, taking with him lists of their prisoners held in the south, mail from them, and a film of their living conditions. He also took a Gallup associate with him, and together they went over the results of the poll with the North Vietnamese.
Some or all of it worked. The treatment of American POWs improved, mail and parcels began to get through to them, and the North Vietnamese started to release names. Most importantly, the prisoners heard of the campaign--from newly captured American soldiers--and the news boosted their morale enormously.
Eight years later, driving to Denver in the snow, Perot recalled another consequence of the campaign--a consequence that had then seemed no more than mildly irritating, but could now be important and valuable. Publicity for the POWs had meant, inevitably, publicity for Ross Perot. He had become nationally known. He would be remembered in the corridors of power--and especially in the Pentagon. That Washington monitoring committee had included Admiral Tom Moorer, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Alexander Haig, then assistant to Kissinger and now the commander in chief of NATO forces; William Sullivan, then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and now U.S. Ambassador to Iran; and Kissinger himself.
These people would help Perot get inside the government, find out what was happening, and promote help fast. He would call Richard Helms, who had in the past been both head of the CIA and U.S. Ambassador to Tehran. He would call Kermit Roosevelt, son of Teddy, who had been involved in the CIA coup that put the Shah back on the throne in 1953 ...
But what if none of this works? he thought.
It was his habit to think more than one step ahead.
What if the Carter administration could not or would not help?
Then, he thought, I'm going to break them out of jail.
How would we go about something like that? We've never done anything like it. Where would we start? Who could help us?
He thought of EDS executives Merv Stauffer and T. J. Marquez and his secretary Sally Walther, who had been key organizers of the POW campaign: making complex arrangements halfway across the world by phone was meat and drink to them, but ... a prison break? And who would staff the mission? Since 1968 EDS's recruiters had given priority to Vietnam veterans--a policy begun for patriotic reasons and continued when Perot found that the vets often made first-class businessmen--but the men who had once been lean, fit, highly trained soldiers were now overweight, out-of-condition computer executives, more comfortable with a telephone than with a rifle. And who would plan and lead the raid?
Finding the best man for the job was Perot's specialty. Although he was one of the most successful self-made men in the history of American capitalism, he was not the world's greatest computer expert, or the world's greatest salesman, or even the world's greatest business administrator. He did just one thing superbly well: pick the right man, give him the resources, motivate him, then leave him alone to do the job.
Now, as he approached Denver, he asked himself: who is the world's greatest rescuer?
Then he thought of Bull Simons.
A legend in the U.S. Army, Colonel Arthur D. 'Bull' Simons had hit the headlines in November 1970 when he and a team of commandos raided the Son Tay prison camp, twenty-three miles outside Hanoi, in an attempt to rescue American prisoners of war. The raid had been a brave and well-organized operation, but the intelligence on which all the planning was based had been faulty: the prisoners had been moved, and were no longer at Son Tay. The raid was widely regarded as a fiasco, which in Perot's opinion was grossly unfair. He had been invited to meet the Son Tay Raiders, to boost their morale by telling them that here was at least one American citizen who was grateful for their bravery. He had spent a day at Fort Bragg in North Carolina--and he had met Colonel Simons.
Peering through his windshield, Perot could picture Simons against the cloud of falling snowflakes: a big man,
