Word: perots
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...many elements of Perot's biography have become a standardized recitation: the son of a Texas horse trader (yes, literally) and cotton dealer, Ross learned Norman Rockwell values at home in Texarkana and as an enthusiastic Boy Scout. An Annapolis graduate, he lost his zeal for the Navy because its bureaucracy was stifling, and he tried to get out early. He became a top salesman for IBM, but the company cut his commissions so that he would not earn more than his managers; worse, when he fulfilled his annual quota by Jan. 19, 1962, he was forced to sit idly...
Trouble is, much of this story is open to dispute. Take the tale that as a preteen Perot delivered the Texarkana Gazette in a dangerous neighborhood, riding a horse so that he could escape from customers who might try to mug him. In his 1990 book, Perot: An Unauthorized Biography, journalist Todd Mason suggests that Perot actually rode a bicycle...
...trivial matter? Not to Perot. For six months he bombarded Mason and his editor, Jeffrey Krames, with letters and phone calls from himself, his sister Bette and boyhood acquaintances who insisted Perot did so ride a horse. He even sent Krames a poster-size map of Texarkana, with his route outlined block by block, and pretyped letters of retraction, needing only a signature. He never...
Reporters have dug up a 1955 letter from Ross to his father, asking the senior Perot to use his influence to get his son out of the Navy before the four-year hitch standard for Annapolis graduates was over. Reason: he found the Navy "fairly Godless" and was constantly offended by the blasphemous language and moral laxity of his shipmates. Perot blithely ignores the question of whether he could really have been that naive and, as he often does when one of his stories is not believed, produces another. The real reason he wanted out of the Navy, he says...
...more than managers, they say, and many did -- with the blessing of the managers, whose own incomes rose the more their salesmen produced. Moreover, they say, IBM was not so stupid as to deny itself revenue by forcing its best salesmen to sit idle. Says Henry Wendler, who was Perot's branch manager in Dallas: "If you sold 100% of your quota, you didn't stop there. You could go to 200%, 300%, 500% and get more commissions...