Perot and con; what America's most famous billionaire could learn from a South Texas rabbi.

• Author: Elkind, Peter
• Position: Doron P. Levin's 'Irreconcilable Differences: Ross Perot Versus General Motors

PEROT AND CON

When I first met Ross Perot, he was pacing about his office, lamenting his personal role in the incineration of Yellowstone National Park.

It seemed the Texas billionaire had a friend who, shortly after the mammoth fire started, had tipped him to the fallacy of the National Park Service's "letburn" policy. Because he had failed to alert the nation, Perot reasoned, he had to shoulder the blame for the immolation of the park. "I'm better than that," Perot declared, slamming a bony fist on his antique desk. "I could've raised enough hell that they would've had to put the fire out."

At first glance, it seemed ... well, a little kooky. How many corporate executives regard fighting forest fires as their personal burden?

Therein lies the magic--and mystery--of H. Ross Perot.

No other private citizen has embraced so many monumental public missions: freeing POWs in Vietnam; waging war on drugs; salvaging public education; reversing the decline of industrial America. Perot's immense wealth (about $3 billion), blunt talk, and daring exploits (most notably, organizing a private commando team to free two employees held hostage in Iran) have combined to make him America's most intriguing--and most publicized--businessman.

Yet, partly due to his genius at crafting his own image, Perot remains poorly understood. What motivates such a man? Is he a right-wing nut or a populist visionary? Why aren't there more like him?

With Perot as the central character, even a corporate merger assumes the dimensions of a public saga, grand enough to inspire two separate additions to the library of business literature. Doron Levin's book (*1) focuses on the deal itself, the ill-fated 1984 marriage of General Motors and Perot's Dallas-based Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Todd Mason, a former reporter for BusinessWeek, reaches more broadly, with what is conspicuously subtitled "an unauthorized biography" (*2) (translation: "Perot wouldn't talk to me").

Levin, who covered Perot for The Wall Street Journal and is now Detroit bureau chief for The New York Times, hews closely to the natural narrative of the "deal-book" genre. The story is cleanly written and well reported, filled with backstage detail. It illustrates how the greed of investment bankers--rather than good business sense--drove so many of the mega-deals that dominated Wall Street in the go-go eighties. It was a Salomon Brothers partner, for example, who first pitched the idea of GM buying EDS. In these...