Ross Perot

Informationen zum Autor Ken Gross is a magazine writer and a former columnist for Newsday . A recipient of the Meyer Berger Award for journalism, he is the author of nine previous books of fiction and nonfiction. Klappentext A portrait of the outsider presidential candidate who captured the American imagination! based on exclusive interviews with Ross Perot! his family! and his business associates He's a brilliant entrepreneur! a robust patriot! a working-class boy who rose to be a business tycoon. But who is the real Ross Perot? In this definitive biography that everyone who cares about America will want to read! Ken Gross brings to life the man behind the news stories and the sound bites! offering insights into Perot's gifts for leadership. Here are the experiences that forged Perot's character and political convictions: his humble childhood in Texas! his naval service! his astounding business success! his daring hostage-rescue mission to Iran. Here are his down-to-earth ideas for re-energizing America. Ross Perot: The Man Behind the Myth offers the most revealing and detailed portrait yet of the man who singlehandedly transformed America's political landscape. 1 I was born rich. Not in tangible things, but rich in the parents I had. ROSS PEROT Ross Perot was born on the hottest day ever recorded in the East Texas town of Texarkana. The thermometer read 117 degrees on June 27, 1930. At least, that's the way it's recorded in the archives of the family legend. How else could they explain the iron will and tensile strength of Ross Perot unless he had emerged from a blast furnace? It was an odd time and odd place to grow up. During the 1930s, Texarkana was split down the middle over the issue of Prohibition. Literally. The border between dry Texas and wet Arkansas ran right through the center of town. On one side of the main street, you could buy hard liquor, and on the other you could obtain undistilled gospel. The cultures broke along roughly the same lines. There was a standoff between the freewheeling cowboys and the tightly bound farmers. The cowboys favored the rowdy sections of town, where they could find bawdy houses with painted women and howl into the night. The farmers and merchants lived in quiet neighborhoods with well-attended churches and modest homes in which no meal was ever served without an accompanying taste of the Bible. Inevitably, life in Texarkana was etched in sharp contrasts, but then, considering the nature of the people who lived there, the town was a small miracle of coexistence. During the nineteenth century, the delta of Bowie County had been settled by Scotch-Irish immigrants. They were bitter wanderers who had been uprooted from their native Scotland and replanted first in Ireland to act as a buffer between the Irish Catholics and the English landlords. But they were too proud to serve as the king's pike, and soon waves of immigrants flooded America and tried to take root in the fertile valleys of the East. Although the soil in Virginia and Georgia and Alabama was rich, the ruling class remained hard, and many farms soon fell to unpaid mortgage claims. The immigrants who couldn't meet the ruinous terms of their loans lost their acreage and homesteads to the unforgiving banks. They packed up, and the wagon trains moved on to the frontiers of Texas, where the playing field was a flat landscape that ran on forever. This wasn't the untamed Wild West beyond the Pecos; it was nearer to the shipping lanes of the great navigable rivers and the cotton centers where land was of a comprehensible size and the farms were on a familiar scale. These were self-sufficient individualists who didn't trust governments or strangers and ran their lives the way they ran their businesseswith narrow margins and adversarial assumptions. But there was a softening influence,...

Autorentext
Ken Gross is a magazine writer and a former columnist for Newsday. A recipient of the Meyer Berger Award for journalism, he is the author of nine previous books of fiction and nonfiction.

Klappentext
A portrait of the outsider presidential candidate who captured the American imagination, based on exclusive interviews with Ross Perot, his family, and his business associates

He's a brilliant entrepreneur, a robust patriot, a working-class boy who rose to be a business tycoon. But who is the real Ross Perot?

In this definitive biography that everyone who cares about America will want to read, Ken Gross brings to life the man behind the news stories and the sound bites, offering insights into Perot's gifts for leadership. Here are the experiences that forged Perot's character and political convictions: his humble childhood in Texas, his naval service, his astounding business success, his daring hostage-rescue mission to Iran. Here are his down-to-earth ideas for re-energizing America.

Ross Perot: The Man Behind the Myth offers the most revealing and detailed portrait yet of the man who singlehandedly transformed America's political landscape.

Leseprobe
1
 
 
 
“I was born rich. Not in tangible things, but rich in the parents I had.”
—ROSS PEROT
 
Ross Perot was born on the hottest day ever recorded in the East Texas town of Texarkana. The thermometer read 117 degrees on June 27, 1930. At least, that’s the way it’s recorded in the archives of the family legend. How else could they explain the iron will and tensile strength of Ross Perot unless he had emerged from a blast furnace?
 
It was an odd time and odd place to grow up. During the 1930s, Texarkana was split down the middle over the issue of Prohibition. Literally. The border between dry Texas and wet Arkansas ran right through the center of town. On one side of the main street, you could buy hard liquor, and on the other you could obtain undistilled gospel. The cultures broke along roughly the same lines. There was a standoff between the freewheeling cowboys and the tightly bound farmers. The cowboys favored the rowdy sections of town, where they could find bawdy houses with painted women and howl into the night. The farmers and merchants lived in quiet neighborhoods with well-attended churches and modest homes in which no meal was ever served without an accompanying taste of the Bible.
 
Inevitably, life in Texarkana was etched in sharp contrasts, but then, considering the nature of the people who lived there, the town was a small miracle of coexistence. During the nineteenth century, the delta of Bowie County had been settled by Scotch-Irish immigrants. They were bitter wanderers who had been uprooted from their native Scotland and replanted first in Ireland to act as a buffer between the Irish Catholics and the English landlords. But they were too proud to serve as the king’s pike, and soon waves of immigrants flooded America and tried to take root in the fertile valleys of the East. Although the soil in Virginia and Georgia and Alabama was rich, the ruling class remained hard, and many farms soon fell to unpaid mortgage claims.
 
The immigrants who couldn’t meet the ruinous terms of their loans lost their acreage and homesteads to the unforgiving banks. They packed up, and the wagon trains moved on to the frontiers of Texas, where the playing field was a flat landscape that ran on forever. This wasn’t the untamed Wild West beyond the Pecos; it was nearer to the shipping lanes of the great navigable rivers and the cotton centers where land was of a comprehensible size and the farms were on a familiar scale. These were self-sufficient individualists who didn’t trust governments or strangers and ran their lives the way they ran their businesses—with narrow margins and adversarial assumptions.
 
But there was a softening influence, and it c…

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