TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052592/05259922.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 3.8 KB | 84 lines

                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 30

ROSS PEROT

Perot's Lieutenants


The top members of Perot's team have at least three things in
common: they are not ideologues, they have never belonged to
the East Coast order of political druids who climb onto campaigns
and television talk shows, and they have each achieved great
success with a low-key, unassuming intensity.


    THOMAS W. LUCE III, 51, has made a career of calming the
waters that Perot has stirred up. The founder of a large Dallas
law firm, Luce was hired by Perot in 1974 to help dig him out of
a disastrous attempted bailout of the Wall Street brokerage house
of DuPont Glore Forgan. In 1984 Luce helped Perot negotiate the
sale of his EDS computer-services company to GM; two years
later, Luce settled a bitter dispute over the buyout of Perot's
GM shares. To the general public, however, the Dallas attorney
is better known for having been Perot's cerebral but lackluster
political surrogate: when Luce ran unsuccessfully for Governor
in 1990 as a moderate Republican, the joke was that Perot was
too busy to do it himself, so he hired his attorney to stand in
for him. (Perot ultimately paid off Luce's $950,000 campaign
debt.) Luce was an intellectual architect for Perot's crusades
to fight drugs and overhaul Texas schools, and many of his
ideas -- including school choice and early-childhood
intervention -- are likely to figure in a Perot platform. But
it is his quieting influence on Perot that will help steer the
sometimes impetuous candidate through the election.

    MORTON MEYERSON, 53, was Perot's alter ego at EDS, the man
who helped put the founder's ambitions into practice and stayed
on top of the details. He started in 1965 as a trainee and left
the company 21 years later as its vice chairman with more than
$20 million from the buyout. Since then, Meyerson has invested
his time in civic projects. He headed the group that sold the
Federal Government on building the controversial $8.4 billion
supercollider in Texas. He spearheaded the construction of the
new symphony hall in Dallas, which is named after Meyerson
because Perot made that a condition for his own $10 million
contribution. The two men are so close, says Meyerson, that "we
can communicate in shorthand." He will help screen prospective
staff members as well as meld a cross section of ideas into the
position papers that Perot has promised to produce.

    JAMES SQUIRES, 49, is an unlikely press spokesman because
he comes close to fitting the stereotype of the crusty,
all-sides-are-suspect city editor. Perhaps that is why he has
proclaimed his distaste for the impure partisanship of most
political press secretaries. "I'm not a spin doctor," he says.
"We don't do research on the opponents and feed it to the
press." At 31, after 10 years at the Nashville Tennessean, he
became the Chicago Tribune's Washington correspondent. By 34,
he was the editor of the Tribune Co.-owned Sentinel in Orlando.
Four years later, he was editor of the Tribune itself. He
ruffled feathers in that newsroom by detaching reporters from
their regular beats -- one sportswriter was assigned to cover
national politics -- but earned the admiration of some of his
troops by backing special projects like a long series on
Chicago's underclass. The newspaper won seven Pulitzers during
his tenure. After leaving the Tribune in 1989, the editor-horse
breeder moved to his Kentucky farm. Since then he has taught
journalism, written a book on the press, finished one novel and
started another. It was Luce, whom he met during a fellowship at
Harvard last year, who brought Squires into the Perot camp. "I
don't know where this will go," he says, "but it might turn out
to be historic."

    By Priscilla Painton.