I have a theory: June 30. Perot is supposed to testify on that date before a Senate select committee investigating-for about the umpteenth time-the issue that has obsessed him for the past 23 years: the fate of American prisoners of war in Southeast Asia. His record has been a tangled commingling of idealism, self-indulgence and weirdness. It may be one of the few clear windows available into the soul of the man.
By most accounts, the high-minded part came early on. Perot performed valuable service in behalf of the POWs during the war and immediate after–not just his flashy, failed 1969 attempt to fly Christmas dinner into Hanoi, but also the quiet support Perot gave when the men came home, staging parades and parties in their honor, keeping in touch, hiring more than a few.
The weirdness came later. Perot allowed himself to get tangled up in the network of swashbuckling con artists who retailed the fantasy that significant numbers of Americans had been left behind, especially in Laos, and were waiting to be liberated. There was a casual cruelty in this. The hopes of families were raised; thousands of Vietnam veterans and others were hit up for contributions to “rescue” efforts that never quite panned out. Perot got burned, too, getting mixed up with one of the most notorious jungle cowboys, Col. James (Bo) Gritz, a former Green Beret who had a fatal tendency to announce rescue missions in advance and then get caught. Perot renounced Gritz publicly in 1981-indeed, he had a spokesman reject the idea that “there are any MIAs or POWs left back in the bush or in the jungle camps.”
If that had been the end of it, Perot would have been no more than a patriot fleeced. But it wasn’t. His jungle fever proved chronic. Hooked on the intrigue, he kept up with the cowboys and, over time, drifted into stranger company: radical conspiracy theorists like Daniel Sheehan of the Christic Institute who insisted that the U.S. government was involved in a vast plot to cover up the existence of living POWs. Why? Well, it had something to do with rogue elements of the CIA-the same people who turned up in every dustup from the Bay of Pigs to Iran-contra-who were using drugs from Southeast Asia to fund secret counterinsurgencies. Sheehan’s attempt to bring suit against the “conspirators” was thrown out of court, but he may have gained a fan in Perot. “When you look into the prisoner cover-up, you find government officials in the drug trade who can’t break the habit,” he is quoted as saying in “Kiss the Boys Goodbye,” a credulous book about POW-MIA scenarios by Monika Jensen-Stevenson.
Certainly, Perot began to act as if the U.S. government were part of the problem. In 1986, he testified to a House subcommittee chaired by Stephen Solarz, the New York Democrat, that there were POWs still alive in Southeast Asia, but he refused to divulge the sources of his information. He also mounted a furious attack against Richard Armitage, a Defense Department bureaucrat in charge of the POW-MIA issue who had been named by Sheehan as part of his fanciful CIA conspiracy. And he may have begun to freelance, as well, traveling to Hanoi in 1987, perhaps offering to “horse-trade” for live bodies or “bones,” despite U.S. policy to the contrary. The 1987 visit seems to have led to meetings between the Vietnamese and a Perot associate; in 1990, according to The New York Times, the Vietnamese designated Perot a “business agent of the government of Vietnam.” Talk about weird.
All of which should be raised on June 30. Perot managed to stonewall Solarz in 1986, but now he’s running for president and a different standard obtains. Does he believe Americans are still held prisoner in Southeast Asia? Does he believe there was a government cover-up or conspiracy to prevent their return? No doubt, those who imply that Perot’s motivation has been profit rather than patriotism throughout are too cynical-but one wonders how America’s newest politician feels, after 20 years obsessed with this issue, to have emerged from Vietnam without a single live body … and with a possible business deal.
