There will never be another Ross Perot

His death should be mourned by all Americans

Ross Perot.
(Image credit: Illustrated | AP Photo/S. Brennan)

To consider the life and career of Henry Ross Perot, who died on Monday at the age of 89, is to enter a world that now seems almost unimaginably quaint: a world in which an ex-Navy man who had done only a brief stint at a junior college could become, first, a top salesman at a technology company and then the founder and CEO of a data processing company, Electronic Data Systems, that was computerizing Medicare at a time when the technology's other principal use was trying to get the United States to the moon. It is still just about possible to imagine a person today enjoying something like Perot's success despite a similar lack of formal education, but instead of a straight-laced, plain-spoken winner of the Distinguished Eagle Scout Award, he or she would be some kind of messianic tech huckster.

Even stranger than the vicissitudes of Perot's biography is the attitude toward politics he embodied, one in which all the relevant issues were matters of prudential judgment, to be debated calmly and reasonably by practical men and women. This made him a political loner even in 1992, at a time when a Republican president could be expected to sign sweeping social and economic legislation like the Americans With Disabilities Act into law and even to raise taxes when it seemed necessary.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.