Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.comment From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Not with a whimper, but with a gong... Date: Fri, 30 Oct 92 15:33:28 EST Message-ID: \SE F;COMMENTARY \SS (WS) \HD Not with a whimper, but with a gong... \BY Christopher Matthews Like that mysterious hero from the radio age, The Shadow, Ross Perot claims an inner window to the souls of his countless adversaries. "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" comes the sinister giggle from Dallas. "I do." So this is how the overlong 1992 campaign ends, not with a wimper but a gong. Ross Perot, who quit the presidential contest in July to avoid being "disruptive" to the Electoral College, makes an election-eve accusation that George Bush's Republicans plotted to "disrupt" his own daughter's wedding ceremony by spreading untrue accounts of her sexuality. How did Mr. Perot know this? "I had three reports that the Republican Party intend[ed] to publish a false photograph of my daughter who was getting married Aug. 23," he told a New Jersey rally early this week, "smear her before her wedding, and actually disrupt the wedding ceremony." Sound impossible? Can we truly imagine a candidate for president who would sink to using a lewd photograph as a pressure tactic? Not in the Shadowlike world of Ross Perot. In May of this year, a Fort Worth newspaper publisher, Richard Connor, printed a first-hand account of how Ross Perot called him in 1989 to complain of insufficient editorial praise for his son's local accomplishments. To grab Mr. Connor's attention, the publisher wrote, Mr. Perot referred in the phone conversation to a relationship between a Connor news staffer and a city official. According to Mr. Connor, Mr. Perot then said he had photographs to prove sexual impropriety between the two. "The incident was clearly a pressure tactic and could have been taken as an implied threat," Mr. Connor wrote in his signed column, though he said Mr. Perot never made any direct correlation between the embarrassing photo and his anger at the paper. Three years later, Mr. Perot is accusing George Bush's operation of precisely what he was accused. He indicts his rival for using computer technology to "put a head on another body" and thereby fabricate a lesbian relationship involving the billionaire's daughter. As might be expected, given his own record, Mr. Perot offers an uncanny insight into the supposed thinking of the behind-the-scenes conspirators against him and his family. He has even told audiences what he thinks his menaces said to each other in the planning meetings. "We have thrown everything we can make up on Perot and he just keeps on coming and keeps going up in the polls," he quoted his presumed conspirators. "Isn't this guy sensitive to anything?" "And one person in the meeting, I'm thinking they said, 'He adores his family.' " This is how Ross Perot, The Shadow, imagines the plot developing against his family, the plot that drove him from the presidential campaign in July. What are we to make of it? Mr. Perot made his weird claim Sunday, then briskly accepted Bush denials. Does he believe in the conspiracy against his daughter or doesn't he? Was the conspiracy real, the concoction of someone who then fed it to Mr. Perot, or the imaginings of a man obsessed with the dark world of private investigators, strong-arm tactics, lewd photographs and never-ending conspiracy theories? Only The Shadow knows. Christopher Matthews, Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner, is a nationally syndicated columnist. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM