Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms:
My Life in American Politics
By Ed Rollins and Tom DeFrank
Broadway Books, 362 pages, $27.50
Ross Perot had a realistic chance of winning the presidency in 1992, but a victory would have been a disaster for the nation, his former campaign manager, Ed Rollins, says in a new book.
Perot’s main enemy was himself–he hamstrung his own campaign, then blamed the very experts he had hired to help him, Rollins asserts in “Bare Knuckles and Back Rooms: My Life in American Politics,” co-authored with journalist Tom DeFrank.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that until he tossed it away, Perot had a legitimate shot at being elected,” Rollins writes. But if Perot had been elected, Rollins says, the government would have disintegrated into “a managerial disaster.”
President Ross Perot would have been “a little dictator, ruling over a government in chaos,” Rollins says in the autobiography.
In the book, Rollins writes about several people in the political arena he has worked with during his 30-year career.
Of George Bush, Rollins says: “Without a doubt, George Bush was the worst campaigner to actually get elected President in modern times. Bush acted like a candidate who didn’t really care if he won. . . . Only Bob Dole’s mistakes in the primaries and Michael Dukakis’ greater ineptitude saved Bush.”
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And of Ronald Reagan: “He was the last American hero. He may have forgotten your name, but he never forgot who he was or what he believed in–and that was his magic.”
As for his experience with Perot’s race for president in the summer of 1992, Rollins describes it as “the campaign from hell.”
One problem, Rollins said, was Perot’s tendency to “spin tall tales, all of which place him at the center of a paranoid and delusional universe,” a practice which Perot’s staff came to describe as “Rossing.”
“The best example of Rossing on my watch was an incident in which Perot claimed to have foiled a Black Panther attack on his home in the 1970s,” Rollins writes. “When police officials said there wasn’t any evidence to support the claim, I checked with one of Perot’s security guys, who told me it never happened.”
Rollins warned Tom Luce, one of Perot’s top aides, that if the national media ever found out the story wasn’t true, “Perot’s credibility would be in the toilet.”
Luce explained that the reason for the lack of evidence was that Ross, alerted by his security dogs, had run the Panthers off himself, Rollins says.
When Rollins took the explanation back to the security man, he writes, the man told him that Perot hated dogs and didn’t have any.