American Decades
Perot, H. Ross 1930-
TYCOON
The Stuff of Fiction.
The life story of H. Ross Perot seems more like a good novel than reality. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate, Perot joined IBM and soon became one of its top salesmen. But Perot wanted more challenges, and choosing to go out on his own, he formed Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Six years later he took it public, and the thirty-nine-year-old Perot was a billionaire. Perot later made headlines for his failed efforts to bring American prisoners of war (POWs) home from Vietnam, and then, ten years later, he was back on the front pages for his successful covert operation that rescued EDS employees being held in an Iranian jail by the Ayatollah Khomeini. He returned to the limelight when he became the largest stockholder of General Motors. In 1992 he ran for president.
Perot and EDS.
From his days with IBM, this man from Texarkana, Texas, came to believe there was a market for someone who...
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1960's Business and the Economy
- Overview
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Topics in the News
- Agriculture in the 1960s
- The Big Three and the Auto Industry
- Unsafe at any Speed
- The Volkswagen Beetle
- The Boom on Wall Street
- Credit Cards
- Dow Chemical and Student Activists
- New Environmentalism
- Franchising
- An Wang and High-Tech Electronics
- IBM and the Computer Industry
- Kennedy versus Big Steel
- Labor in the 1960s
- Rise of Conglomerates
- Trading Stamps
- Women and Work
- Headline Makers
- People in the News
- Deaths
- Publications
- Important Events in Business and the Economy, 1960-1969
