Free On Wings of Eagles by Ken Follett Page B

connections with the Nixon White House. Perot went to
        Washington and talked to Chief Foreign Policy Advisor Henry Kissinger. And
        Kissinger had a plan.
        The Vietnamese were maintaining, at least for the purposes of propaganda,
        that they had no quarrel with the American peopleonly with the U.S.
        government. Furthermore, they were presenting themselves to the world as
        the little guy in a David-andGoliath conflict. It seemed that they valued
        their public image. It might be possible, Kissinger thought, to embarrass
        them into improving their treatment of prisoners, and releasing the names,
        ON WINGS OF EAGLES 53
     
    by an international campaign to publicize the sufferings of the prisoners
    and their families.
        The campaign must be privately financed, and must seem to be quite
        unconnected with the government, even though in reality it would be closely
        monitored by a team of White House and State Department people.
        Perot accepted the challenge. (Perot could resist anything but a challenge.
        His eleventh-grade teacher, one Mrs. Duck, had realized this. "It's a
        shame," Mrs. Duck had said, "that you're not as smart as your friends."
        Young Perot insisted he was as smart as his friends. "Well, why do they
        make better grades than you?" It was just that they were interested in
        school and he was not, said Perot. "Anybody can stand there and tell me
        that they could do something," said Mrs. Duck. "But let's look at the
        record: your friends can do it and you can't." Perot was cut to the quick.
        He told her that he would make straight A's for the next six weeks. He made
        straight A's, not just for six weeks, but for the rest of his high school
        career. The perceptive Mrs. Duck had discovered the only way to manipulate
        Perot: challenge him.)
        Accepting Kissinger's challenge, Perot went to J. Walter Tbompson, the
        largest advertising agency in the worid, and told them what he wanted to
        do. They offered to come up with a plan of campaign within thirty to sixty
        days and show some results in a year. Perot turned them down: he wanted to
        start today and see results tomorrow. He went back to Dallas and put
        together a small team of EDS executives who began calling newspaper editors
        and placing simple, unsophisticated advertisements that they wrote
        themselves.
    And the mail came in truckloads.
        For Americans who were pro-war, the treatment of the prisoners showed that
        the Vietnamese really were the bad guys; and for those who were anti-war
        the plight of the prisoners was one more reason for getting out of Vietnam.
        Only the most hard-line protesters resented the campaign. In 1970 the FBI
        told Perot that the Viet Cong had instructed the Black Panther~ to murder
        him. (At the crazy end of the sixties this had not sounded particularly
        bizarre.) Perot hired bodyguards. Sure enough, a few weeks later a squad of
        men climbed the fence around Perot's seventeen-acre Dallas property. They
        were chased off by savage dogs. Perot's family, including his indomitable
        mother, would not hear of him giving up the campaign for the sake of their
        safety.
    54 Ken Follett
     
        His greatest publicity stunt took place in December 1969, when he chartered
        two planes and tried to fly into Hanoi with Christmas dinners for the
        prisoners of war. Of course, he was not allowed to land; but during a slow
        news period he created enormous international awareness of the problem. He
        spent two million dollars, but he reckoned the publicity would have cost
        sixty million to buy. And a Gallup poll he commissioned afterward showed
        that the feelings of Americans toward the