The day he and his prospective shipmates on the Ark met in Dallas
over the last weekend in May, Ed Rollins wondered why he had
come -- why, indeed, he had been invited in the first place. After a
month's courtship, he and Hamilton Jordan were ready to sign up as
full-time co-chairmen of the campaign-to-be and had flown in to close
the deal, first with Tom Luce and Mort Meyerson, then with Perot.
But at the Saturday preliminaries in Meyerson's office, everything
Rollins threw at Perot's two guys about what needed doing seemed to
make them nervous, even suspicious of his intentions. Their partner-
ship hadn't even begun, and Rollins was already feeling as welcome as
an atheist in a convent garden.

There had been signals from the beginning that he was walking into
a collision of cultures -- the pro-am civil war that would help destroy
the first Perot campaign within six weeks of the day Rollins arrived.
He was, on his record, everything that Perot was running against. At
age forty-nine, he already had a secure place in the handlers' hall of
fame, for having lasted twenty-five years in the business and having
managed Ronald Reagan's postcard-pretty landslide in 1984. He even
looked different from the smooth, clean-shaven corporate men Perot
favored; he was a taut, thick-chested ex-prize fighter with a beard, a
fringe of receding gray hair and an air of contained, almost dangerous
energy. The uncandidate himself had been wary of the match from the
beginning, a view reinforced by some of the purists who had his ear.

"I got some questions whether Rollins would fit," Perot had said at
one point in the long mating dance. "Does he understand this type of
campaign?"

The most accurate answer might have been yes and no. Rollins was
what he seemed, a tough, combative, anything-to-win professional.
But he did not fit the stereotype of the handler as a man without
beliefs except in his own ever-rising net worth. Like others in his trade,
he was fed up with the aridity of American politics and had found
himself powerfully drawn to the raw, up-from-under energy of the

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