BILLIONAIRE POLITICS IS NOTHING NEW; FORD JUST COULDN'T ASSEMBLE CAMPAIGN

H. Ross Perot is not the first person of gigantic wealth to contemplate the presidency. Back in the early 1920s, when a billion dollars was real money, billionaire Henry Ford figured that just maybe he ought to turn his assembly-line talents to streamlining the nation's capitol. Things weren't going as he thought they should. Politicians didn't know how to run anything. He the Ford of Ford Motor Company could bring a businesslike efficiency to the inherently inefficient federal government.

As his official biographer put it, "Ford was a victim of the reasoning that because a man piles up a vast fortune making a girdle or baking soda or tonic or flour, the value of what he thinks improves with his net cash worth. Pre-eminence in one field, that is, guarantees capacity in all." And so it was that Ford spoke and wrote authoritatively on most any subject: history, the commodity markets, the farm problems, ballroom dancing, reincarnation, Wall Street, cigarettes, liquor, The Chicago Tribune, world peace and the Jews. His minister said of him, "If only Mr. Ford was properly assembled! He has in him the makings of a great man, but the parts are lying about in more less disorder."

The quest for peace in World War I was his first major foray into governmental pursuits. The war had not been going well in 1915; the Lusitania was torpedoed; gas had been used at Ypres. Ford decided to "donate my life and fortunes to stamp out militarism." He organized a boatload of peacenicks to sail to Europe and stop the war. Teddy Roosevelt denounced Ford as "discreditable." The British prime minister questioned the usefulness of "a vessel propelled by a gentleman named Ford, said to be a manufacturer of perambulators." The mission failed ignominiously.

In 1918, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, he ran for U.S. Senate as a Democrat. He didn't like campaigning and didn't like being questioned by the press. So he stopped both and lost the race.

In 1920, Ford turned to anti-Semitism as his main hobby. He was the owner of the Dearborn Independent newspaper. Over a period of two years, he sanctioned a series of 91 articles in which he sought to substantiate the existence of a Jewish plot to rule the world via commerce and finance. Amongst the titles: "The Jewish Associates of Benedict Arnold," "The All Jewish Mark on Red Russia," "Taft Once Tried to Resist the Jews and Failed."

He stopped the articles in December of 1921, as he was contemplating a run for president in 1924. His political advisers told him he couldn't carry New York if he continued bashing the Jews. In early 1924, he decided not to run for president and started up his anti-Semitic venom with 20 new articles on the "Jewish Exploitation of American Agriculture." Jewish leaders called for a boycott of Ford cars and suddenly Ford apologized for all the articles claiming that he was too busy making cars to read his own newspaper.

At his zenith, he was the world's richest man. He was America's first billionaire to contemplate the presidency. He was great at the automobile assembly line, but as his own minister put it, he wasn't "properly assembled" to address the remainder of life's challenges.