Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot hasn't given an interview in years. Yet Perot, who won 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential election, making him one of the strongest third-party candidates in American history, contacted Newsweek's Jonathan Alter.
Perot came out and asked Alter: "Remember what you wrote about John McCain in the March 13, 2000, Newsweek?"
The article mentioned that presidential candidate John McCain labeled Perot "nuttier than a fruitcake."
Perot tells Alter that McCain "is the classic opportunist--he's always reaching for attention and glory. Other POWs won't even sit at the same table with him."
The Newsweek report outlines that the history between Perot and McCain "goes back to McCain's five and a half years of captivity in Hanoi. When McCain's then-wife Carol was in a serious car accident, McCain's mother called Perot for help. "She asked me to send my people to Philadelphia to take care of the family," Perot says. Afterwards, McCain was grateful. 'We loved him [Perot] for it.' "
Perot denies this.
"After he came home, he walked with a limp, she [Carol McCain] walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona [Cindy McCain, his current wife] and the rest is history," Perot tells Alter.
Reportedly, the bad blood between the two men is over the fact Perot believes the senator quashed evidence that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam and even sent to the Soviet Union for human experimentation, a charge based on hearsay from a senior Vietnamese official in the 1980s.
"There's evidence, evidence, evidence," Perot states, according to Alter's report. "McCain was adamant about shutting down anything to do with recovering POWs."