Ross Perot Sr. pulled up to Thomas Luce III’s house one Saturday morning in the late 1970s, towing a horse trailer. Perot told his lawyer he wanted to show him a piece of property he had been eyeing but that it was so remote and massive it could only be seen on horseback.
The two loaded into the car and headed to a prairie far north of Dallas, where they saddled up and went for a ride. They trotted out into the middle of nowhere and stopped. Perot turned to Luce and told him, “I want to build downtown Dallas right here.” There were no roads in sight.
Fast forward to 2022, when Luce found himself walking into the sleek headquarters of Toyota North America in Plano for a meeting. He realized he was standing near the exact spot where he and Perot had ridden horses so many years ago.
Perot had purchased the North Texas prairie that he and Luce trotted through that Saturday morning and turned it into Legacy business park. Annexed by Plano, it became one of the world’s most significant concentration of corporate campuses, home to Frito-Lay, PepsiCo, JCPenney, Pizza Hut, Ericsson, and Perot’s tech giant, Electronic Data Systems. EDS is currently in the planning stages of a remodel that would make the center of a massive biotech development in Plano.
Luce took that 1970s arrival of his boss with equines in tow in stride, as always. It wasn’t unusual for Perot to ask him to go on adventures—like when he asked Luce to manage his presidential campaign. Or the time he brokered the purchase of a 13th-century copy of the Magna Carta. Or when he commissioned a container ship tanker to serve as a refueling station in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for an around-the-world helicopter journey.
Luce spent decades as the trusted legal aid to one of the most innovative business leaders of the 20th century, helping Perot build a corporate empire. He is full of stories from his years working alongside Perot, but his desire to serve and make the world a better place has always driven him—to the point where he ran for Texas Governor in 1990. And that drive has never left. He is continuing to push—long after many of his peers have moved on to retirement. Luce is a leading voice for the growth of the region’s biotech industry, teaming up with another Texas legend, Lyda Hill. At age 83, he is still busy founding think tanks, advocating for workforce development and education, and doing what he can to help pave a better future for the state he loves.
The ‘Captain of the Titanic’
Tom Luce was born to a single mother in a University Park duplex. An active child who loved athletics, an accident when he was 8 years old nearly put an end to his collegiate baseball and basketball career before it ever began. During after-school care at the YMCA, Luce fell and tripped on a pipe that impaled his leg. Doctors told him they may have to amputate.
His uncle knew Doak Walker and got the SMU star and Heisman Trophy winner to visit the young Luce at the hospital. Walker convinced him that if he worked hard he would recover, and he did. Luce would go on to become a triple threat in sports, helping to win a state championship in football at Highland Park High School in 1956 as an offensive lineman and attend Virginia Military Institute to play baseball and basketball. He was able to attend VMI after a group of Dallas businessmen raised funds to help pay for his education.
But Luce got homesick and transferred to SMU after his first year, and married his wife when he was 19. He worked to put himself through college and, after majoring in accounting, became interested in the law and attended law school at SMU at night.
In the early 1970s, President Nixon took the unusual step of asking Ross Perot Sr. if he would purchase the country’s third-largest brokerage firm, DuPont, Glore Forgan & Co., which was experiencing financial difficulties. Ever the patriot, Perot acquired the company but couldn’t turn the business around and eventually decided to settle up with creditors rather than declare bankruptcy. Perot was searching for law firms to handle the liquidation and had been interviewing East Coast attorneys to no avail.
Texas 2036 Finds the ‘Sensible Center’ With its Common-Sense Advocacy
Luce’s public policy work has shown him that advocacy efforts are often siloed and that budget spending can be short-sighted and focused on a legislator’s next election. So, he set about creating an organization to think holistically about the Lone Star State. After 82 trips on Southwest Airlines in one year, he identified key players working on the issues and built a board to help guide the initiative. The result is Texas 2036, a nonpartisan think tank named for Texas’ 200th birthday. Its data-based advocacy ranges from K-12 education and healthcare to workforce development and natural resources. After serving as Secretary of Education and running the University of North Carolina system, Margaret Spellings came home to Texas to oversee the effort, and, until recently, served as president and CEO. “We’re thinking about the future and using data to put what I call the sensible center together,” Spellings says. “People are starving for their government to do the work of the government. We’re working on the meat and potatoes of government, and people want and expect that.”
Luce, then just 33 years old, had recently opened his own firm and had only five lawyers on his team. But after a friend of Perot’s recommended him, Luce won the job. The young attorney was initially apprehensive. He feared he’d become the “captain of the Titanic” as he worked to liquidate the business, and asked what would happen to his firm when the matter was settled.
Perot told Luce that if he did a good job, he would get a chance at handling matters for Electronic Data Systems. “Within the year, he had given me all the EDS business,” Luce says. “That started my 50-year journey with Ross Sr.”
The relationship took Luce all over the world and required him to tackle things well outside typical legal work. In the 1970s, EDS landed a contract with Iran to build a social security system. But when the revolution took hold of the country in 1979, two EDS employees were imprisoned by the struggling regime. Ever one to take control, Perot tapped a group of mostly ex-military employees to bust his workers out of prison.
In 1983, British author Ken Follett turned the story into a historical novel called On Wings of Eagles, which was also made into a TV miniseries. Follet interviewed Luce several times for the book, but the attorney was ignorant of the rescue plan as it was happening. He focused on using diplomacy and negotiation to free the men—at one point making his case to Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Secretary of State.
Luce’s diplomatic negotiations were ultimately unsuccessful, though the men did make it out of Iran. “If I had done my job, there wouldn’t have been a rescue,” Luce says. “Certainly, there were some extenuating circumstances. The Khomeini government was not easy to negotiate with.”
‘Follow Your Nose and Figure It Out’
International politics would soon lead to a brief career in international logistics. In 1982, Perot’s son, Ross Perot Jr., and copilot Jay Coburn left Dallas to circumnavigate the globe in a Bell 206L-1 LongRanger II helicopter called the Spirit of Texas. There was only one problem for Coburn and eventual United States Air Force fighter pilot Perot Jr.—the Pacific Ocean.
There wasn’t a suitable location for Perot Jr.’s route that allowed a helicopter to land and refuel, so Perot Sr. called Luce and asked him to come up with something. Perot Jr. had already begun the journey; Luce had just two-and-a-half weeks to create a refueling station in the middle of the ocean between Asia and Alaska.
Luce flew to San Francisco and convinced a container ship with sufficient loading dock and weight bearing to fill a shipping container with jet fuel and sail into the middle of the Pacific to serve as a pit stop. The helicopter landed, refueled, and made its way to Alaska and then down to Dallas. At 23, Perot Jr. became the first person to fly around the world in a helicopter. But it wouldn’t have happened without Luce.
By this time, Luce had established himself as a capable leader who could solve problems, leading him to fly commercial with one of the most famous documents in the history of Western Civilization. It all began with a call from Perot Sr., as so many of his adventures did. In 1984, Perot told Luce that his foundation had purchased an early copy of the Magna Carta, an agreement between barons in England and King John that limited the rights of the king. It laid the foundation to protect rights like wrongful imprisonment and freedom of religion that would be established in the U.S. Constitution.
Perot said he bought it on the condition that Luce would go to England to verify its authenticity and bring it home. Luce had no idea how to do such a thing. “Follow your nose and figure it out,” Perot told him. Luce went to the U.K., found an expert to verify it, and got the proper documentation. It was the real deal.
Tom Luce and Lyda Hill’s Pegasus Park Biotech Collaboration
“She’s a hard lady to say no to,” Luce says of his longtime friend, Dallas philanthropist Lyda Hill. “She has done so much for so many.” When she asked him to be CEO of biotech initiatives for Lyda Hill Philanthropies in 2021, Luce agreed. “We asked Tom to lead our biotech initiatives because we knew he would bring the right people together to drive transformational advances in science, especially the fast-growing biotech ecosystem in North Texas,” says Lyda Hill. Luce’s strategic role with Lyda Hill Philanthropies forges connections to develop the biotech industry, notably developing Pegasus Park, a 23-acre mixed-use development with an emphasis on biotech, nonprofit, and corporate innovation. It has been a catalyst of the transformation of North Texas into a growing biotech hub, and recently was named as a hub for a $2.5 billion federal agency to develop biotech and life science innovations and take on healthcare’s toughest challenges.. “It has been seamless to work on Texas 2036 and Lyda Hill; there’s a lot of continuity between the two,” Luce says. “Lyda’s a philanthropist and a capitalist, focused on building a more inclusive economy with better-paying jobs for more people.”
Luce thought that would be the end of it and assumed Perot would want the document sent back in the aviation equivalent of a Brinks truck. “No, just get on the airplane,” Perot told him. “The best security is no security.” Luce made sure he had a seat next to the coat closet where he kept the document on an American Airlines flight back to Dallas. When he returned to DFW Airport customs, they asked him if he had anything to declare. Luce responded honestly: “Yes, the Magna Carta.” In 2007, Perot’s foundation sold the document for $21 million to raise money for medical research.
Another episode in Luce’s “Forrest Gump” life involved a stint on the state’s highest court. The Texas constitution is unique in that it allows the governor to appoint a temporary justice to the Supreme Court in the case of a deadlocked vote. When Chief Justice Tom Phillips had to disqualify himself from a case in 1988, the judges couldn’t break their four-to-four vote tie. So, then-Gov. Bill Clements called Luce and asked him to be Chief Justice Pro Tempore. When Luce questioned whether he could fill in for just one case, Clements responded, “By God, don’t tell me what I can do!”
Luce wore the robe and heard the case, which had to be reargued for his benefit. It involved a child who was electrocuted by a transmission line. The case took hours to argue and a couple of months to get a majority and write the opinion. In the end, Luce sided with those finding for the transmission company.
A career lawyer who has long been connected to public service, Luce likely would have made a formidable judge in another life. “That satisfied my itch,” he says.
Entering the Political Fray
Luce never had big political aspirations, but he was not naïve about the inner workings of government. He had long been involved with advocating for educational and workforce development in the Texas Legislature and, in 1984, led the Texas Select Committee on Public Education. During that process, he traveled the state and studied its public education system and decided it was not doing a good job of preparing the next generation.
Exploring the state and making connections served him well for the rest of his career; it also inspired him to see if he could make an impact as a candidate. When there was no incumbent in either party running for Governor in 1990, he decided to enter the fray as a Republican, running a campaign focused on improving Texas’ public education system with equitable funding. He finished third in the primary, losing to West Texas oil magnate Clayton Williams.
Luce’s first impression of Williams left a lasting memory. “He put his arm around me and said, ‘Tom, I’ve heard nothing but great things about you, and I know you and I don’t like each other, but I want you to know I’m going to buy this race and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ [Williams] self-funded his campaign and outspent me 15 to one,” Luce says.
The attorney focused on growing his firm, Hughes and Luce, and served as lead counsel for billion-dollar mergers and litigation cases. In the 1990s, he sold his company and segued into investments. Then one night, while working out at home, Luce found himself watching his old boss on the Larry King Live show. Perot announced that he would run for President—if he could garner enough momentum in each state. “I almost fell off the treadmill,” Luce says.
After the show, Perot made another call to Luce. He wanted the attorney to drop what he was doing and manage his campaign, and Luce, as he usually did, agreed. Perot would lead both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton at one point in 1992.
For Luce, it was a challenging and exhilarating experience. He found that managing a candidate with as much charisma and popularity as Perot was much different than his own run for Governor. “There was such a ground surge for him that it was an overwhelming experience,” Luce says. “When I first went to the campaign headquarters, there were 1,500 media requests.”
Perot would later exit and then re-enter the race when he qualified for the ballot in all 50 states. He received 18.9 percent of the popular vote across a broad spectrum of voters and was the most popular third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Making A Lasting Impact
Luce’s ability to foster relationships allowed him to have an impact at the federal level, too. When Luce served on the Texas Select Committee on Public Education, he hired a young policy adviser named Margaret Dudar. The relationship would prove fruitful for decades to come. Going by the last name of Spellings since marrying in 2001, she worked on George W. Bush’s gubernatorial campaign as a political adviser and was nominated to be the secretary of education in 2005. To build out her staff, she hired her old friend Luce to run the policy and budget arms of the department as assistant secretary of education. (See sidebar on page 43.)
Together, the two helped implement No Child Left Behind, one of the country’s most influential educational initiatives. Luce was a grandfather by the time he began his role in Washington, which he calls “a young person’s town.” Once, with his grandchildren in D.C. for a visit, he told a security guard in the education building that it was a special day for him. “Your retirement day?” she asked. It was his first day on the job.
Luce is proud of his work in the department, helping to write the Academic Competitiveness Act and serving on the National Math Panel to improve how the subject is taught in schools. But after two years of taking the Metro and living inside the Beltway, it was time to head back to Texas.
When Luce returned from Washington, he could have done anything he wanted. Notably, he could have done nothing. But that isn’t in his DNA. Luce, who has been married for 63 years, has seven grandchildren and a Bichon Frisé named Sophie, could easily retire and rest on his laurels. But he continues to do what he can to make Texas a better place, founding think tanks and serving as a booster for North Texas’ biotech industry with Lyda Hill Philanthropies. (See sidebar on page 44.) “I feel a need to pay back the state,” he says. “I was blessed to be born in Dallas; I have enjoyed a wonderful career, and I see this work as part of my obligation.”
Author
Will Maddox
Will is the senior editor for D CEO magazine and the editor of D CEO Healthcare. He’s written about healthcare…
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- Source: https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-ceo/2023/october/the-adventures-of-tom-luce/
