Ross Perot denies any personal animosity toward George Bush. "Nice man, nice family," he chirps, with all the enthusiasm he might use to compliment the cut of Bush's golf pants. Privately, Perot has told friends that Bush is "whiny and hand-wringing." Perot, an expert needler, knows how to get the president's goat. At a rally last month in Little Rock, Ark., Perot declared, "I don't have to prove my manhood by sending anybody to war." The remark, predictably, set off a seismic reaction in the White House. "The president is ready to deck him," says a campaign aide.

Where does this guy get off?"

Political opponents rarely end up liking each other, but the enmity between Perot and Bush runs deep, and it started long before the 1992 presidential campaign. Indeed, the ferocity of Perot's assault makes some White House aides wonder whether they're dealing with a campaign or a vendetta.

Part of the clash is cultural. Bush and Perot both like to race Cigarette boats, not exactly a workingman's sport. But there the similarity ends. Bush is Andover, old money and oil. Perot is Texarkana High, swaggering and self-made. Perot has drawn his best and brightest from public universities and the military. He doesn't have much respect for third-generation wealth, especially the kind that was originally amassed on Wall Street. Perot regards himself as real Texas, Bush as bogus Texas. There is no doubt that in Perot's eyes, Bush symbolizes all that is wrong with government today. Bush is the ultimate bureaucrat, too accepting of the status quo. Perot is impatient, happy to run roughshod over the bureaucracy.

Bush and Perot first ran afoul over Perot's belief that the Reagan and Bush administrations have been party to a cover-up of MIAs in Vietnam. In 1986, as vice president, Bush allowed Perot to see U.S. intelligence files dealing with the MIA issue. Bush may have hoped to co-opt Perot by bringing him on the administration team, but Perot only became more inflamed. He was convinced that Richard Armitage, the Defense Department official negotiating with Vietnam, had been "compromised" by his relationship with a Vietnamese woman. Perot confronted the White House with his evidence: a photograph of the woman, bare-chested in her bedroom, with a picture of Armitage on the night stand. After investigating the charges, Bush backed Armitage. Perot was furious. He keeps the photo locked away, like an amulet, showing it to selected visitors, "A man who carries dirty little pictures in his safe, I've got problems with," says a former national-security official who dealt with Perot at the time.

Perot was so disgusted with what he saw as Bush's passivity on MIAs that he decided to help out the veep's political foes. In 1988, NEWSWEEK has learned, he contacted Michael Dukakis's campaign, offering to share his negative critique of the GOP candidate. A Dukakis aide flew to Dallas, where Perot outlined why Bush would not make a good president because he was "weak" and didn't stand up issues. It was the kind of whispering campaign Perot loves to criticize the GOP for today. (Perot says he has no recollection of such an event.)

And it may not be the last. Perot has already turned his investigators on Bush. Earlier this year he sent the general counsel of his company and two expert pilots to interview a Missouri state-prison inmate who complained that he was unjustly imprisoned. The inmate claimed that he had flown Bush, then the GOP vice presidential candidate, to Paris in 1980 as part of the so-called October Surprise scheme. Conspiracy theorists have charged that the Reagan campaign arranged to delay the release of the U.S. hostages in Iran until after the 1980 election. Perot says his team was at first stymied by "guys in dark suits" who reported back to "dirty-tricksters." One of Perot's men finally managed to pose a single question that tested the inmate's technical knowledge of the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane that had allegedly carried Bush to this rendezvous. When the prisoner ducked the question, Perot backed off. But the incident showed how far Perot is willing to go to defrock Bush.

Bush is said to be hurt and confounded by Perot's attacks. But a politician who was elected partly on the strength of Willie Horton ads is not likely to be shy about shooting back. Perot and Bush do share something besides a love of speedboats: both men have shown a willingness to do whatever it takes to get what they want.