 was ready for what lay ahead, but I swallowed my pride and suggested that we might profitably spend a few minutes preparing for the conference call with reporters that would follow the news re- lease. Elisha was game. "The first question you're going to get is probably going to be something like, 'Why did you fire John Walter?" I said. "We didn't fire him." Don't Dance to the Music of Your Own Buzz "Uh-huh. Okay, then, why did you decide not to make him CEO as you had promised?" "That's easy," he said brightly. "It's a private personnel matter, and I'm not going to get into it." Trying to convince him that that wouldn't fly, I suggested that he fall back on the language in the news release that the board had ap- proved-we felt John wasn't ready yet because the industry had gotten even more complicated since he was named president Companies were merging, and SO on. John Walter disagreed, thought he was ready now, and decided to leave. Nope. Elisha was going to stick to his guns and refuse to answer. "The problem with you AT&T guys," he said, "is that you think you have to answer every question. That's why you get SO much press and why SO much of it is bad." I could see a new era of media relations dawning. And if it took that course, it would dawn without me. But as I would later decide, as antediluvian as Elisha's observation sounded, there was a germ of truth in it. When the telephone news conference began, there were only three people in the room at our end: Elisha, me, and Dick Katcher, the Wachtell Lipton lawyer who was advising the board. After a few intro- ductory remarks summarizing the news release we had issued an hour earlier, I opened the call for questions. The first was from CNN. As usual, it was a multipart question, but the gist of it was, "What happened in the last nine months to change your mind about John Walter's suitability to be CEO?" True to his word, Elisha bobbed, weaved, and dodged and asked for the next question. It came from USA Today: "First of all, I'd like to repeat the last questio