ory is not what happened but what is remembered of it. -ALVIN VON AUW, Heritage and Destiny1 Gilded and Gelded A golden statue of a winged youth, brandishing lightning bolts and draped in telephone cables, once perched on the roof of the old AT&T headquarters at I95 Broadway in lower Manhattan. ² When AT&T de- cided to move uptown in the early 1980s, it lowered the statue, popu- larly called "Golden Boy," in order to place it in the lobby of the company's new headquarters on Madison Avenue. No one was surprised that after being exposed to the elements for sixty-four years, Golden Boy needed to be regilded. But AT&T's chair- man at the time, a courtly southerner named John deButts, was shocked to discover that the twenty-four-foot-tall statue was also ana- tomically correct-and of heroic proportions. Concerned that the statue would scandalize genteel Madison Avenue shoppers, deButts was said to have decreed that it be not only gilded, but also gelded. Apocryphal or not, Golden Boy's gilding and gelding became a metaphor for AT&T's embattled history in the last decades of the twentieth century and a cautionary symbol for all companies in an era in which perception has become the hyper-reality within which they do business. While a rah-rah brother- and sisterhood of stock boosters and image consultants work to gild a company's image, guerrilla bands of special-interest groups and the business media geld them with countless little cuts. No wonder corporate America feels that it is under siege. CEOs, boards, and their advisers vacillate between the instincts of fight and flight. They don't know whether to jump on a Tough Calls soapbox and fight back or to hunker down in the hope that they won't be noticed. In recent years, AT&T has been buffeted by these opposing forces as were few other companies. A widely admired icon of American business for more than a century, the company made some strategic blunders and couldn't seem to get its management act together. All of this was reported in gory detail. AT&T looked like th