on. Andy Black provided some of the financial analysis. Al Solecki, my attorney and friend, kept me on the right side of my responsibilities to my former employer as well as to my new readers. John Keller, who is no longer a working journalist, was generous with his time and thoughts, as were several current journalists and former colleagues who, for their own reasons, prefer to remain anonymous. Mike Armstrong played no role in the writing of this book, al- though he saw a draft. He disagrees with my interpretation of some events and with many of my conclusions. But I must acknowledge his role in this story. I discuss his mistakes as well as my own in these pages. But no one should overlook the fact that he took on one of the greatest challenges in American business at a time in his life when he could have coasted into retirement in the glow of decades of achieve- ment at IBM and Hughes Electronics. Armstrong served his new company with integrity and courage. The same cannot be said of all the people upon whom he depended. I believe history will show that he had the right plan for AT&T and that, while some of the deals he approved were "fully priced," or badly structured, he might still have recovered if the company's biggest competitor had not engaged in three and a half years of fraud that distorted the markets and robbed him of the one thing he needed most: time. Finally, I never would have finished this book were it not for the encouragement, patience, and prodding of my wife, Ginny, and my children, Christopher, Elizabeth, and Juli, as well as my daughter-in- law, Laura, and my cousin Marcel, all of whom gave me the courage to approach this story with candor and a degree of introspection that does not come naturally to me. My grandson, Sky, arrived around the same time as the first draft, SO he has only had excerpts read to him. But I hope that someday this book will give him an idea of what "Gramps" was up to in the decade before he was born. TOUGH CALLS This page intentionally left blank Introduction Hist