n. I don't think it was properly answered." "No one is a chief executive officer until they are elected as a CEO. [We] concluded it was not timely for him to move to that next position," Elisha said. "Why? What was it about his performance that disqualified him?" USA Today wanted to know. "I don't feel a need to get into all of the details the directors unanimously felt it just wasn't timely." I jumped in and asked for the next question. For a moment it seemed that the New York Times might be offering Elisha an out when its reporter asked whether one of Walter's problems might have been his lack of experience in telecommunications. "Are you today willing Tough Calls to say that you are focusing more narrowly on someone with telecom experience?" Elisha said he wouldn't speculate on what the search for the new CEO might entail. Just when I thought the direction of the questions might be taking a safer turn, the Nightly Business Report's reporter asked, "So what changed in your evaluation of Walter's perform- ance?" We were back in the same hole, and Elisha was using the same shovel. "I think the answer to that is we don't evaluate our executives in public or in press conferences." And SO it went until John Keller of the Wall Street Journal had his turn at bat. "With all the langst inside AT&T that has been well docu- mented in the press over the last six months with all that you said about John Walter when you brought him in, don't you think that the AT&T board owes the world and AT&T employees a better explanation than the one you have just given? He [John Walter] is getting an aw- fully expensive payout for having worked seven or eight months." John Keller was the dean of reporters covering AT&T. He had fol- lowed the company for more than ten years, first at a trade magazine, then at Business Week, and finally at the Wall Street Journal. He had impeccable sources inside the company at all levels and had broken more front-page stories about AT&T than all the other reporters work- ing our beat combined. He was sma