okings Institution for June I9 to give a point-by-point rebuttal of Allen's speech. And, according to his memoirs, he "cut a deal with the New York Times to trade good coverage of [his] speech for an exclusive leak."3 The Times, keeping its end of the bargain, delivered a banner headline on page one of its business section on the morning before the speech, guaranteeing that TV cameras would be in the room when Hundt walked to the podium. Two of Hundt's colleagues on the commission said that his speech was inappropriate. The Times itself called it "almost unheard of for a Federal official to publicly prejudge a corporate merger" and pointed out that Hundt was scheduled to step down within six months and Tough Calls would be unlikely to vote on it anyway. The media had another field All we could do was seize on a point on the first page of Hundt's speech, in which he said that such a merger "should be considered only when and if it is proposed." Two days after the speech, Allen's Journal op-ed appeared, spiced up with references to Hundt's speech inserted at the paper's request to give it more "news value." Then, on June 27, the FCC denied SBC's application to offer long- distance service in Oklahoma-an application to which we had filed a forty-five-page objection shortly after the Journal's original story ap- peared. The FCC's action convinced SBC that merger approval would come at too high a price, if it was even possible. Whitacre called Allen and told him that he didn't believe a merger was in the cards. The forces opposing a merger were too great, and the two companies' ap- proaches to dealing with them were too different. Allen agreed to call off the talks, and the two CEOs told their respective boards on Friday. Although Allen and Whitacre agreed to maintain radio silence on the end of the discussions, by late afternoon we got wind that some- one was spreading the story that SBC had called off discussions be- cause it was fed up with the way we were handling the lobbying and PR. We stuck to our policy of not