irman and CEO and electing Zeglis president. Both deci- sions were foregone conclusions. So how the Armstrong-Zeglis dinner would go provided the only real suspense of the evening. We had arranged for them to eat alone in a private room just down the hall from one of the conference rooms where we had gathered. Dinner was buffet-style, SO there wouldn't even be a waiter hovering nearby. Zeglis had prepared by filling a yellow legal pad with lists of issues that Armstrong would have to address, people he would have to meet, and questions he would have to resolve. Zeglis later reported that the conversation flowed SO naturally that he never got to his list. When Allen, Elisha, and Zeglis went into another room for the board conference call that would end Allen's tenure as chairman and begin Armstrong's, I began briefing Armstrong on the announcement plan for the next day. It was scheduled from 7:30 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. in half-hour blocks that included a gathering of the company's senior management team, a conference call with financial analysts, a "town meeting" broadcast to AT&T employees around the world, a news con- ference, one-on-one media interviews, and live interviews on CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg television. It was a pretty standard AT&T PR plan, but as I ran through it, Armstrong looked at me with an intensity I hadn't felt since Sister Catherine of Siena caught me in the girls' coatroom. Armstrong is an imposing figure to begin with. He's six feet tall, and he still has the broad shoulders and barrel chest of the college football player he was more than forty years ago. He has the well-scrubbed, healthy complex- ion of an outdoorsman. His only concession to advancing years is male pattern baldness encroaching on carefully trimmed white hair. His default expression is a wide grin, and his voice is surprisingly soft, as if to compensate for a gaze that condenses from blue-eyed twinkle to laser intensity when he's really listening. He was really listening as I ran through the schedule, and I couldn't tell whethe