ess Week, Time, Newsweek, US News Q World Report, and all points between. Even newspapers that seldom comment on business issues took the AT&T board to task in editorials. A week later, the influential Wall Street Journal columnist Roger Lowenstein used the quote to suggest that AT&T's board had been "reading Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein and passing around old term papers" while the company's reputation was "going down the tubes."3 It was bad enough that he called Elisha "stunningly ungracious and lacking in class," but he went on to attack Elisha's performance at Springs Industries, which, he said, "while not the worst textile operator, has notably lower margins than its arch- rival." The directors, management, and employees of Springs Industries could be forgiven for wondering how they became part of this circus. A little more than three months later, as we gathered in the Short Hills Hilton to prepare for yet another news conference, Walter Elisha needed to be ready for the obvious question: "So does Mike Arm- strong have the intellectual capacity to lead AT&T? Have you seen his SAT scores?" Similarly, Bob Allen needed to be prepared to deal with a question he had sown in a previous interview. During the original search for a chief operating officer to replace Alex Mandl, Allen, who was then nearly sixty, was asked whether he would resign if he found a candi- date who was perfect but wouldn't take any job but the CEO's. Allen, who had no intention of retiring, said he was looking for a number two, but obviously if he found "god," he'd step aside to make room for Tough Calls him. So had he now found "god"? Why was this search different from the first one? The media ask questions for three reasons: to elicit information and understanding; to needle a candid, colorful reaction out of some- one they know is programmed for blandness; and to fish for quotes that fit into a preconceived story idea. We knew that the questions for Elisha and Allen would come almost exclusively from the latter two categories. This time,