aff reluctantly conceded that they knew about AT&T's plans to increase some prices, its chairman, Bill Kennard, put out his own six-sentence news release: "AT&T promised to pass on savings to all customers. Their new rate plan does not do that. It is in our order and I am going to enforce it. AT&T promised to tell their customers which plan would be most cost effective for them. This was not done. I will also hold AT&T to this commitment." After all that, it was not difficult to convince Armstrong to postpone the rate increases. The next day's coverage was all about AT&T's "backing down." The FCC even got a few headlines crediting it with "hanging up on AT&T's planned rate hikes." Within two weeks, the company introduced a radically redesigned basic calling plan that eliminated minimum fees, raised most rates (though not as much as in the original plan), and gave customers their choice of three low-cost calling days. AT&T's new rates were the same as or lower than its competitors' at all times of day and even reduced the cost of anytime calling by I5 percent, with no monthly fee or minimum charge. AT&T also sent letters to all twenty-eight million families who were on its basic calling plan or who made few long distance calls, inform- Tough Calls ing them of their options. And it ran full-page ads on the price changes in more than seventy-five major newspapers around the country. Between the access reductions, the elimination of the mini- mum charge, the new calling plans, the cost of a twenty-eight-million- piece mailing, and the advertising, the company lost millions. But AT&T lost something even more precious: its customers' trust. And that answered the question "Why should we be held to a higher stan- dard?" once and for all. In PR, You Can Never Say, "I Told You So" I wish I could say that I had foreseen the cliff at the end of the path we had taken. But even if I had-even if I had taken my warnings to Armstrong and been overruled, with the same disastrous results-I could not have said, "I told you so." My j