any doubts about Armstrong, that dissipated them. He told several of us what a great conversation he had had with Armstrong and how encouraged he was by Armstrong's grasp of the issues that AT&T faced and his openness to a variety of options. Keller uncharacteristically also had some of the other details Tough Calls wrong. Allen had not opposed the purchase of McCaw Cellular. The board had never considered buying Hughes to get Armstrong. The sale of our own satellite services business earlier in the year included a noncompete clause that would have made it impossible for AT&T to buy Hughes, which owned DirecTV. In fact, during the CEO search, we were actively negotiating with Hughes to get out of a marketing agreement that gave us warrants for a minority position in DirecTV. And knowing how board members were coddled (especially when their wives were around, as they were at the Greenbrier), I found it very hard to believe there was only one van to shuttle them to their corporate jets at the three airports serving the resort. Announcing Mike Armstrong as his successor should have made for a satisfying, if not happy, day for Bob Allen. He had made a hiring mistake; he had admitted it, at great cost to his reputation; and now he was helping to fix it even though it meant leaving the company that had been his life for more than forty years. But Keller's front-page, right-hand-column story in the Wall Street Journal all but guaranteed that the photo op for the day would be of a tired, downcast, defeated Bob Allen. For Mike Armstrong, the day was a blur of flashbulbs and micro- phones. Setting aside the homogenized remarks we had drafted for him, Armstrong spoke from a single sheet of paper with five or six lines of his left-hand scrawl, demonstrating the kind of confidence, optimism, and pent-up energy seen only in super salespeople and great racehorses. It was a tour de force, and it was on display all day. But after thirteen hours of employee meetings, investor calls, and media interviews, Armstrong slumped exhauste