 only if he had found "god." "Is John Walter god?" someone from the national media actually thought to ask. And then, of course, Walter was asked the most challenging question of all: "Who's your long- distance company?" His answer: "I don't know." No one was thrilled with the news conference. When we returned to our offices for one-on-one interviews, we discovered that "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap was on CNBC blasting Walter's appointment and asking why AT&T's board had not sought someone "with a proven record of wealth creation, which is what suffering shareholders are looking for." Furthermore, AT&T's stock price was down half a point on volume of 4.8 million shares, about twice the normal volume. By the end of the Complete the CEO day, it would be down nearly $2 on volume of 9 million shares in primarily institutional trading. I didn't realize how upset Walter himself was until dinner. We had arranged to meet at the restaurant in the Olde Mill Inn, just across the highway from AT&T's Basking Ridge headquarters, at the end of the day. It was supposed to be a celebratory dinner, but Walter under- standably was not in a joyful mood. He was convinced that his inabil- ity to name his long-distance company had torpedoed any chance he had of establishing himself as the visionary kind of CEO that AT&T needed. And he blamed us for not preparing him for the question. "The prep you guys gave me for that news conference was just lawful," he said. "More than lawful, it was appalling." I stared at my menu while Marilyn gamely declared that we would work harder to get into sync with his expectations. "Just appalling," he continued. "I thought AT&T would have a real professional opera- tion. All you guys did was point me to the elevator and warn me that there'd be a lot of photographers." In fact, we had spent an inordinate amount of time warning him that the moment he stepped off the elevator to walk the ten yards or SO to our auditorium, he would be confronted with a phalanx of about a dozen photographers, each flashing strobe lig