canned reply, I recommended that we use Sandy Weill, co-CEO of Citigroup at the time and a mem- ber of AT&T's board of directors, as an intermediary with Jackson. Weill was one of the founding sponsors of Jackson's Wall Street Proj- ect, and I thought that if he could get Jackson to sit down with Arm- strong, without an entourage on either side and without the mediation of their handlers, we might be able to build a constructive relation- ship. Weill agreed, and a breakfast was scheduled at the Regency Hotel in New York City. Armstrong and Weill went without assistants; Jackson was accom- panied by Karin Stanford, the executive director of his Citizenship Ed- ucation Program, the nonprofit foundation through which he financed many of his activities. Stanford wrote her Ph.D. thesis on Jackson and then went to work for him in Washington. Breakfast ended with an agreement that Stanford would contact me to explore the questions posed in Jackson's initial letter. I arranged for Stanford and some of her colleagues to spend a full day in Basking Ridge, interviewing the subject matter experts in each area where they had questions. I made it clear that these were not to be negotiating sessions, but sessions to educate Jackson's people. At the same time, the sessions would give us some insight into the group's goals. By the end of the day, we not only knew what Jackson and his group wanted but knew how to give it to them at practically no cost. While he was still easily seduced by an opportunity to walk a picket line and work crowds into a frenzy, Jackson's principal goal had be- come economic development within the African American commu- nity, particularly its growing middle class. Two of his major tools in that effort were the Wall Street Project, an annual seminar and trade fair conducted in lower Manhattan, and an associated Trade Bureau, a loosely organized group of minority entrepreneurs and business- people who looked to Jackson to give them entrée to the large corpora- tions that sponsored the Wall Street Project.