lly find enthusiasm contagious. Thin, angular, and gray in hair and pallor, he was all edges and seemed too ascetic to get excited about anything but a checkbook that balanced to the penny on the first try. But when he came to lunch in the executive dining room, just be- fore a scheduled news conference, he told Allen that the meeting with analysts had gone very well. "They just thought we should move faster," he said. Then, in an almost offhand way, as he reached for the pickles, he added, "Why don't we say we'll do the IPO by the end of the first quarter?" Thus were sown the seeds of a public relations crisis that would ignite a national debate on corporate responsibility and make AT&T and its chairman symbols of corporate greed. A Matter of Numbers Setting up three new companies was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to clean their books of obsolete equipment and facilities. Low-performing divisions could be sold off. Each company's workforce could be re- sized to its new competitive environment, and the separation charges could be wrapped into one magnificent write-off that would give all three companies as close to a clean slate as the accounting rules would allow. And if an extraordinary write-off was in the offing, why wait to do it in the middle of the next year and complicate continuing results? Why not do it on the last business day of the current year SO it would all be charged to 1995? Wouldn't that give everyone the cleanest possi- ble jumping-off point? So on January 2, the first business day of 1996, AT&T greeted the New Year by announcing a restructuring charge against 1995 results Tough Calls of about $4 billion after taxes, about half of it to pay for the elimina- tion of 40,000 jobs. Miller had hoped that the job reduction would be the biggest in history and had us do the research to prove it. He was disappointed when we discovered that General Motors, IBM, and Sears had already copped that distinction. We were in fourth place. Bummer. Neverthe- less, as designed, the announcement suitably impres