 guests of honor at the New Castle, Indiana, high school homecoming. Allen, whose father owned and operated a children's clothing store in New Castle, was the local boy made good. After graduating from Wabash College, where he met and married his wife, he went off to work for the telephone company as a manager for Indiana Bell. Now he was chairman and CEO of AT&T, traveling by corporate jet and golfing on national television with stars of stage, screen, and Wall Street. But he had never lost touch with his old friends in New Castle, and, as he waved to them from the football stands while Chrysler Newport High School played Kokomo, few would have guessed that he had a care in the world. Actually, Allen harbored a secret that would make the financial markets swoon, and before leaving for New Castle, he had instructed Tough Calls his trusted lieutenants back in New Jersey to prepare to announce it in just two days. Allen's plan had evolved in unprecedented secrecy over the spring and summer. At first, he had confided his intentions only to the com- pany's chief counsel, John Zeglis, and its chief financial officer, Rick Miller. They, in turn, had engaged one of the company's outside law firms, Wachtell Lipton, and its long-time investment banker, J. P. Mor- gan, to run the numbers, do the research, and draft the necessary legal documents. The AT&T executives didn't even use their secretaries to prepare their memos; they wrote them out in longhand. Allen went SO far as to carry documents home to burn in his kitchen sink. By Labor Day, only about forty of the company's most senior offi- cers had been briefed on the plan. Allen was going to ask the board of directors to split the company into three parts: an equipment manu- facturer built around the venerable Western Electric company, which AT&T had controlled since 1881; a computer company built around the NCR Corporation, which AT&T had acquired in a hostile takeover just three years earlier; and a communication services company, which would carry the AT&T name. In o