Perhaps, they told themselves at their nightly caucuses in George Saunders’ Madison Hotel suite, the basic problem was that Greene could never be comfortable with the phone company’s gargantuan size. Perhaps the judge’s jokes about “the well-oiled machine” genially masked a deeply held suspicion about huge, centrally managed organizations. Although he never dwelled on it, Greene had seen during his childhood in Nazi Germany the extreme consequences of manipulated, concentrated power, and perhaps the experience, understandably, had left an indelible impression.
