The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T

by Steve Coll

The lawyers at Antitrust came in all shapes and sizes, but they were roughly divided along generational lines. On one side were the older, “career” lawyers who had worked in the division for decades, rising slowly through its bureaucracy to supervisory positions. Over the years, these attorneys had tried hundreds of government antitrust cases, large and small. They had won many of them, lost a few, and settled the rest. They had seen political administrations and political movements come and go, and they had survived the tenures of politically appointed Antitrust chiefs of every ideological stripe. And through it all, they had acquired that salty, slightly world-weary, eminently pragmatic outlook peculiar to men of integrity who have spent their lives working in a bureaucracy. On the other side were the young, passionate lawyers like Verveer, most of them politically liberal and graduates of the turbulent 1960s campuses, who had come to Antitrust to combine a respectable profession with furtherance of the movement that had swept them up in school. As lawyers, Verveer and his contemporaries had been trained in caution and diligence, but they were also activists, and there was very little that was cynical about their approach to the legal profession. Inevitably, these two generations within the Antitrust division met, clashed, compromised, and learned from each other. The younger lawyers acquired skills and patience from their supervisors; the older lawyers were reinvigorate...