Book Review : The Day They Dismantled Ma Bell

Managing the Bell System Break-Up: An Inside View by W. Brooke Tunstall (McGraw-Hill: $17.95)

To those inside the Bell System, the government-imposed dismantling of the monolithic organization inspired early in this century by Theodore N. Vail verged on madness. But Ma Bell’s heritage taught loyalty to a higher order--originally creation and operation of a superb telephone network available and affordable to all--and this heritage, writes W. Brooke Tunstall, made the breakup possible without a breakdown in communications.

During the two years between signing of the consent decree ending a long-standing antitrust suit against American Telephone & Telegraph and Divestiture Day on Jan. 1, 1984, the effort proved to be like “taking apart a 747 in midair and making sure it keeps flying,” as one planner recalled. Transforming the intricately interwoven units of the Bell System into seven separate regional holding companies, while merging Bell Laboratories and Western Electric into a new AT&T; technologies subsidiary and creating a new central support organization jointly owned by the Seven Sisters, was less like slicing a pie, said another, than pulling apart taffy.

The author was intimately involved in divestiture at AT&T;’s highest level, and provides a useful account of how the celebrated Bell corporate culture, with its emphasis on diplomacy, courtesy and teamwork, coped with achieving a dismemberment most employees considered not only ill-advised but wicked.

Tunstall is rightly proud of that record, and of the men and women who made it work. His brief account, though deferential, charts fertile fields for future explorations.