William M. Ellinghaus Dies at 99; Presided Over AT&T Breakup

Jan 6, 2022
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However in a plan devised by the state, Mr. Ellinghaus was named chairman of the Municipal Help Company, which was created to include the disaster, and was later appointed to the Emergency Monetary Management Board, which took over metropolis fiscal affairs. The board imposed extreme cuts in metropolis companies and spending and closed some hospitals, libraries and fireplace stations.

Federal mortgage ensures had been finally labored out, banks deferred maturity on some bonds, traders returned, and, after a number of years, the disaster pale.

After Mr. Ellinghaus was named vice chairman of AT&T in 1976, he resigned from the Emergency Monetary Management Board, citing “the heavy calls for of my new project.” Gov. Hugh L. Carey, who had appointed him, hailed Mr. Ellinghaus as “a mannequin of essentially the most fascinating mix of government-private sector experience working collectively for the widespread good.”

Mr. Ellinghaus was named president and chief working officer of AT&T in 1979, and over the subsequent eight years he was deeply concerned in methods to defend the corporate towards rivals and authorities litigation. Washington aimed to dismantle the corporate’s regulated monopolies over native and long-distance cellphone companies and its tools manufacturing arm, Western Electrical.

For almost a century, AT&T had been guided by the objective of offering native phone service to each American who needed it. It created the Bell System of twenty-two regional subsidiaries, which collectively provided greater than 80 % of the nation’s cellphone service. It additionally had digital monopolies on long-distance calling, permitting 1,600 unbiased carriers to tie into its strains.

AT&T had survived wars, depressions, floods, earthquakes, scandals, lawsuits, competitors, dangerous jokes and cable-gnawing squirrels. However with its stranglehold on the phone enterprise, it appeared clear to economists, authorities regulators and plenty of abnormal Individuals that it had lastly grown too massive.

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Supply- nytimes