"Hi, I'm Charlie Brown"

The decision was the most difficult Charles Lee Brown had ever confronted during a 37-year career with the telephone company. Yet on the night the AT&T chairman made up his mind not to fight the Justice Department's plan to break up the Bell System, he squelched all second thoughts and slept soundly. "If I worried after a decision," he says, "I'd be a basket case, and I don't do that." Armed with such self-assurance, Brown, 62, has for nearly two years calmly dealt with criticism, fears and confusion among customers, employees, share holders and Congressmen while presiding over the most extensive reorganization in U.S. corporate history. Says Belton Johnson, a Texas ranch owner and a director of AT&T: "Charlie Brown's done an amazing job. Nobody could have done it better."

A graceful, gray-haired man with an easygoing smile, Brown is as unpretentious as a telephone repairman, perhaps because he has fixed a few phones in his time. "Hi, I'm Charlie Brown," he introduces himself. Throughout all the congressional hearings, bargaining sessions with the Government and marathon staff meetings surrounding the divestiture, he has kept a self-effacing sense of humor. On one arduous day, an employee accidentally trod on Brown's foot in an elevator at AT&T's Manhattan headquarters. "Oh, that's O.K.," Brown said. "Everybody's stepping on me nowadays."

Brown admits that his deal with the Government was a retreat from AT&T's longtime resistance to a breakup. "Divestiture was not our idea," he says, "and we think it is wrong from the standpoint of the country's interests." But the alternative seemed bleaker: "Time was not on our side. The Government's determination to restructure the Bell System would have gone on for years, draining our energy and preventing us from planning our own future." Rather than cling to the past, Brown was eager to get on with the "exciting" task of building the new AT&T.

Even so, the breakup is almost like a divorce in the family for Brown. A native of Richmond, he is a Bell brat. His mother had been a Bell operator before getting married, and his father spent 37 years with the company, eventually rising to district traffic manager in Richmond. While earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Virginia, Brown worked two summers as an AT&T ditchdigger and cable layer, making $13 a week. After joining the Navy during World War II and serving as a radioman in the Pacific Fleet, he became an equipment maintenance man for AT&T in Hartford, Conn., in 1946.

Showing more versatility than flash, Brown climbed up AT&T's corporate telephone pole step by step, going through 23 jobs in nine cities. He became president of Illinois Bell Telephone in 1969 and earned a place in AT&T lore by making service calls during a repairmen's strike. After becoming chief financial officer of the parent company, he developed innovative ways to reduce AT&T's debt. As president, he began pushing AT&T forward rapidly in such advanced fields as fiber optics and electronic voice recognition.

In 1979 he became chairman, succeeding the colorful and quotable John deButts, who was a company spokesman in AT&T commercials. Brown's image has been bland by comparison. While respected for his intelligence and technical expertise, he has never been a great communicator. His speeches to groups of employees or Wall Street analysts can have a narcotic effect. Asked to explain his formula for success, he admits that "it isn't my charisma." AT&T insiders say he hides his emotions and signals distress only by growing ominously silent. On balance, that stolid style has been an asset. Says Rawleigh Warner Jr., chairman of Mobil and an AT&T director: "He's equitable, and he doesn't lose his cool. There are no highs or lows, just steadiness." Brown, who lives in Princeton, N.J., with his second wife, Ann Lee, works off much of his tension by playing tennis and at least two rounds of golf each week. His handicap: 11.

One of the few ways to get a rise out of Brown is to suggest that AT&T is a monopoly-coddled giant without the agility needed to compete in free markets. "If we're not competent," he says, "I wonder why the competitors are trying to get Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to restrict us in various ways. We must be making a mark somewhere, or the competition wouldn't be so frightened." After spending nearly four decades in a company shackled by Government regulation, Brown is eager to show what an unbound AT&T can do. He is sure that the competition will soon be saying in awe, "Good grief, Charlie Brown!" This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.