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Rising to the Occasion

There is a tide in the affairs of menWhich, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;Omitted, all the voyage of their lifeIs bound in shallows and in miseries.On such a full sea are we now afloat,And we must take the current when it serves,Or lose our ventures.1

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I represented the giant defense contractor Northrop Corp., prior to its merger with Grumman. The company’s crisis at that time was exceedingly public and well covered by the national media, so I can mention it here. Northrop was the target of at least five Justice Department investigations and faced a litany of more than 140 charges alleging that the company had falsified test data on the MX missile, falsified test data on the ...

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