Day 025 - 16 Sep 94 - Page 63
1 whole credit for the national distribution of these
2 information leaflets in which, apparently, you can see
3 McDonald's is unique, the whole credit is owed first to
4 the Attorney General of New York and, secondly, to the
5 Attorneys General of Texas and California?
6 A. Mr. Rampton, I will often give credit. I will never
7 take it on myself. This is not an argument.
8
9 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Concentrate on New York then.
10 A. On New York: New York kicked the boulder that started
11 rolling downhill. The fact that it was voluntary that
12 McDonald's and the other restaurants agreed to do that
13 after we asked them to, all those restaurants chains
14 deserve credit for doing it voluntarily without having
15 been sued. I do not attach a great deal of credit to a
16 company that gets sued and then decides to do something
17 supposedly voluntarily. That becomes a lot more
18 questionable.
19
20 Once a law suit is instituted, the question of how
21 voluntary or how creditworthy anything is when done by the
22 defendant is highly in doubt. But in this instance
23 McDonald's deserved equal credit with the other fast food
24 chains for agreeing to do precisely what the other chains
25 agreed to do, which was to make nutrition an ingredient
26 information available nationwide.
27
28 The objection I had was that McDonald's attempted to, and
29 for about a two-day span did, get all the credit to itself
30 as a PR move. That is an objection that I have that
31 really has nothing to do with law enforcement matters.
32
33 Q. I am not asking for your opinion as a law enforcement
34 person, Mr. Gardner. I am asking for your personal view,
35 not that it matters very much perhaps what you or I think
36 about it in the end. Suppose it should turn out at the
37 end of this case that I am right in suggesting that the
38 whole initiative for this thing came from McDonald's, and
39 that it was McDonald's who, as you put it, kicked the
40 boulder down the hill and everybody else latched on to it,
41 either willingly or under compulsion of threat, would you
42 have been prepared to revise your opinion then?
43 A. If McDonald's, without prompting from the State of
44 New York and without the fact of the State's investigation
45 or the subsequent investigations by the other States had
46 always intended this and that is proven, then I would
47 change my mind.
48
49 I mean, you must understand, Mr. Rampton, that although
50 I have been asked to testify in this matter and have been
51 asked what my opinion is in regard to what McDonald's
52 plans were from our perspective then, we did not care. We
53 had no concern about why McDonald's chose to do this. We
54 only were concerned that McDonald's chose to do it.
55
56 So, I am having to reconstruct and to testify to an
57 entirely different matter than that which interested us in
58 either 1986 or 1987. The motivations of a company in
59 placing false advertising and deceiving its customers or
60 in agreeing to stop, were not relevant to us; only they
