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

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