• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“On my wedding night, I had chicken fried steak at the Wigwam Café in Wahoo, Nebraska,” Buffett says.22 The Wigwam was a tiny hole-in-the-wall less than an hour from Omaha, with a few booths and cowboy decor. From there, Warren and Susie drove thirty miles to the Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln to spend the night, “and that’s all I’ll say on that subject,” Buffett says.

“The next day I bought a copy of the Omaha World-Herald and it had run an article that said, ‘Only love can stop the Guard.’” 23 The 1952 flood was the worst in modern times in Omaha, the effort spent to avert it Herculean. “The other guys were sandbagging for days, patrolling in the flood, with the snakes and rats. I was the only guy that didn’t get called out.”

The newlyweds traveled all over the western and southwestern United States. Warren had never been there, but Susie knew the West Coast well. They visited her family, took in the sights, went to the Grand Canyon, and had a wonderful time. “We did not stop to visit companies and look at investments, as has been reported,” Buffett insists. On the way back they stopped in Las Vegas, which was full of ex-Omaha people. The “layoff bookies” Eddie Barrick and Sam Ziegman had moved there shortly before and bought into the Flamingo Hotel.24 They were soon followed by another associate, Jackie Gaughan, who had invested in casinos from the Flamingo to the Barbary Coast. All these characters had shopped at the Buffett grocery store, and Fred Buffett got along well with them, even though he wasn’t a gambler. For Warren, Vegas felt almost homey, carrying echoes of the racetrack and full of people who knew his family. So he was not afraid of the house. “Susie won a jackpot on the slot machine. She was only nineteen. They wouldn’t pay her because she was underage. I said, ‘Lookit, you took her nickels.’ And they paid her.”

After Vegas, the Buffetts headed back to Omaha. Warren could not stop chortling over his luckless colleagues in the Guard. “Oh, the honeymoon was great. It was great. Three weeks. And all the time, these guys in the Guard were sloshing it up.”

PART THREE

The Racetrack

20

Graham-Newman

Omaha and New York City • 1952–1955

A few months after the wedding, Susie went to Chicago with her parents and new in-laws for the Republican convention in July of 1952. The Thompsons and the Buffetts descended on Chicago, not as delegates but as part of an army. Politically speaking at least, they were now one united family, and this election year they were on a crusade to reclaim the White House for the Republicans after twenty agonizing years under the Democrats.1 Doris would be working behind the scenes alongside her father, while the much younger Bertie and Susie, innocents at the spectacle, spent their time gawking at celebrities like John Wayne, who had shown up for the Grand Old Party.2

Warren, of course, stayed in Omaha, grinding away. Politics fascinated him, but not like money. He still hated working as a “prescriptionist,” and kept toiling at it while trying to find a way out. His old teacher David Dodd tried to help him by referring him to the Value Line Investment Survey, an investment adviser and research publisher, which was looking for “new men.” The job would have paid well—“at least $7,000 a year.”3 But Warren did not plan to be an anonymous researcher. So he carried on trying to sell GEICO to uninterested clients while reading the convention news that was being reported under inch-high headlines in the newspapers. For the first time in history, a convention was also being covered on television, and Warren watched eagerly, struck by the power of this medium to magnify and influence events.

The front-runner going into the convention was Senator Robert Taft of Ohio.4 Known as “Mr. Integrity,” Taft headed a minority wing of the Republican Party—centered around isolationist Midwesterners—that wanted the government to be small, to stay out of everybody’s business, and above all to go after Communism more aggressively than