The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [136]
She also helped the senior Buffetts, who were saddled with both Howard’s health issues and his ideology. Just as the rest of America had caught up to his level of paranoia about Communism, Howard leapfrogged ahead. By the late Eisenhower years, Americans felt their country, grown soft and fat in its prosperity, was losing the arms race and were haunted by the frightening image of Premier Nikita Khrushchev banging his shoe on a table at the United Nations and thundering “We will bury you.” All 180 million Americans ducked-and-covered in air-raid drills, the youngest crouched under their elementary-school desks. More than one billion people were now living under Communism in almost twenty countries around the globe. The rapid advance of Communism over such a broad swath of the world stunned much of the nation. Howard joined a newly formed group, the John Birch Society, which combined paranoia about Communism with what he described as concern for the “moral and spiritual problem of America, which would be with us even if Communism were stopped tomorrow.”18 He covered his office walls with maps showing the menacing red advance of Communism. He and Doris helped bring the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade to Omaha19 and threw themselves behind a movement of ideological conservatives that was coalescing around Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Howard was respected as a philosophical purist among the libertarian-leaning wing of the Republican Party, but anyone associated with the Birchers attracted both alarm and ridicule. After he went to the local press to defend his Birch membership, people increasingly wrote him off as an eccentric. That Omaha snickered at his revered father was painful to Warren.
But his anxiety on Howard’s behalf had even more to do with eighteen months of mysterious symptoms that doctors could not seem to diagnose despite a trip to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.20 Finally, in May of 1958, Howard had been told he had colon cancer that required immediate surgery.21 Warren had been upset by the diagnosis, but angered by what he considered its inexcusable tardiness. Since then, Susie had shielded him from the details of his father’s illness.22 She gave him head rubs and kept up the household schedule. She also devoted herself to propping up Leila during Howard’s surgery and long recuperation. She did all of this cheerfully; not only that, she seemed to thrive as the calm, soothing presence on whom everyone could depend in this crisis. She helped her older children understand the illness and saw that all of them, including little Peter, visited their grandfather regularly. Howie watched college football in the afternoons with Howard, who would sit in his recliner and switch sides repeatedly during games, cheering for whichever team was losing. When Howie asked him why, he said, “They’re the underdogs now.” 23
Throughout his father’s ordeal, Warren used business as a distraction. He kept his head buried in American Banker or the Oil & Gas Journal except for brief interludes when he wandered into the kitchen for some popcorn or a Pepsi from the wooden crates that only he was allowed to touch.
Yet somehow, despite Howard’s distress and illness, the quiet, withdrawn man who was the Warren Buffett his family saw became a presence in public no matter what was going on at home. He displayed an authority, an almost electric charge of energy, that radiated to an audience. “He just used to ooze that stuff wherever he went,” says Chuck Peterson.24 The man who had so impressed Charlie Munger talked constantly and convincingly