The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [152]
Brandt scouted Travelers Cheque users, bank tellers, bank officers, restaurants, hotels, and credit-card holders to gauge how American Express was doing versus its competitors, and whether use of American Express Travelers Cheques and cards had dropped off.47 Back came the usual foot-high stack of material. Buffett’s verdict after sorting through it was that customers were still happy to be associated with the name American Express. The tarnish on Wall Street had not spread to Main Street.48
During the months that Buffett was investigating American Express, his father’s health declined precipitously. Despite having undergone several surgeries, Howard’s cancer had spread throughout his body. In early 1964, Warren took charge as the de facto leader of the family. While time remained, he had Howard remove him from his will to increase the share left to Doris and Bertie in a trust. The amount—$180,000—was a fraction of his and Susie’s net worth; he felt it made no sense for him to share it when he could so easily earn money himself. He set up another trust for his children so that Howard could leave them the farm to which the Buffett family had planned to flee when the dollar became worthless. Warren would be trustee of these trusts. Howard’s previous will had specified an ordinary wood casket and an economical funeral, and the family convinced him to delete that part.49 One of the most difficult things Warren felt he had to do was to level with his father that he was no longer a Republican at heart.50 The reason, he said, was civil rights.51 Amazingly, however, he could not bring himself to change his voter registration as long as Howard was alive.52
“I wouldn’t throw that in his face. In fact if he had lived, it would have really constrained my life. I would not have come out against my father politically in public. I can envision his friends wondering why Warren was behaving that way. I couldn’t have done it.”
Although the family did not talk about Howard’s impending death at home,53 Susie took over much of his care from Leila. She also saw to it that the children took part in their own way. She arranged for them to stand outside his hospital window with a sign that said, “We Love You, Grandpa.” At ten and nine years old, Susie Jr. and Howie understood what was going on. Five-year-old Peter had a vaguer sense of his grandfather’s illness. Susie also made sure that Warren—who had trouble facing illness under any circumstances—went to the hospital every day to see his father.
As Howard worsened, Warren poured his attention into American Express. At the time, he had the largest cache of money with which to work that the partnership had ever seen: Its huge profits in 1963 meant that on January 1, 1964, $5 million of new money had come in, and the partnership was already enriched by $3 million of stock gains from the previous year. His own money had exploded: He was now worth $1.8 million. BPL’s capital at the beginning of 1964 stood at just under $17.5 million. During Howard’s last weeks, Warren began to invest in American Express at a hyperactive sprint, pouring money into stock as fast as he could trade, working tirelessly and methodically to get as many shares as he could without running up the price. Only five years before, he had had to scrape and scrounge to find a few tens of thousands for National American. Never before had he invested like this. Never had he put to work anything approaching this much money, and so fast, in his life.
Through most of Howard’s final few days, Susie was alone with him, often for hours at a time. She both feared and understood pain, but she was unafraid of death and had the strength to sit with Howard even when those around her were falling apart. Her gift for comforting the hopeless and those in misery blossomed, and Leila, devastated, let her take charge. In such close proximity to death, Susie found that the boundaries between herself and the other dissolved.