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There is no telling what Leila, sixty-two years old, felt at her sister’s death. But why should Leila—who always did feel put upon—feel any different than other survivors of those who commit suicide, who normally experience anger and abandonment, along with other emotions? At the very least, Edie’s death meant that Leila was the last remaining member of her immediate family; Edie had also taken away the opportunity to repair their strained relationship. And yet another of the Stahls had embarrassed the Buffetts, this time by stigmatizing the family with suicide. Whatever Leila did feel, less than a month later she abruptly married Roy Ralph, a pleasant man twenty years her senior who had been pursuing her since Howard’s death. Until now she had refused his proposals. Her relatives had listened with numb boredom throughout her widowhood as she ceaselessly invoked the past and the 38½ wonderful years with Howard. Thus she stunned them all when she reversed herself—and changed her name to Leila Ralph. Some of them thought she was out of her mind, and conceivably she was, at least temporarily. Howard, who had remained an invisible but constant presence since his death less than two years before, now went unmentioned at family gatherings for the sake of politeness, while his children adapted uneasily to a new stepfather who was in his eighties.

Susie, meanwhile, was taking on more obligations than ever, not just in the family but in the community. She began to press Warren to call a halt to his continuing obsession. The Buffett Partnership was stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey by American Express. It ended 1965 with assets of $37 million, including more than $3.5 million in profit on this one stock, which had risen to $50, then $60, then $70 per share. Warren had earned more than $2.5 million in fees, bringing his and Susie’s stake in the partnership to $6.8 million. He was thirty-five years old. The Buffetts were among the very rich by the standards of 1966. How much money did they need? How long did he have to keep going at this pace? Now that they were so rich, Susie thought they should do more for Omaha.

In 1966 she glowed with the fire of a woman who had found her cause in life. She had become close to leaders of the black community and was all over Omaha, brainstorming, coordinating, cajoling, publicizing, working on behind-the-scenes relationships in a town where racial tensions were reaching the point of violence. Every summer now in the nation’s major cities, race riots flared after minor incidents involving the police. Martin Luther King Jr. had issued a call the previous year: Desegregating workplaces and public facilities wasn’t enough; segregated housing had to be eliminated. The idea terrified many whites, especially after riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, which had turned into a war zone of arson, sniping, and looting in which thirty-four people were killed. Similar uprisings had taken place in Cleveland; Chicago; Brooklyn; Jacksonville, Florida; and other smaller towns.4 During a fifteen-day heat wave in July 1966, riots erupted in Omaha; the governor called out the National Guard, blaming the riots on “an environment unfit for human habitation.”5 Susie now made the elimination of segregated housing in Omaha her central cause. She tried to involve Warren in some of her community and civil-rights work, and he complied, but he was not much for committees. In the 1960s Buffett generally rolled over sapheads without even commenting. “I got involved in half a dozen of these things. It’s just the nature of it; if people focus their whole lives on one thing, they get a little obsessed after a while. And Susie would always see it coming with me—I would be sitting with these guys and she could see the look on my face as they went off into the wild blue yonder.”

Committee meetings also gave him a “splitting headache,” according to Munger; his way, therefore, was to let other people sit on the committees while he fed them ideas. Warren was far from indifferent to social and political causes,