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however. He had become deeply concerned about the potential for nuclear war—a vivid and seemingly impending threat in the early 1960s, since President Kennedy had urged families to build fallout shelters in order to survive a nuclear attack and the United States had barely averted a nuclear war after a standoff between Kennedy and Khrushchev over the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba. When Buffett discovered philosopher Bertrand Russell’s 1962 antinuclear treatise, Has Man a Future?, it affected him powerfully.6 He identified with Russell, admired his philosophical rigor, and frequently cited his opinions and aphorisms. He even kept a small plaque on his desk quoting a phrase from an influential antinuclear “manifesto” on which Russell had collaborated with Albert Einstein: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”7

But it was the antiwar movement that had taken on more urgency in Buffett’s mind after Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, authorizing President Johnson to use military force in Southeast Asia without formally declaring war, using an alleged but unproven naval attack against a U.S. destroyer as the pretext to attack North Vietnam. Young men were burning their draft cards, going to jail, and fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets all over the world to protest the war escalation; they marched in New York City on Fifth Avenue, in Times Square, and at the New York Stock Exchange; in Tokyo, London, Rome, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and elsewhere.

Warren was not an ideological pacifist like many of those who were marching, nor an extreme isolationist like his father, but he did feel strongly that the war was wrong, and that U.S. involvement in it was based on deception—especially troubling for a man who placed such a high value on honesty.

He started asking speakers over to the house to talk to his friends about it. Once he brought an antiwar speaker from as far away as Pennsylvania.8 He himself, however, was not going to march against the war.

Warren had strong views about specialization; he defined his special skills as thinking and making money. When asked to donate, his first choice, always, was to donate ideas, including ideas that would get other people to give money. But he would also give money himself—not a lot, but some—to politicians and to Susie’s causes. He never labored in the trenches stuffing envelopes; volunteering directly for causes, no matter how urgent and important, would consume time he felt was more efficiently spent thinking of ideas and making more money to write bigger checks.

Many people in the 1960s felt a burning desire to tear down the Establishment that had created the war and operated the “military-industrial complex”—a desire to avoid “selling out” to “the Man.” For some, therefore, social consciousness clashed with the need to make a living. Warren, however, saw himself as working for his partners, not for “The Man,” and as someone whose business acumen and money helped the civil rights and antiwar causes. So he could focus on his business with a sense of dual purpose, and felt no inner conflict about how he spent his time.

The conflict he was beginning to feel was a struggle to find investments for the partnership. During the past year he had put money into safe but increasingly scarce cigar butts like his old favorite Philadelphia and Reading, and Consolidation Coal. He had managed to find some of the few undervalued stocks that still paraded through the Standard & Poor’s weekly report: Employers Reinsurance, F. W. Woolworth, and First Lincoln Financial. He’d also bought some stock in Disney after meeting Walt Disney and seeing the entertainment showman’s singular focus, his love of his work, and the way these had translated into a priceless catalog of entertainment. But the concept of “great businesses” had not entirely sunk in, and he didn’t load up. Of course, he’d continued to cobble together a bigger and bigger stake in Berkshire Hathaway. But he had also built a $7 million “short” position