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At this time, tens of thousands of students were demonstrating against the Vietnam War on college campuses. The Vietcong had launched the Tet Offensive, attacking a hundred South Vietnamese cities. Americans had been horrified by a photograph of a South Vietnamese police chief shooting a Vietcong guerrila in the head point-blank, an image that for the first time changed the Communists from an abstraction to human beings. The U.S. government had just eliminated most draft deferments, finally putting the sons of the upper middle class at risk of being drafted. Public sentiment turned decisively against the war. By the time King was shot, the country felt as though revolution could erupt at any moment.

In their various ways, many people decided they were fed up, and done with being put down. Buffett’s friend Nick Newman abruptly announced that he would no longer attend meetings at clubs that discriminated against Jews as members.27 Warren, too, was moved to take action. Since his Graham-Newman days, he had broken away from the segregated 1950s culture and the anti-Semitism of his family’s elder generation to forge friendships and business connections with a wide circle of Jewish people. He even seemed to feel a sense of personal identification with Jews, some thought; their status as outsiders fit with his own sense of maladjustment and his alignment with the underdog. Some time before, Buffett had quietly resigned from the Rotary Club, repelled by the bigotry he saw as a member of its membership committee. But he never told anyone the reason. Now he made it his personal project to sponsor a Jew—his friend Herman Goldstein—for membership in the Omaha Club.

Since one of the rationales that institutions like the Omaha Club used to defend their exclusionary policies was that “they have their own clubs that don’t admit us,” Buffett decided to ask Nick Newman to nominate him for the all-Jewish Highland Country Club.28 Some of its members objected, using the same logic employed by the Omaha Club: Why take in gentiles when we had to establish our club because their clubs wouldn’t have us?29 But a couple of rabbis got involved and an Anti-Defamation League spokesman appeared on Buffett’s behalf.30 Once accepted, Buffett quietly stormed the Omaha Club, armed with his Jewish country-club membership. Herman Goldstein was voted in, and the long-standing religious barrier to membership there finally toppled.

Buffett had devised a clever solution, a way to get the club to do the right thing without confronting anyone. It avoided the thing he dreaded, but it also reflected his reasoning—probably correct—that marching and demonstrations would not change the minds of well-off businessmen.

It also worked because he was now a well-known figure in Omaha. He was no longer an upstart; he had clout. The man who had once had to work to get off the blacklist of the Omaha Country Club had singlehandedly effected what was perhaps the most significant organizational change since its founding in one of Omaha’s most elite institutions.

Yet Buffett wanted to play more than just a local role. With his money, he knew he could have an impact at the national level, for 1968 was an election year, and it would take a lot of money to try to unseat an incumbent President—Lyndon Johnson—in favor of an antiwar candidate.

Vietnam was the central issue of the campaign, and Eugene McCarthy, the liberal Senator from Minnesota, was initially the only Democrat willing to run in the primaries against Johnson.

The campaign had started in New Hampshire, where a McCarthy “children’s crusade” against the war sent nearly ten thousand young activists and college students to knock on almost every door in the state in heavy snow. He won forty-two percent of the New Hampshire vote, a strikingly strong showing against an incumbent President. Many students, blue-collar workers, and antiwar voters considered McCarthy a hero. Buffett became treasurer of his Nebraska campaign, and he and Susie