The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [184]
Then Johnson announced that he would not run again and John F. Kennedy’s brother Robert Kennedy entered the race. He and McCarthy raced through a bitter primary battle in which there was no clear front-runner until Kennedy won the California primary, giving him a decisive lead in delegates. But on the night of his victory, he was shot by an assassin, dying twenty-four hours later, and Johnson’s Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, announced his candidacy. He captured the nomination at a tumultuous Democratic convention in Chicago marked by battles between police equipped with nightsticks and Mace and rioting antiwar protesters. Buffett then supported Humphrey against the Republican Richard Nixon, who won the election. In later years, McCarthy switched parties several times and made several erratic independent runs for President, undermining his credibility as a serious politician.
Buffett was notably loyal to his close friends. His enthusiasm for more distant acquaintances, and especially for public figures was fickle, however, waxing and waning with their stature in others’ eyes. In his insecurity, he worried constantly about how associating with others reflected on him. Eventually he regretted and downplayed his association with McCarthy. But his involvement in politics and his commitment of money signaled a sea change in Buffett’s life. For the first time he had made room for something besides investing, a “noneconomic activity” with roots in his family’s past and one that stretched toward the unknowable future.
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Easy, Safe, Profitable, and Pleasant
Omaha • 1968–1969
In January 1968, Buffett had issued a call to his fellow Grahamites, summoning them together for the first time as a meeting of the faithful in the middle of a stock market gone mad. “[T]here has been a tremendous change in attitude in the last few years, and I think the gang that is assembling in La Jolla is about all that is left of the old guard,”1 he wrote, inviting Graham’s former students Bill Ruane, Walter Schloss, Marshall Weinberg, Jack Alexander, and Tom Knapp. He also invited Charlie Munger, whom he had introduced to Graham, as well as Munger’s partner, Roy Tolles, and Jack Alexander’s partner, Buddy Fox. Ed Anderson, who had left Munger’s partnership to become a partner in Tweedy, Browne, was on the guest list, too, as was Sandy Gottesman, who, Buffett told Graham, is “a good friend of mine and a great admirer of you.” Lastly, he said, “I think you probably remember Henry [Brandt], who works very closely with us.”2
Fred Stanback, Buffett’s partner in deals like Sanborn Map and the best man at his wedding, was too busy to attend. A few years after Warren had finished at Columbia, he and Miss Nebraska 1949, Vanita Mae Brown, had reunited for dinner in New York. They made it a sort of double date by bringing along Susie and Fred, who had met Vanita at least once before through Warren. She was then Vanita Mae Brown Nederlander, having been briefly married to a member of the Nederlander family, theater owners who were part of an American entertainment dynasty. After the dinner, Fred, Warren’s most introverted friend, became, as another friend put it, “putty in her hands,” as if to prove the old maxim that opposites attract. Initially, their marriage probably seemed like a sort of charming postscript to Warren’s career at Columbia: a couple brought into the Buffetts’ circle from that era. He did have a tendency to arrange his friends’ lives, asking them to partner with him, putting them on his companies’ boards, and in general wrapping them into his life through ties of various kinds. Two friends married may have felt almost like a compliment to him, but it turned out to be the worst decision Fred ever made in his life.
He and Vanita had been living in Salisbury, North Carolina, where Fred grew up and where his family had built their “Snap Back with Stanback” headache-powder business. Now