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Warren particularly disliked buying houses, considering money spent on them as lying fallow, not earning its keep. Susie needled him about money. “If we were rich,” she said, “you would just go up to that house, and ask the owner how much she wants for it, and pay however much she asked. But I know we’re not rich.” In their perpetual tug-of-war, however, Susie was usually able to dislodge the cash from him in the end. Buffett eventually sent Roy Tolles’s wife, Martha, a canny bargainer, to negotiate for the house. She dickered the owner down to $150,000,52 and when Roy Tolles called to tell Warren, he said, “I have bad news. You bought it.”

35

The Sun

Omaha • 1971–1973

Susie set to work decorating the place in Emerald Bay with casual rattan furniture. She installed a separate telephone line for Warren, who spent most of the time when he was in California watching business news on television and talking on the phone.

The “personal concerns” and Joe Rosenfield were drawing her husband in the opposite direction from California—toward Washington, and electoral politics. The Buffetts hosted a dinner in Omaha for Senator George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic candidate for President. And Warren had given money to Allard Lowenstein, a former Congressman known as the “pied piper” of liberals, who resembled Gene McCarthy in his power to galvanize young people into activism over civil rights. He had also backed John Tunney, the “Kennedyesque” son of heavyweight boxer Gene Tunney, in his successful Senate run in California;1 Tunney’s golden-boy political career became inspiration for the movie The Candidate, about a charismatic politician who is “too young, too handsome, too liberal, too perfect” to win, so can afford to tweak the Establishment. “The Candidate” was the kind of politician for whom Buffett consistently fell—men with the ineffable magnetism of Hollywood stars, men whose presence stirred voters’ emotions—except that he wanted his candidates to win.

He had an idea that he thought would be helpful to politicians, about what he called the “discomfort index”—the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate—which he passed on to Harold Hughes of Iowa, to whom Rosenfield had introduced him.2

“Hughes had been a truck driver and a drunk. He was big physically, had a big voice, and was one of the most significant orators in decades. He looked a lot like Johnny Cash and had that kind of voice. He arose sort of from nowhere as a truck driver to become governor of Iowa and prominent in the Democratic Party. Joe was a good friend of his, and he had become a big force in the Senate. So we were helping him and gave modest amounts of money to a presidential exploratory effort. The war was his big issue; he was very anti-Vietnam, very eloquent.”

A college dropout, messianic Christian, and reformed alcoholic who was sometimes described as the “Iowa Populist,” Hughes would skip a scheduled meeting at the drop of an empty vodka bottle to help someone with a drinking problem through a crisis. Several times he had successfully saved colleagues from suicide, and once—to his deep regret—he had failed. With a magnetic personality, he was considered both a dark horse and a rising star, the kind of candidate who would attract the young, the blue-collar voters, and the insurgent liberals who had voted for McCarthy; in other words, he was the great hope for a populist resurgence among a field of uninspiring candidates. At the time, no other Democratic candidate was attracting significant support. McGovern, the leader of the pack, was getting only five points in national opinion polls.3

In the spring of 1971, Hughes summoned “six of his closest advisers and aides,” including Buffett and Joe Rosenfield, and directed them to present every possible argument why he should or should not seek the nomination.4

“At the end of May 1971, we had this meeting in a hotel in Washington. They were ready to go ahead on a big scale, although it was one of those meetings where it’s already predetermined what you’re going to do, but you