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By Root 3143 0

Post won for investigative reporting. During the cocktail hour before the awards ceremony, as Stan and Jeannie Lipsey milled among the guests, waiting to catch a glimpse of Woodward and Bernstein, Jeannie nudged her publisher husband in the ribs and said, “I’ll make you a bet. I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that you’ll win the Pulitzer.” A few weeks later came the phone call. The Sun had won a Pulitzer for local investigative specialized reporting, sending the newsroom into a jubilation of cheers and applause.50 This time it had swapped awards with the Washington Post, which won the Pulitzer for public service. Susie Buffett threw a party to celebrate, fixing an oversize pretzel that spelled out “Sun Pulitzer” to the paneling in the family room. In part they were also celebrating some tangible results. Boys Town had started throwing money at projects and quickly announced a center for the study and treatment of children’s hearing and speech defects. It was something, and it would do some good. Boys Town from now on would have a budget and would disclose its financial status publicly.

Instead of the annual Christmas fund-raising letter that year, there was only a Christmas card expressing thanks, as well as a letter from Archbishop Sheehan, announcing with “deep regret” that Monsignor Wegner would retire “due to his failing health.” While he was genuinely frail and ill, some cynic at the Sun circled this before filing it and added, “due to something he read.”51

The following Easter, 1974, Jet Jack Ringwalt sent Warren a copy of the letter he had received from Father (no longer Monsignor) Wegner. Instead of whining that there would be no joyous Christmas for the homeless, abandoned boys, the letter talked at length of the costly new projects that Boys Town had just built and was going to build and the experts who had been hired “to assist us in planning for our future.”52 While down from previous highs, the contributions that rolled in after the letter was sent came to $3.6 million, never mind the scandal.

Thus, the story ended as such things usually do: a mixed triumph with a certain amount of ass-covering and reforms that came about because of public embarrassment rather than an institutional change of heart. While Boys Town eventually turned over its board of trustees and management, it did not happen easily or overnight, and the conflicts of interest on the board also did not disappear, at least not immediately.

And even the Sun’s glory proved short-lived. It was failing financially, and its muckraking editor, Paul Williams, retired not long after the Pulitzer. One by one the investigative reporters dispersed to other papers and the wire services. Unless Buffett was willing to run it as a money-losing hobby, the economics of the Sun couldn’t support a future like its past. And the Washington Monthly had already proven that—even for great journalism—Buffett would not do that. In a sense, the Sun was one of his cigar butts, from which he had been able to enjoy one huge personal puff.

In another sense, the temporary boost of fame he had gotten from the Sun was a sidebar compared to something else. Buffett had recently exploded in investors’ minds for a different reason. Under the pen name Adam Smith, a writer named George Goodman had published Supermoney, a fire-and-brimstone critique of the 1960s stock-market bubble, which sold more than a million copies.53 It demonized the fund managers who had ascended to the stratosphere almost overnight and then crashed, in a parabola as dramatic as if their engines had suddenly run out of rocket fuel. They were featured as devil-horned, pitchfork-bearing tempters of the ordinary Joe Investor. But when it came to Ben Graham and his protégé Buffett, Goodman knew he had met a couple of very different characters, and he devoted an entire chapter to the two of them, in which he captured them brilliantly.

Goodman respected the Latin-and French-spouting Graham and had been highly entertained by him, but when Graham was quoted in Supermoney, he sounded painfully affected, speaking in