The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [223]
Still, by late spring 1973 Buffett had accumulated more than five percent of the Washington Post stock.6 He now sent a letter to Graham. She had never lost her terror that somehow her company would be taken away from her, even though Beebe and Gillespie had structured the Washington Post’s stock in two classes so that an unfriendly buyer could never do that.7 Buffett’s letter told her that he owned 230,000 shares and meant to buy more. But instead of legalistic boilerplate, he wrote a highly flattering, personal missive that linked their common interest in journalism and stressed the Sun’s Pulitzer. The letter began:
This purchase represents a sizable commitment to us—and an explicitly quantified compliment to the Post as a business enterprise and to you as its chief executive. Writing a check separates conviction from conversation. I recognize that the Post is Graham-controlled and Graham-managed. And that suits me fine.8
Nonetheless, Graham panicked. She reached out for advice.
“At times,” Jim Hoagland, one of her reporters, wrote, Graham was “capable of being taken in by mountebanks of the moment,” and “particularly if they were adroit at a certain kind of kidding flattery.”9 She was a “pretty dreadful snob” and “too easily impressed by people with big titles,” according to another reporter.10 Moreover, while she instinctively pursued women’s equality—she had given the seed money to Gloria Steinem for Ms. magazine, she was known to chide men for referring to professionals as if all members of the class were men, and she once hurled a paperweight at a Post executive who refused to allow girls to deliver papers—deep inside she still thought that only men knew anything about business. Thus, when André Meyer was “irate” and told her that Buffett meant her no good, she took him seriously.11 And it also carried weight when another of Graham’s acquaintances, Bob Abboud, a fellow trustee at the University of Chicago, warned her away.
“André Meyer really wanted to think he controlled everything. And it was easy when he got a woman like Kay—he would make her feel like she’d better not go to the bathroom without checking with him. He had that style. André kept referring to me as her new boss because I bought this stock. You had all these guys who could see their power being diluted if I got in the inner circle.
“She was very sensitive to the idea that anyone would manipulate her, for political purposes or for the paper, which is understandable. She was used to everybody in the world trying to use her. But what you could do with Kay is you could play on her fears. If you wanted to work her over, you could make her feel so insecure. And she knew you were doing it to her, but she couldn’t resist it.”
“She would second-guess herself,” says fellow Post board member Arjay Miller. “She would fall in and out of love with people. She could be bullied. She would get overwhelmed by certain people in business. She would meet somebody and be sort of dazzled with them for a little while and think they knew all the answers. She thought men knew all about business and women didn’t know anything. At the bottom, that was the real problem. Her mother told her that and her husband told her that, over and over and over and over again.”12
Graham tried to find out what she could about Buffett. She barely remembered him from