The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [225]
The National News Council was a worthy crusade, indeed perhaps ahead of its time, like many of the causes on which Buffett spent his energy. But by 1973, Susie Buffett had seen him expend a tidal wave of energy on each new crusade or obsession, sometimes changing entire coastlines in his wake. While many people shift their interests over time, the shy, insecure man she had married seized on one obsession after another. From his childhood hobby of collecting license-plate numbers to reforming the jiggery-pokery of journalism, three roles invariably interested him. The first was the relentless collector, expanding his empire of money, people, and influence. The second was the preacher, sprinkling idealism from the lectern. The third was the cop, foiling the bad guys.
The perfect business would allow him to do all of these at once: preach, play cop, and collect money to ring the cash register. The perfect business, therefore, was a newspaper. That was why the Sun had been a sliver of something that he wanted more of, much, much more.
But he and Munger had struck out at trying to buy major city newspapers. Now here was Katharine Graham, unsteady on her feet when it came to business, manipulated by those around her, flailing, seeking a lifesaver ring from anyone she could find. Yet despite her insecurities and vulnerabilities, because of her position at the helm of the Washington Post, she had become one of the most powerful women in the Western Hemisphere. And Buffett had always had a strong attraction to powerful people.
Graham was afraid of him. She asked George Gillespie whether he was crooked. She could not afford to make a mistake. For several years the Nixon administration had been waging an all-out war to discredit the Post. The Senate Watergate Committee was holding hearings. Woodward and Bernstein had unearthed Nixon’s “enemies list.” A set of newly discovered tapes implicated the President, who had refused to hand over information he claimed was privileged, information that could answer the question of what happened and who was involved. Graham labored every day over the Watergate story. In a sense, she had staked the Post’s franchise on it.
She relied heavily on the opinion of the devoutly religious, utterly respectable Gillespie. He had served the Graham family ever since, as a twenty-eight-year-old trust lawyer at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, he had drafted Eugene Meyer’s final will, witnessing the signature of the fading old man. “He’s going to take over the Washington Post,” she said about Buffett. “Kay, he can’t take over the Post,” Gillespie said. “Forget it. It’s not possible. It doesn’t make any difference how much B stock he owns. He has no rights. All he could do would be to elect himself to the board if he owned the majority of the B stock.”
Gillespie had called a San Jose Water Works director and was convinced that Buffett had had no inside information. He made it clear that he disagreed with the powerful André Meyer, going out on a limb, given Meyer’s position and connections. He told her to talk to Buffett, that he would be good for her to know.21
Graham wrote Buffett, quaking as she dictated the letter, suggesting that they get together in California, where she would be traveling late that summer on business. He agreed eagerly, and when she arrived at an office provided by the Los Angeles Times, the Post’s West Coast news-service partner, she looked exactly as she had two years before: impeccably tailored shirtdress, her pageboy hairdo lacquered into place, lips pursed in a small smile. When she saw Buffett, Graham said, his “very appearance surprised” her.
“The great blessing and curse in my mother’s life,” says her son Don, “was she had very high standards when it came to taste. She was used to traveling in high-falutin circles. She thought there was one right way to dress and eat and one circle of people to be paid attention. Warren violated all her standards when it came to these things, yet he didn’t