The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [226]
But at the time, that certainly didn’t show. Instead, she came across as frightened, unsure of both him and herself.
“When I first met with Kay, she was wary and scared. She was terrified by me, and she was intrigued by me. And one thing about Kay was that you could tell. She was not a poker-face type.”
Buffett could see that Graham knew nothing about business and finance and that she thought her board and managers outclassed her in running the business despite what was by now a decade of experience. He told her he thought Wall Street did not see the value of the Post. Graham relaxed her guard slightly. In her patrician accent, she invited him to meet with her in Washington a few weeks later.
Warren and Susie arrived November 4, the evening before the meeting, drove up in a taxi to the Madison Hotel, directly across the street from the Post headquarters, and, as they were checking in, found that the newspaper was in the middle of a printers’ union work stoppage. Federal marshals were evicting the mutinous printers amid rumors of pressmen carrying guns. Commotion, glaring lights, and television cameras carried on until dawn. Given what was happening in the political sphere, it would be hard to find a worse time to shut down a newspaper, which of course was exactly what the union intended. Vice President Spiro Agnew had been under criminal investigation but suddenly pleaded “no contest” less than a month ago to a tax-evasion charge, then resigned. The Watergate scandal had reached an explosive crisis. Two weeks after Agnew’s resignation, U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned in protest rather than execute President Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox—who had been appointed to investigate the unfolding scandal—and abolish his office. Nixon did so anyway, in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.”24 The President’s interference in the supposedly independent judiciary branch of government marked a turning point in the Watergate affair by shifting public opinion decisively over the course of the past two weeks against him. Pressure was mounting rapidly on Congress to impeach.
The morning after the Buffetts’ arrival, Graham, exhausted from working with most of her managers until six a.m. to get the paper out, was embarrassed at the introduction her new shareholder had received to her paper and nervous about how the day’s meeting would proceed. But she had arranged lunch for Buffett with Ben Bradlee, Meg Greenfield, Howard Simons, and herself.
Graham considered Meg Greenfield her closest friend, yet referred to her as “a lone fortress…no one ever really got to know Meg.” Editorial-page editor of the Post, Greenfield was a short, chunky woman with cropped dark hair and a plain no-nonsense face. She exemplified humor, honesty, toughness, good manners, and modesty.25
Howard Simons, the Post’s managing editor, was known for his sharp-witted way of twitting Graham. “Howard Simons used to say that you don’t have to be dead to write obituaries. He was a great guy, but he was wicked. He used to tease Kay so much.26
“We were eating lunch, talking about acquisitions and media properties. I could see that even though she had all the A stock, she was afraid of me. I mean, they had spent their whole life dreaming up and putting defenses around the stock. So I said something about how the amortization of intangibles made it harder for the media companies, because they paid so much for goodwill, which caused problems if they were conscious of valuation.”*27 Buffett was trying to reassure Graham that it was hard to take over media companies