The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [250]
There were some good reasons, however, why stocks were cheap and cities like New York were close to bankruptcy. Along with rampant inflation, out-of-control labor costs and unstable labor relations were strangling the economy. Newspapers were among the most severely affected businesses. Right after the Hilton Head meeting, on October 1, 1975, at four a.m., the Washington Post’s union contracts expired. Some of the Post’s pressmen disabled the fire extinguishers, drained the oil, stripped the gears, and ripped electrical wiring and operating machinery out of the presses. They slashed the rolls of newsprint, set fires, and left one pressroom foreman bleeding from a gaping head wound.11 Graham arrived within an hour to a building glaring under the lights of television cameras and engulfed with fire engines, police, and hundreds of picketers.
The Post’s relations with some of its unions “were almost literally on a drunk,” recalls Don Graham.12 The militant workers viewed management as “incompetent,” Kay was to later write, “yet able enough to deviously make them scapegoats for all of the problems that could more clearly be laid at management’s own door.”13 After years of surrendering to sabotage and work slowdowns, with nine union contracts set to expire at once, management negotiators armwrestled with labor in an atmosphere of tension and frustration.
Most of the unions other than the pressmen had stayed at work, especially the all-important Newspaper Guild of journalists. Using borrowed printing plants and helicopters to move key people past picket lines, the Post started getting out an attenuated paper after only one day’s disruption. But as the strike ground on, Graham became paralyzed with fears that her paper was committing suicide. The managers and scab workers could produce only half the number of papers at a quarter of their normal size, and advertisers marched steadily over to the Post’s archrival, the Evening Star. Within days, the Star was “so thick with advertising that we could hardly lift it.”14
“They called me back because they were actually afraid Kay would fall apart. We crossed the picket line together. Kay was gutsy about that. But I saw her burst into tears when she picked up the Star. The Star was trying to out-Post the Post, copying their format, hiring their people. She’d wake up and call me in the middle of the night.”
When she felt threatened, the woman that her editor Howard Simons called the “Bad Katharine” flew down the chimney.
“It wasn’t really the Bad Kay. It was the Insecure Kay. If she got feeling insecure, she could get pretty shrill. Occasionally some incident would set her off, and then she would react like an animal. It was as if she felt nobody was on her side. She felt cornered. And nobody would quite know what to do. That’s when they would call for me. Phil hadn’t been on her side, and her mother hadn’t been on her side. The executives at the company hadn’t always been on her side. And so she always had this sense in the back of her mind that she was in an unfriendly environment and it could be triggered by some incident.
“But she always knew that I was on her side. That didn’t mean I agreed with her on everything or ate everything she wanted me to eat. But I was on her side. And I always would be.”
The Bad Katharine bore some similarities to Leila Buffett. And Warren took an obvious pride in being the one person who could win Kay’s trust and keep the Bad Katharine at bay.
Buffett had developed so much discernment about people’s motivations by now that he understood what was driving everyone around Graham and helped her gain perspective. It was a measure of what Susie had done for him that he could transmit some of her discernment to others. His antennae for people’s reactions were sharp. He could help a person who felt threatened tell the difference between somebody who was actually dangerous and someone who was simply acting from fear.
“She thought Warren walked on water—and he did,” says board member Arjay Miller. “Warren was open, and she had confidence in