The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [263]
Annenberg enjoyed owning two of the Essentialities, but he wanted to own all three. The visit to Sunnylands was the beginning of a reel that he and Buffett would dance from time to time: talking about whether and how they could buy the Wall Street Journal together.
But “the real reason that he had me out there was to send a message to Kay.”
The Annenbergs and the Grahams had once been friends.2 Then, in 1969, during the confirmation hearing for Annenberg’s appointment as ambassador to Great Britain, the Post’s muckraking columnist, Drew Pearson, penned a column saying that Annenberg’s fortune “was built up by gang warfare” and repeated an unsubstantiated rumor that his father had paid $1 million a year in protection money to mob boss Al Capone.3 Annenberg, enraged, accused Graham of using her paper as a political weapon against President Nixon, the man who had restored the Annenberg family to respectability by taking the risk of nominating him for the ambassadorship. “President Nixon may have had his flaws,” Annenberg said later, “but he paid me the highest honor that anyone ever paid the family.”4
The morning of his confirmation hearing, Annenberg read another Pearson column that described at length his editorial vindictiveness at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He clutched his chest and his face turned purple. His wife thought he was having a heart attack.5
Annenberg called Graham to ask for a retraction. She tried to soothe his feelings, but said she never interfered with the editorial page.
That evening, after a stressful day of hearings in which Walter had had to defend himself one by one against the points made in the Pearson columns, the Annenbergs reluctantly went to Graham’s Georgetown mansion to attend a dinner party for fifty guests to which they had been invited many weeks before. Upon entering the gilded splendor of Graham’s drawing room, Annenberg—who cared deeply about protocol and who was well primed to take offense that night—did indeed take offense when Graham seated someone else next to herself and seated him between two of her friends, Evangeline Bruce, wife of the outgoing British ambassador David Bruce, and Lorraine Cooper, the wife of a prominent senator.
Annenberg’s prickliness about anything he took as a slight resembled in many ways his friend Nixon’s lack of perspective. He and Nixon also shared an unfortunate inability to charm and disarm.6 Thus, a feud that had been brewing between Mrs. Annenberg and Vangie Bruce over the decoration of the ambassadorial residence soon escalated and overshadowed the meal.7 Compounding this, Mrs. Cooper offended Annenberg by supposedly implying that he wasn’t rich enough to be ambassador.8 Feeling that he had been set up, Annenberg stalked out of the party early and stopped speaking to Kay Graham.
“Kay was distraught about it. She wanted enormously to get along with Walter. Kay was not looking to have fights with anybody. That was not her style. She liked being in charge, but she did not like to show off. She liked big shots, and she liked big-shot guys, particularly. So it was not comfortable for her to be in a fight with him. But she also wanted Walter to understand that she wasn’t going to tell Ben Bradlee what to write about in the paper.
“So by the time I went out to see him, he was thinking about having a book commissioned about Phil Graham, and how Phil’s teeth were in a funny way.”
Phil Graham’s teeth.
“Walter had a theory that if you were gap-toothed, that was a sign of mental instability. And if Walter had a theory, you didn’t argue with it. Walter liked me, but one reason that he liked me was that I never disagreed. If Walter said to me, black was white, I just wouldn’t say anything.
“So I became the go-between with Kay.” Annenberg expected Buffett to deliver the message that if he published the book about Phil Graham’s teeth, well, that’s show business.
“Meanwhile, he couldn’t