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By Root 3393 0

have been nicer to me. He put me in this super-fancy guest room. And he took me into his office, where he had a little display in a glass case of a Prussian coin, a pocketknife, and one other thing. It was all that his grandfather had in his pocket when he landed in this country from Prussia. And he said, ‘Everything you see here is a product of that.’ In a period of not that many years, Walter had rehabilitated his family. He did his father proud. And that was his number one goal in life, to do his father proud.”

Buffett understood Annenberg psychologically yet never seemed to notice certain resemblances between the ambassador and himself. Probably this was because they were so different in other ways. Annenberg’s humorlessness, his fondness for opulence and formality, and his enmity toward the Grahams set him strikingly apart from Buffett, and they were at opposite poles politically. Nonetheless, beneath their similarly paper-thin skins, these two shrewd businessmen shared a deep drive to prove themselves—both in business and in the social world—and a reverence for fathers whom they felt the world had treated unjustly.

They struck up a correspondence. Annenberg would come to think of himself, in an avuncular sort of way, as training Buffett in philanthropy. He thought rich people should give it all away before they died lest their appointed stewards dishonor their obligations.9 He wanted to warn Buffett of the potential pitfalls. Mistrustful by nature and always testing people—again, like Buffett in both respects—Annenberg had made a close study of failed foundations and the perfidy of foundation trustees. He sent Buffett examples of foundations gone wrong after their benefactors had died, along with chitchat about stocks and courtly correspondence. Buffett—a budding philanthropist and a publisher whose paper had won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the failed stewardship of a major charity—read this material with interest. Annenberg conveyed to him his dread of an imperial administrator for his money, one who would conduct what he referred to as “foundation rapings” after he was gone.

“Dear Warren,” he wrote, thanking Buffett for sending an article about Mac Bundy, who ran the Ford Foundation in a way that Annenberg deemed abhorrent,10 “Henry [Ford II] once described McGeorge Bundy as ‘the most arrogant son of a bitch in the country, who developed the lifestyle of an Arabian prince on Ford Foundation money.’”11

Annenberg spent immense amounts of time scheming to avoid being double-crossed after he was dead. He told Buffett about the Donner Foundation, whose executive director had changed the name of the foundation to the Independence Fund, obliterating the founding donor.12 “I respectfully suggest you make sure that no one can tamper with the name of your foundation after you’re gone,” he wrote. “Remember Mr. Donner.”13

Buffett thought otherwise about the foundation he and Susie had set up. “It should not have been named the Buffett Foundation,” he said later. “It was dumb to name it the Buffett Foundation. But it would also be dumb to change it now, because it would be too obvious.”14

He and Annenberg shared a fascination for media and publishing. TV Guide was Annenberg’s greatest asset. It had the same “essentiality” as the Daily Racing Form, but a much bigger audience. Once Buffett got the idea that Annenberg was going to sell TV Guide, he and Tom Murphy flew out to Los Angeles to see if the imperious ambassador would sell it to them, fifty-fifty.

But Annenberg wanted to be paid in stock, not cash. “And we wouldn’t give our stock away,” says Murphy. “Warren never gave his stock away; neither did I if I could possibly avoid it. You don’t get rich that way.” Giving stock in exchange for TV Guide was saying, in a literal sense, that they thought it would earn more in the future than whatever share of Berkshire Buffett swapped for it. Paying with stock showed a sort of contempt for your own business versus whatever it was that you were buying—that is, unless you were paying with stock that had gotten wildly overpriced.15