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Enlisting his sister Doris as a partner, he bought three shares of a stock for each of them, costing him $114.75 for his three shares of Cities Service Preferred.11

“I didn’t understand that stock very well when I bought it,” he says; he knew only that it was a favorite stock that Howard had sold to his customers for years.12

The market hit a low that June, and Cities Service Preferred plunged from $38.25 to $27 a share. Doris, he says, “reminded” him every day on the way to school that her stock was going down. Warren says he felt terribly responsible. So when the stock finally recovered, he sold at $40, netting a $5 profit for the two of them. “That’s when I knew that he knew what he was doing,” Doris recalls. But Cities Service quickly soared to $202 a share. Warren learned three lessons and would call this episode one of the most important of his life. One lesson was not to overly fixate on what he had paid for a stock. The second was not to rush unthinkingly to grab a small profit. He learned these two lessons by brooding over the $492 he would have made had he been more patient. It had taken five years of work, since he was six years old, to save the $120 to buy this stock. Based on how much he currently made from selling golf balls or peddling popcorn and peanuts at the ballpark, he realized that it could take years to earn back the profit he had “lost.” He would never, never, never forget this mistake.

And there was a third lesson, which was about investing other people’s money. If he made a mistake, it might get somebody upset at him. So he didn’t want to have responsibility for anyone else’s money unless he was sure he could succeed.

9

Inky Fingers

Omaha and Washington, D.C. • 1941–1944

One December Sunday afternoon when Warren was eleven, the Buffetts were driving back from a visit to West Point after church. As they listened to the radio in the car, the announcer broke in to say that the Japanese had struck Pearl Harbor. Nobody explained exactly what had happened or how many were killed or injured, but from the commotion Warren quickly realized that the world was going to change.

His father’s already reactionary political views quickly turned even more extreme. Howard and his friends considered Roosevelt a warmonger who lusted after dictatorship and was trying to achieve it by luring America into yet another European war. They felt that Europe, a continent unable to settle its own petty bickerings before these turned into mortal disputes, must be allowed to burn in its own tinderbox.

Until now, Roosevelt’s blandishments had not worked. Neither “international cooperation”—the wickedly deceitful Lend-Lease program, which Howard considered “Operation Rat Hole,” 1 an outright gift of war supplies to England, neither a loan nor a lease—nor giving speeches alongside that portly, popular Englishman Winston Churchill, had drawn America into the war. Roosevelt had told the country—lying through his teeth, they agreed—“To you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance…. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”2 Howard now came to believe that in a desperate gamble, Roosevelt and his army’s chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, had decided that “the only way to get us into the European war was to get the Japanese to attack us,” says Warren, “and not tip off the people at Pearl Harbor.” This belief was common among conservatives at the time, although Howard, as in most things, was strikingly firm in his convictions.

The following spring, the Nebraska Republican Party tapped Howard with the awkward job of finding a candidate to run for Congress against a popular incumbent, Charles F. McLaughlin. At the last minute, according to family lore, Howard entered his own name on the ballot, unable to find another sacrificial lamb willing to run against a heavily favored Democrat.

He found himself thrust into the role of campaigner. The Buffetts plastered simple flyers