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Many of the board members were seeing their net worth evaporate in front of their eyes. Another slew of lawsuits, on top of those they already anticipated, would arrive on Salomon’s doorstep. Buffett appeared calm but determined. He had come to a realization. Gutfreund was being drummed out for having created a nightmare. Now he, Warren Buffett, was actually on the brink—not of overseeing the salvation of a business—but of steering a zombie Salomon through the night of the living dead. Buffett balked.

He said to the board that he was going to tell Treasury Secretary Brady he would not serve as interim chairman; he had come to save the firm, not to oversee its dismemberment. His reputation would be shot either way, he thought, and the fallout from resigning would be less than the grief from staying on. The board understood and agreed. It was the only card that Buffett had to play with Brady. Meanwhile, the board decided to pursue two other courses simultaneously. Buffett turned to Marty Lipton. “Do you know a bankruptcy lawyer?” he asked. Everyone sat frozen for a split second. Then Feuerstein and Lipton went off and began to set in motion the wheels of filing for bankruptcy. If necessary, the firm would fail in an orderly manner, rather than a rout.

Four and a half hours remained to try to reverse the Treasury’s decision before a press conference that Salomon had already called for two-thirty p.m. to announce that Buffett would officially become interim chairman. Less than seven hours remained until the Japanese markets would begin to open for the week’s business, and London seven hours after that. When Tokyo opened, the landslide would begin.87 Lenders would start pulling their credits immediately. To plead for clemency had become immeasurably harder. They had not only to change the Treasury’s mind but to convince it to reverse itself in public.

John Macfarlane, Salomon’s treasurer, came in wearing a warm-up suit, directly from competing in a triathlon. He talked to the board about what the Treasury’s action meant to the firm.88 Banks had already started notifying Salomon they were pulling the firm’s commercial paper lines. Solly was careening toward what would almost certainly be the largest failure of a financial firm in history. If the government withdrew its endorsement of Salomon and the firm lost its funding, it would have to liquidate assets at fire-sale prices. That would be followed by severe consequences in the world markets, as some of Salomon’s creditors and counterparties, themselves unpaid, also began to fail. It was all going down the tubes. Buffett feared the regulators were going to regret their uncompromising stance.

“If I’d been free to act and wanted to maximize my gain in the ensuing week, not only would I have shorted any Salomon security that I could have in Tokyo that afternoon and in London late that night, but I would have also shorted equities everywhere.

“We were going to find a judge someplace in Manhattan, walk in on him while he’s watching baseball probably and eating popcorn at two in the afternoon, and tell him, we’re handing you the keys. You’re running the place now. By the way, what do you know about Japanese law, because we owe ten or twelve billion dollars in Japan? We owe ten or twelve billion in Europe. London will open at two in the morning. And as of this very moment, you’re running the place.”

Corrigan was hard to reach. Asking to speak directly to Treasury Secretary Nick Brady, Buffett found that he was not available either.

Brady was the patrician former CEO of brokerage firm Dillon, Read & Co., and Malcolm Chace Jr.’s nephew, thus a member of the family that had sold Berkshire Fine Spinning to Hathaway Manufacturing. It was he who had written his college thesis on Berkshire, which depressed him so much that he had decided to sell his stock. Through Malcolm Chace, Buffett had once gone to visit Brady at Dillon, Read. The two weren’t close friends, but they had a “fine feeling about each other,” Buffett says.