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Salomon’s board couldn’t understand why Buffett’s arguments weren’t getting through to the regulators. They ran the financial markets. Why wasn’t it obvious to them that Salomon was going down?

As the afternoon wore on, Buffett’s logic failed, on this most critical occasion, to win over a key ally.

He had only one choice left. Of all avenues open to him, of all resources on which he could draw, this one was the most precious, the huge pool of crystal essence that he was most reluctant to tap. Buffett would undertake almost any item from his short list of most-loathed tasks—get into an angry, critical confrontation; fire someone; cut off a long friendship carefully cultivated; eat Japanese food; give away a vast sum of money; almost anything—than make a withdrawal from the Bank of Reputation. For all these many decades, he had brooded over, nurtured, cultivated, and stored that priceless commodity in its vault. Never had he drawn down so much as a drop on behalf of himself or anyone else, except when the odds hugely favored getting back even more in return.

Now the debacle at Salomon had exposed him utterly, putting the entirety at stake. And the only remaining hope was to ask, to literally beg as a personal favor, drawn purely on his own credibility, for help.

He would be putting himself eternally in Brady’s debt. He was staking his entire reputation—the reputation that takes a lifetime to build and five minutes to lose—on whatever happened afterward.92 He had to summon more courage than he knew he had.

Buffett’s voice cracked. “Nick,” he said, anguished, “this is the most important day of my life.”

Brady had his own problems to deal with. He didn’t think Buffett’s arguments were any good. But he heard the feelings behind the words. He could hear in Buffett’s voice that the man thought Salomon had thrown him over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

“Don’t worry, Warren,” Brady finally said. “We’ll get through this.” He hung up the phone and went off to consult.

But as the clock crawled toward two-thirty p.m., when the press conference was scheduled to begin, Brady had not called back.

Buffett decided to play the one card he could use with Corrigan. He picked up a phone. “Jerry,” he said, “I haven’t taken the job yet as interim chairman. We did not hold our meeting this morning because of what the Treasury did. So I am not the chairman of Salomon now. I could become the chairman in thirty seconds, but I am not going to spend the rest of my life shepherding the greatest financial disaster in history. I’m going to get sued either way by fifty people, but I don’t want to spend my life trying to mop up a total disaster on Wall Street. However, I don’t mind spending some of my life trying to save this damned place.”

Charlie Munger was telling him not to do it under any circumstances. “Forget it,” he said. “Some sort of surprise could happen the first day and you won’t be able to extricate yourself and will spend the next twenty years of your life in court.”

Corrigan took Buffett’s threat to leave more seriously than the other regulators had, however. “I’ll call you back,” he said.

Buffett sat and waited, envisioning his next move. He pictured himself getting on an elevator, riding down six floors, walking onto the stage at the press conference all alone, and opening with the words “We’ve just declared bankruptcy.”

Downstairs, in the August heat, more than a hundred reporters and photographers who had been pulled away unexpectedly from their baseball games and swimming pools and family picnics swarmed into Salomon’s auditorium for the press conference. The only thing they had to fill their interrupted Sunday afternoon was the sight of Salomon’s blood-drenched gladiators, gutted before their eyes on the sand of the Colosseum.

“This crowd was sitting there expecting big news. And I was thinking about the old story about the reporter sent to file a story on a wedding, and he went back and told the editor, ‘Well, there wasn’t any story, because the groom didn