The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [381]
Dwayne Andreas had been charged, but acquitted, of making illegal political campaign contributions during Watergate; he also made huge and sometimes controversial donations to politicians of both parties while Congress was repeatedly passing the tax subsidies for ethanol that benefited ADM. Buffett’s view that rich people and powerful business interests were far too able to buy access and influence with politicians conflicted sharply with the way that ADM did business in politics.
Six months after Howie joined the board, Andreas hired him for a job in public affairs. Howie had no public-relations or financial experience, although he did have a basic compass when it came to money and business that made him the most Buffettesque of his siblings. At a school bake sale for the local junior high kids, he worked the checkout line; when people handed him five bucks for a fifty-cent brownie, he looked them in the eye and said, “We don’t have change.” He told the principal, “This is how you raise money.” All afternoon, people donated whatever was in their pocket because Howie refused to give them change.24 Likewise, he was shrewd when it came to calling his father to talk about the job at ADM. He knew better than to take anything for granted. What happens to the donations I can make through the Sherwood Foundation if I accept this job? he asked. Buffett said he would not take that away. Okay, said Howie, perhaps understandably worried about the impact of a desk job on his waistline, what about the rent deal on the farm? Buffett swapped him fixed for floating by letting Howie start paying a straight seven percent rent on what the farm had cost.25 After nailing down another point or two, Howie agreed to move to Decatur, Illinois, where ADM was headquartered. The company put him in charge of working with analysts.26
On the surface, Howie’s role at ADM had nothing to do with his surname or his father’s recently burnished reputation as a paragon of corporate ethics. He would not have taken the job if he thought it did; and his expertise in ethanol made it plausible. His father had instilled in him disdain toward special privilege. However, while Howie had many years of experience with people trying to use him for his father’s wealth, he was naive about large corporations, and he saw nothing remarkable in a major company hiring a member of its board of directors to work as a public-affairs spokesperson.
Buffett, who would never invest in a company like ADM or hire a person who mixed business and politics the way Andreas did, said nothing to dissuade his son from serving on a board and working for a company so dependent on largesse from the government. This uncharacteristic reticence speaks volumes about his longing for his son to gain some business experience and follow, at least to a degree, in his footsteps.
Andreas was tough and demanding, according to Howie, and gave him assignments like buying flour mills in Mexico and working on the North American Free Trade Agreement. But Howie remained the same person as before—driven by adrenaline, energetic, almost painfully honest, and vulnerable. At family trips and gatherings, he still surprised his relatives by jumping out of closets in his gorilla costume.27 He wrote his mother letters brimming with tearstained emotion. His office looked like a teenager’s bedroom, crammed with company tchotchkes: toy trucks with ADM and Coca-Cola logos and Coca-Cola bottles that played the company theme song.28 Nevertheless, Howie felt that he was getting years of business education compressed into a short time.
In 1992, Buffett had invited Howie to join the board of Berkshire Hathaway, saying that his son would become nonexecutive chairman after he died. Howie’s business experience