The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [431]
As the service began, Buffett and Gates slipped into a pew next to Melinda. The music started. Historian Arthur Schlesinger spoke; Henry Kissinger spoke; Ben Bradlee spoke; Graham’s children spoke. Near the end, former Senator John Danforth gave the homily. Graham, he thought, never said much about religion, but she lived the way a believer is supposed to live. “She dismissed out of hand the notion that she was the most powerful woman in the world,” he said. “In Washington, especially, a lot of people strut, and Kay did not strut…. We do not attain the victory of life by selfishness. Victory is for those who give themselves to causes beyond themselves. It is very biblical and very true that everyone who exalts themselves will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted. That is a text for all of us. It was lived by Katharine Graham.”
Melinda Gates reached up and wiped away tears while Buffett sat next to her husband with a frostbitten, grief-stricken face. The two cathedral choirs, dressed in black and white robes, sang Mozart. Carefully, the pallbearers lifted the casket to their shoulders and bore it down the aisle while the congregation sang “America the Beautiful.” The family followed the procession out of the cathedral to the Oak Hill Cemetery across the street from Graham’s house, where she would be interred next to her late husband.
Early that afternoon, more than four hundred people swept up the circular driveway to Graham’s house and walked around to the rear garden, where her children and grandchildren stood about, chatting with guests. At a buffet inside the tent, people ate finger sandwiches and sliced ham and tenderloin. They wandered around past the swimming pool, and found their way into the house to gather the collection of memories that it held. They stood in the living room where President Reagan had gotten down on his hands and knees to pick up ice cubes he’d spilled on the floor, and gazed for one last time at the books and knickknacks in the library where Mrs. Graham had pondered whether to print the Pentagon Papers. They paused by Napoleon’s china on the walls next to the round dining tables in the golden room where American Presidents from Kennedy to Clinton had dined. From Jacqueline Onassis to Princess Diana, if Katharine Graham invited them, they all came.31 The house itself was a kind of history.
Warren walked through Kay’s house for one last time to remember, but he did not linger. He left early and would never return.32
As the afternoon wore on, the rest of Katharine Graham’s friends and admirers told her good-bye. They withdrew down the long hallway gallery past the rooms where she had entertained them so often and slipped past the garden outside. Then slowly, sometimes reluctantly, they left the last Kay Party, and began their final trip down the pebbled drive.
56
By the Rich, for the Rich
Omaha • July 2001–July 2002
Buffett flew back to Nebraska alone. He knotted every waking minute into a web of distractions. He read the financial reports that came into his office. He read the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. He watched CNBC. He talked to people on the phone. He played bridge in the evenings after work. He surfed the Internet for news online. In between, he played helicopter on the computer.
A week later he was crying on the phone, great gulping sobs, choking, gasping cries that left him out of breath. The convulsion broke through the dam that had kept his grief contained.
A moment later, after the torrent of grief had poured out of him, he was recovered enough to speak. He regretted not being able to eulogize Kay at her funeral, he said. It shamed him. The man who had worked so hard to become comfortable on a stage felt that he should have been able to do that for Kay. And there would be more regrets, more second thoughts.
“If I’d been playing bridge with her that day she might not have fallen,” he reflected