The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [433]
This year he was turning seventy-one. He could not believe he was seventy-one. He could not believe it, either, when he’d turned forty, and fifty, and sixty, and seventy. But this year, especially, he did not want to think about his birthday, because he did not want any reminders of time passing so soon after Kay’s death.
Fortunately, the Omaha Classic golf tournament, an annual event that the Buffetts sponsored to benefit various local institutions, followed his birthday like recess after study hall. Corporate CEOs and celebrities, friends and relatives, people he knew and enjoyed, were coming to play golf and tennis at the Omaha Country Club.3 The guests at this event were another collection, like his shareholders, like the people who came to Omaha for his shareholder meeting, like the members of the Buffett Group. As the days counted down, the staff juggled shifting guest lists, airport transportation, and food and entertainment for golfers at the club. Buffett enjoyed knowing the details: who would come, how many times a guest had come before, who was attending for the first time, and how much money the event would raise.
Most of the guests arrived Monday evening for a dinner at the Omaha Country Club with entertainment by Academy Award–winning songwriter Marvin Hamlisch.4 Every year he sat at the piano and made up personal songs on the spot for anyone who asked.
“He didn’t play golf. He came to the tournament some years ago, and he likes Little Sooz, and she likes him. And he said, ‘Why don’t you let me do a little show the night before for the people who come in early?’ It got to be the best part of the golf tournament. You say, ‘I wish I could get rid of that damn hook that I have with my three wood,’ and it’s a song. People thought it was rigged. It wasn’t rigged. If you said, ‘I can’t believe my mother-in-law steals the sugar packets from restaurants,’ thirty seconds later he’s banging out a little tune and singing a song to that refrain.”
The next morning dawned under a flawless blue dome of sky. Around eight o’clock, Buffett’s phone rang. It was Devon Spurgeon, a Wall Street Journal reporter who had been covering Berkshire Hathaway. “Oh, my God, Warren, turn on the TV,” she said. He turned it on to a news channel. At opposite ends of the phone line they watched what appeared to be a horrible aviation accident. The cameras were running footage that panned across the North Tower of the World Trade Center, whose upper stories were slashed through by a jagged, gaping wedge of flames. An airplane appeared, circled toward the building, and plunged into the side of the South Tower, exploding in a corona of flames like a bomb going off. They watched in silence as the news channel began repeating the footage: Plane turns, dives into building. Plane turns, dives into building. “Devon,” said Buffett, “the world has changed.” He started asking her about her office, which was two blocks from the Sears Tower in Chicago. Listen, he said, that’s not a safe place to be. The Wall Street Journal headquarters in New York was across the street from the World Trade Center. They discussed the fact that the Journal staff must be evacuating and reporting at the same time. Spurgeon could hear Buffett switching, as they spoke, into his fastest-thinking, most rational, problem-solving mode.5
As he was hanging up the phone, the FAA halted all flight operations at U.S. airports, and minutes later American Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. About fifteen minutes after that, while the White House was evacuating, Buffett, his mind latticing bits of information into a plan, called General Re, where he was supposed to be speaking the next day to a group of employees. He said that he was still planning to fly out to Connecticut if the airports