The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [464]
Through the years, his penchant for letting the rubes in on the fact that Wall Street was a sort of speakeasy inhabited by people who were out to fleece them had made trafficking with the Journal, Wall Street’s official broadsheet, dangerously fraught. He had once done an “editorial board” luncheon at the Journal that backfired on him. Editorial board meetings were an opportunity for Buffett to put on his teaching hat and explain the economic issues of the day to editors—something he relished—but this time, an off-the-record quote had shown up in the paper. Kay Graham’s rule of journalism had tripped him up—Graham’s maxim being that a statement given off the record means the quote will not be used—unless it is really good.14 Buffett had been furious, and obtained excuses and apologies from the Journal over its betrayal, which could not be undone. Moreover, the Journal’s editorial page poured vitriol on him periodically because he supported shifting the tax burden away from the poor and middle class and toward the rich.
He would not dream, however, of skipping a day of reading the Journal, even on Fridays, the day he drove out to Eppley Airfield for the three-hour NetJets flight to San Francisco. Sharon Osberg picked him up at the airport and took him straight to Susie’s apartment in Pacific Heights. Not wanting to disturb her or to be awakened by the light that came in through Susie’s huge uncurtained windows, he slept down in the ground-floor apartment that Susie used mainly for storage. While Susie napped and slept, he went to Sharon’s much of the time to watch football on TV and cry on her shoulder. Sometimes they went to midnight movies.
When Warren was in town, Susie saw no visitors, only her daughter, her nurses, and a couple of people like Kathleen who were caring for her day to day. Nearly everyone, even Jeannie Lipsey Rosenblum and Warren’s sister Bertie, who had bought apartments in the same building, were kept away all the time—not just during the weekends—the feeling being that even a soupçon of attention would be too draining for Susie. Every day Jeannie wrote Susie a card and left it downstairs for her. Like many of Susie’s loved ones, Bertie was sad about not being able to see her sister-in-law. She had always looked up to Susie for her wisdom about people, and now, in the wake of her husband’s recent death, she felt that she had gained a similar wisdom herself. “Hilt was a psychologist,” she says, “and even without trying, he could see what people’s meta message was. When Hilt died, what he willed to me was that I can see things about people that I never saw before. All of a sudden my eyes opened about things I had never understood.” Bertie felt that now her relationship with Susie would be different, more equal, so that she would no longer have to lean on Susie. She also felt she was starting to understand Susie for the first time.
As her brother traveled back and forth to San Francisco every week, he, too, was learning about things he had never known before—medication, radiation, and the ins and outs of dealing with doctors and nurses and hospital equipment. And he was also exploring a new emotional territory—facing Susie’s fears as well as his own. When talking about this new world he had just entered, he measured out his words, keeping his feelings private, adjusting how much he shared according to how well he knew his audience. Sometimes he used as a distraction a favorite prop, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fellow elephant friend whom he had recently endorsed as the Republican candidate in a recall election to unseat Gray Davis, the governor of California. “My wife had an operation in San Francisco about six weeks ago, and I’ll be out there a couple