The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [470]
She hated to be alone. “Can’t you just sit on the couch and look at magazines while I’m awake?” she asked Susie Jr. Then she scribbled, “WHT,” her father’s initials, on a piece of paper, a wry reference to the family trait of becoming anxious when alone.
She was cared for by her nurses, Kathleen, her daughter, and John McCabe, her former tennis coach, who after many years of looking after her once they had both moved to San Francisco, was well-schooled in acting in a one-hundred-percent supportive role. Anyone else, however, was likely to trigger her “giving” impulses and to drain her of energy.1 On the weekends, when Warren came, he sat with Susie in the TV room watching old episodes of Frasier, or simply hung around in his bathrobe, reading the paper. Susie was comfortable with him there; he made her feel secure—but decades of her “giving” and his receiving didn’t disappear overnight. Sometimes Susie was so sick from the radiation that even Warren had to leave. But he was doing his best to immerse himself in the day-to-day needs of his family in a way that he had never done before. To give his daughter a break from endless days in Susie’s apartment, Warren would take her to Johnny Rockets for a burger. The rest of the time he spent with Sharon.
He had even gotten involved in the minutiae of Susie’s radiation treatment, however. “Her taste buds aren’t gone yet. I talked to the radiation oncologist, and it’s conceivable that some of the tongue won’t get hit by what they’re doing, which could presumably mean a fair number of taste buds would stick around.”
Warren Buffett—the man who ducked the subject of a common cold and used terms like “not feeling up to par” as euphemisms for illness; the man who changed the subject uneasily whenever anyone spoke of physical complaints and who professed ignorance of the most basic points of anatomy—was using terms like “radiation oncologist” and doing medical homework for his wife.
But as he grew more optimistic about Susie’s recovery, he started to become more irritable and needy. The business events of the year 2004 began to consume him, in between the trips he made back and forth to San Francisco every weekend. Unlike the ascending journey to glory of 2003, this would be a very different kind of year. Moreover, early in 2004 he was deprived of his regular source of support. Sharon Osberg had gone on a lengthy trip to Antarctica with his sister Bertie. On a ship cutting through the ice, she was reachable only by occasional e-mails. He filled the hours by scribbling away at his letter to shareholders, e-mailing it back and forth to Carol Loomis, and by serving as teacher and unpaid father confessor to corporate America. He had become the elder statesman of the business world. Buffett always said, Be long-term greedy, not short-term greedy. People turned to him because they trusted his direct way of getting to the heart of things and his sense of right and wrong. Although rich beyond even his own wildest dreams, he had passed up a lot of opportunities to make more money or to make it faster. This had brought him power and respect of a different sort. He was not feared like so many businessmen. He was admired.
Prominent people made the pilgrimage to Omaha or sought him out at events to ask for his influence and help. Sports figures like Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Cal Ripken Jr., and Alex Rodriguez came for advice. Bill Clinton stopped by for lunch to get advice on fund-raising for his new charity. Buffett was also pals with Mike Bloomberg, got along with John McCain, and maintained a good relationship with the senior Bushes and other Republicans like Chris Shays. He endorsed Senator John Kerry for president, but Kerry was not The Candidate, and unlike the entertaining triumph of the Schwarzenegger campaign for governor of California—Schwarzenegger most definitely was The Candidate—Buffett found himself associated with a respected senator who had no charisma.
The less-than-electrifying