The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [49]
The Buffetts were aghast. Warren was their gifted child, but by the end of 1944, he had become the school delinquent. “My grades were a quantification of my unhappiness. Math—Cs. English—C, D, D. Everything Xs for self-reliance, industry, courtesy. The less I interacted with teachers, the better it was. They actually put me in a room by myself there for a while where they would kind of shove my lessons under the door like Hannibal Lecter.”5
When graduation day came and the students were told to show up in a suit and tie, Warren refused. With that his principal, Bertie Backus, had had enough.
“They wouldn’t let me graduate with the class at Alice Deal, because I was so disruptive and I wouldn’t wear clothes that were appropriate. It was major. It was unpleasant. I was really rebelling. Some of the teachers predicted that I was going to be a disastrous failure. I set the record for checks on deficiencies in deportment and all that.
“But my dad never gave up on me. And my mother didn’t either, actually. Neither one. It’s great to have parents that believe in you.”
Yet by the spring of 1945, as Warren was starting high school, the Buffetts had had enough too. By now, it was no great mystery how to motivate Warren. Howard threatened to take away the source of his money.
“My dad, who was always supportive of me, said, ‘I know what you’re capable of. And I’m not asking you to perform one hundred percent, but you can either keep behaving this way or you can do something in relation to your potential. But if you don’t do it, you have to give up the paper routes.’ And that hit me. My dad was low-key, just sort of letting me know he was disappointed with me. And that killed me probably a lot more than his telling me I couldn’t do this or that, you know.”
11
Pudgy She Was Not
Washington, D.C. • 1944–1945
The disruption Warren had created in his family’s life undoubtedly made his father’s already challenging career as a new Congressman no easier. Members of the 78th Congress fraternized under a sort of jolly monarchy ruled by House Speaker Sam Rayburn, a Texas Democrat who kept five portraits of Robert E. Lee in his office, all facing south. The House that Rayburn oversaw was a comfortable home for the typical backbencher, an elbow-grabber who lived for county fairs and the chance to kiss somebody’s grandma, a beauty queen, or any secretary he could catch. Famed for his artful behind-the-scenes vote-wrangling and powerful oratory, Rayburn operated a sort of private saloon in the afternoons where he served “bourbon and branch” water to his favorites.
Naturally, Howard was not among them. Besides the fact that he was a Republican, his idea of a good time was reading the Congressional Record every night. He never went near a saloon. And yet, in many other ways, he did fit the profile of the typical Congressman of the era—hailing from a small city, graduate of a state university, middling student, background in community politics, Rotarian from the middle of the middle class, not part of the country-club set, and a foe of Communism.
But instead of joining the rest of his peers in what amounted to a club and beginning the climb up the ladder of power, Howard Buffett quickly gained a reputation as perhaps the least-backslapping Congressman ever to represent his state. He stayed miles away from the “rubber chicken circuit” of campaign money and vote-getting events that occupied so many Congressmen, and made it known his vote was not for sale or barter. He turned down a raise because the people who elected him had voted him in at a lower salary. He went around with eyebrows lofted at the perks that came with being a Congressman. The subsidized restaurants, the payrolls padded with friends, relatives, and mistresses,