The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [50]
His long-standing isolationism was shared by a friend, Republican leader Robert Taft.1 But isolationists were no longer entering Congress; they were leaving or retiring. Moreover, with the country at war and the government running at a deficit, Howard was obsessed with the quixotic goal of trying to return the country to the “gold standard.” The United States had dropped the gold standard in 1933. Ever since, the Treasury had been printing money freely to finance first the New Deal and now the war. Howard feared that someday the United States might wind up like Germany in the 1930s, when people had to cart wheelbarrows of money down the street to buy a head of cabbage—the direct result of Germany being forced to deplete its gold stock to pay reparations after World War I.2 The economic chaos that resulted was one of the major factors that had led to Hitler.
Certain that the government was going to spend the country into ruination, Howard bought a farm back in Nebraska to serve as a refuge for the family when everybody else starved. A distrust of government bonds was so well-entrenched in the Buffett household that when the family held a powwow about giving a savings bond to somebody for a birthday present, young Bertie, nine years old, thought her parents were trying to put one over on the guy. “But won’t he know they’re worthless?”3 she asked.
Howard’s rigidity impeded him from doing his job, which was to legislate.
“He would lose these votes in the House, maybe 412 to 3. My dad would be among the three. And it just didn’t get to him. He was very much at peace. It would have gotten to me—I get mad when I lose. I can’t ever recall seeing him depressed or despondent. He just figured he was doing the best he could. He went his own way, and he knew why he was there—for us kids. He had a very pessimistic appraisal of where the country was going, but he was not a pessimist.”
The way Howard invariably held aloft his principles—instead of working toward Republican Party goals by joining coalitions—strained relationships with his colleagues and took a toll on the family. Leila cared about fitting in; other people’s opinions mattered to her. She was also competitive. “Why can’t you be a little more flexible,” she said, “like Ken Wherry?”—the junior Nebraska senator who was moving quickly up the ranks. Howard was having none of it. “We believed in him,” says Doris, “but it was hard to see him lose all the time.” That was an understatement. All the Buffetts admired Howard’s fortitude and credit their father for teaching them integrity. But each of the children absorbed in their own way a desire to belong that somehow muted or balanced the family streak of independence.
Her husband’s stance as the lone wolf of the party exacerbated Leila’s irritable mood. Still miserable about living in Washington, she tried to create a miniature Omaha and spent her free time with the women of the Nebraska delegation. But that free time was limited, for she no longer had a cleaning lady. She felt put upon. “I gave it all up to marry Howard,”4 she would say, adding this lament to her stories of how she and Howard had sacrificed for their ungrateful children’s welfare. But rather than teaching those children to help around the house, she did everything, because “it was just easier to do it myself.” Feelings of martyrdom made her angry at the kids a lot of the time, especially at Doris, who was having her own issues about fitting in.
Although strikingly pretty, Doris says she never felt that way, and was insecure about whether she was good enough for the sophisticated Washington crowd of which she longed to be a part. She was invited to the French Embassy for Margaret Truman’s birthday party and was added to The Debutante Register, as she began planning to debut as a Princess of Ak-Sar-Ben*7 with the crowd she would have been graduating with back in Omaha. Warren