The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [542]
8. The luckless George Champion, chairman of the board of Chase Manhattan Bank, followed King on the program, speaking on “Our Obsolete Welfare State.”
9. This common paraphrase of Lowell was more eloquent than Lowell’s actual words: “Though her portion be the scaffold, And upon the throne be wrong.” James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), “The Present Crisis,” 1844.
10. Interview with Hallie Smith.
11. From King’s 1963 speech at Western Michigan University. King may have said something like this at the October 1967 Grinnell Convocation, but no transcript exists.
12. King first said this in Cleveland in 1963 and used variations of it in most major speeches thereafter. He called the idea that you can’t legislate morality a “half-truth.” “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me,” he said, “but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that is pretty important.”
13. Despite flirting briefly with the magic 1,000, it had ended down more than 15%.
14. Letter to partners, January 25, 1967.
15. Letter to partners, January 24, 1968.
16. Galbraith in an interview by Israel Shenker, “Galbraith: ’29 Repeats Itself Today,” published in the New York Times on May 3, 1970. “The explosion in the mutual funds is the counterpart of the old investment trusts. The public has shown extraordinary willingness to believe there are financial geniuses in the hundreds. Financial genius is a rising stock market. Financial chicanery is a falling stock market.” Galbraith reiterates this in “The Commitment to Innocent Fraud,” Challenge, Sept.–Oct. 1999: “In the world of finance, genius is a rising market.”
17. Grinnell forgave Noyce after intervention from his physics professor Grant Gale and, according to Buffett, from Rosenfield.
18. Wallace sought signatures in order to be placed on the Nebraska ballot as a candidate for the American Party.
19. Wallace hired an ex-Klansman as a speechwriter and made a number of inflammatory statements at different times, such as “I reject President Kennedy’s statement [that] the people of Birmingham have inflicted abuses on the Negroes…the President wants us to surrender this state to Martin Luther King and his group of Communists.” Yet his famous stand, blocking the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium to prevent the enrollment of two black students until forced by federal marshals and the National Guard to step aside, was a compromise apparently engineered with the White House to appease white supremacists and avoid violence while allowing the blacks to enroll. Wallace later apologized to the black community for his role.
20. Associated Press, “Disorder, Shooting Trail Wallace Visit,” Hartford Courant, March 6, 1968; Homer Bigart, “Omaha Negro Leader Asks U.S. Inquiry,” New York Times, March 7, 1968.
21. “Race Violence Flares in Omaha After Negro Teen-Ager Is Slain,” New York Times, March 6, 1968; Bigart, “Omaha Negro Leader Asks U.S. Inquiry.”
22. Associated Press, “Disorder, Shooting Trail Wallace Visit.”
23. UPI, “1 Wounded, 16 Held in Omaha Strike,” July 8, 1968.
24. He recovered after a lengthy hospital stay. Part of this account is from The Gate City: A History of Omaha (Lincoln: The University of Nebraska Press, 1997).
25. In a December 1981 Playboy interview, Henry Fonda, an Omaha native, recounts witnessing the same event: “It was an experience I will never forget…. My dad’s office looked down on the courthouse square and we went up and watched from the window…. It was so horrifying. When it was all over, we went home. My dad never talked about it, never lectured. He just knew the impression it would have on me.”
26. April 4, 1968.
27. Interview with Racquel Newman.
28. The club was renamed Ironwood in 1999.
29. By coincidence, at the time, Chuck Peterson had also been put up for the Highland. Peterson was eating there a lot with fellow flying enthusiast Bob Levine and thought he ought to join instead of freeloading.
30. Stan Lipsey, another friend of Buffett’s, weighed in on behalf of Chuck Peterson. “I got so high-profile because of that,” says Lipsey, “that they