The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [547]
38. Buffett also would have gone on the board of his favorite company, GEICO, had the SEC not concluded that it would be a conflict because Berkshire Hathaway already owned an insurance company, National Indemnity.
39. Interview with Peter Buffett.
40. Each of the advisory-board members invested about $7,000. Control of the bank was retained within the African-American community. Some blacks did not want white investors. “They just thought we were trying to put something over on them, I guess,” Buffett says.
41. Interview with John Harding.
42. Interview with Larry Myers. According to Myers, Buffett continued this level of involvement for seventeen years. An advisory board is different from a regular board position and normally requires less time commitment.
43. Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
44. Interview with Hallie Smith.
45. Interview with Rhoda and Bernie Sarnat. Buffett recalls the story as well.
46. At an anniversary party for the Thompsons a few weeks earlier, the Buffetts’ cook served what came to be known throughout Omaha as the “poisoned chicken.” Except for a rabbi and his wife, who ate tuna, everyone present came down with salmonella. By then, Buffett was so well-known that the episode made the Omaha World-Herald. Interview with Rabbi Meyer Kripke.
47. Interview with Ron Parks.
48. As Buffett tells this story he lost the game, but according to Roxanne and Jon Brandt, he was determined not to lose to a six-year-old—and won.
49. According to a friend, Susie began to verbalize this attitude around the late 1960s. She later said these words, as quoted, to Charlie Rose in an interview.
50. Interview with Milton Brown. Several sources confirm that Susie was frequently in contact with Brown during this period.
51. Interviews with Racquel Newman, Tom Newman.
52. His mortgage was $109,000 in 1973.
Chapter 35
1. “Warming Up for the Big Time: Can John Tunney Make It as a Heavyweight?” Charles T. Powers, West magazine (Los Angeles Times), December 12, 1971.
2. A letter from Senator Ed Muskie to Buffett, September 23, 1971, said that Muskie was “especially intrigued by this concept,” which Hughes and Rosenfield had passed along to him. Later, the same notion, with the more memorable and attention-grabbing name “misery index,” played a role in President Jimmy Carter’s failure to win a second term.
3. James Doyle, “A Secret Meeting: Hughes Rejects Presidential Bid,” Washington Evening Star, July 15, 1971.
4. John H. Averill, “Hughes Drops Out as Democratic Contender,” Los Angeles Times, July 16, 1971.
5. Without naming the interviewer, this incident is cited by James Risser in “‘Personal’ Religion of Senator Hughes,” Des Moines Sunday Register, July 11, 1971. Hughes appeared on Meet the Press on April 4, 1971.
6. James Risser and George Anthan, “‘Personal’ Religion of Senator Hughes.” Hughes said he “believes in the ability of certain people to foretell the future.”
7. The way Hughes told this story (with Dick Schneider) in his autobiography, The Man from Ida Grove (Lincoln, Va.: Chosen Books, 1979), differed slightly from the press account. Hughes freely discusses his reputation as a “mystic” and mentions Rosenfield’s backing. He does not mention Buffett but recalls the meeting as taking place in a California motel room instead of Washington, as reported. On the plane on the way home, he saw “a vision of a red button” that would launch “an awesome nuclear attack” and says he realized that, as President, he could not press the button. After asking God’s guidance, he decided not to run for President.
8. John H. Averill, “Hughes Drops Out as Democratic Contender.” Most likely, the media would have unearthed the story at some point anyway, and Hughes was saved from greater embarrassment later. Hughes’s advisers subsequently denied in the Los Angeles Times that disclosing his beliefs in spiritualism and his communication with his dead brother through a medium had influenced his decision not to run.
9. Interview with Tom Murphy.
10. This version