The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [90]
That spring of 1951, Milt was elected sophomore class president and Bertie its vice president. Susie cried every time she opened a letter from home demanding that she break off her relationship with Brown. Bertie could see what was going on, but Susie never confided in her, even though they had grown to be friends.31 She seemed to have a way of never letting anyone get inside her head. Then, one day as the semester neared an end, the two were sitting in their dorm room when the phone rang. It was Doc Thompson. “Come home now,” he commanded. He wanted her away from Milt and he let her know she would not be going back to Northwestern in the fall. Susie collapsed, sobbing, but there was never any appeal of her father’s decisions.
After graduating from Columbia that spring, Warren, too, returned to Omaha. He would be living in his parents’ home since they were away in Washington, but he would have to spend part of that first summer after his return fulfilling his obligation to the National Guard. Though he wasn’t particularly well suited to the Guard, it was better than the alternative—going off to fight in Korea. The Guard required him to attend training camp in La Crosse, Wisconsin, for several weeks every year, however. Training camp did nothing to help him mature.
“In the National Guard, at first, the guys were very suspicious of me because my dad was in Congress. They thought I was going to be some kind of prima donna or something. But that didn’t last long.
“It’s a very democratic organization. I mean, what you do outside doesn’t mean much. To fit in, all you had to do was be willing to read comic books. About an hour after I got there, I was reading comic books. Everybody else was reading comic books, why shouldn’t I? My vocabulary shrank to about four words, and you can guess what they were.
“I learned that it pays to hang around with people better than you are, because you will float upward a little bit. And if you hang around with people that behave worse than you, pretty soon you’ll start sliding down the pole. It just works that way.”
The experience gave Warren incentive to make good on another vow just as soon as he got back from National Guard camp. “I was terrified of public speaking. You can’t believe what I was like if I had to give a talk. I was so terrified that I just couldn’t do it. I would throw up. In fact, I arranged my life so that I never had to get up in front of anybody. When I came out here to Omaha after graduating, I saw another ad. And I knew I was going to have to speak in public sometimes. The agony was such that just to get rid of the pain I signed up for the course again.” That was not his only mission: To win the heart of Susan Thompson, he knew he would have to be able to converse with her as well. The odds against succeeding with Susie were long, but he would do anything to improve them, and this summer might be his last chance.
The Dale Carnegie class met down at the Rome Hotel, a favorite of the cattlemen. “I took a hundred bucks in cash and gave it to Wally Keenan, the instructor, and said, ‘Take it before I change my mind.’
“There were about twenty-five or thirty of us in there. We were all just terrified. We couldn’t say our own names. We all stood there and wouldn’t talk to each other. Meanwhile, one thing that impressed me was that, after meeting all those people once, Wally could rattle off all our names from memory. He was a good teacher, and he tried to teach us the memory association trick, but I never learned that part.
“They gave us this book of speeches—keynote speech, election speech, lieutenant governor’s speech—and we were supposed to deliver these things every week. The way it works is that you learn to get out of yourself. I mean, why should you be able to talk alone with somebody five minutes