The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [91]
Yet Warren could not try out his new skills on Susie, who made herself scarce. Mindful of Doc Thompson’s influence over his daughter, Warren showed up every night, ukulele in tow, to romance her father in her stead. “She would go out with other guys,” says Buffett, “and I didn’t have anything to do when I would go over there. So I would flirt with him instead, and he and I would talk about things.” Doc Thompson, who loved the summer heat, sat outside on the screened porch on the boiling July nights, dressed in his three-piece pastel wool suit, while Susie was secretly out with Milt. Doc Thompson played the mandolin while Warren sweated and sang, accompanying him on the ukulele.
Warren felt comfortable with Doc Thompson, whose style reminded him of his father’s way of holding forth on how the world was going to hell because of the Democrats. Whittaker Chambers’s autobiography, Witness, describing his conversion from Communist spy to ardent Cold War anti-Communist, had just been released. Warren had read this book with great interest, in part because of its description of the Alger Hiss case. Chambers had accused Hiss of being a Communist spy, an accusation that had been pooh-poohed by people the Buffetts considered political enemies, the Truman crowd. Only Richard Nixon, a young senator on the House Un-American Activities Committee, had pursued Hiss, leading to Hiss’s conviction for perjury in January 1950. This was the kind of fodder that Doc Thompson could chew on endlessly. Unlike Howard, however, he also talked about sports. He had no sons, and he thought Warren was the best thing since bubble gum.32 Warren was smart, Warren was Protestant, Warren was Republican, and, above all, Warren was not Milt Brown.
The support of Bill Thompson was not as much of a plus as it might have seemed. Warren was up against stiff odds in winning Susie’s heart. She could overlook his baggy socks and cheap suits; it was the rest that worked against him. He came across to her as a Congressman’s son, somebody considered “special,” a boy who had every advantage—a graduate degree and a good bit of money—and who was obviously headed for success. He talked about stocks all the time, a subject she cared nothing about. His way of entertaining a date was telling rehearsed jokes, riddles, and brainteasers. That her father liked Warren so much made her think of Warren as an extension of her father’s control. Doc Thompson “practically threw Susie at Warren.”33 “It was two against one,” says Buffett.
Milt, who needed her, suffered the injustice of being a Jew from literally the wrong side of the tracks. He was all the more attractive because he was the guy her father couldn’t stand.
That summer, Brown was working in Council Bluffs. When he got a letter from Northwestern notifying him of a tuition increase, he realized he couldn’t afford to go back to Evanston, so he went over to the Buffett house and handed Bertie, his class vice president, a letter saying that he was transferring to the University of Iowa.34 Susie was enrolling that fall at the University of Omaha, and by then, she and Milt had to acknowledge that, because of her father, they were “off and on.” She spent the summer in tears.
Meanwhile, despite her initial lack of interest in Warren, Susie could never spend time with anyone without wanting to learn all about him. She soon started to realize that her first impression had been wrong. He was not the privileged, cocky, self-confident guy she thought. “I was a wreck,” he recalls; he was jittering on the brink of a nervous breakdown. “I felt odd, I was socially inept, but beyond that, I hadn’t found a cruising speed in life.” Even her friends noticed the vulnerability that lay beneath his veneer of self-assurance. Susie gradually recognized how worthless he felt inside.35 All that