Finally, Warren realized that even though Vanita could handle herself just fine when she wanted to, “the truth was that she would always want to embarrass me. She preferred acting that way with me,” he says, and she did so regularly. Vanita had a fascination about her, however, and had he not had an alternative, there is no telling what would have happened next.10
Every time Warren went home to Nebraska, he saw Susan Thompson as much as she allowed, even though it wasn’t much. To him she seemed immensely sophisticated, even authoritative, and generous with her emotions. “Susie was way, way, way more mature than I was,” he says. He started falling hard for her and disentangling himself from Vanita, even though “it was obvious I wasn’t Number One”11 with Susie. “My intentions were clear,” he says; “they just weren’t having any effect on her.”
Susan Thompson’s family was well known to the Buffetts—in fact it was her father, “Doc Thompson,” who had managed Howard’s only failed reelection campaign—but in most respects they were as different as could be from Warren’s. Susie’s mother, Dorothy Thompson, a sweet, tiny woman, warm, genuine, and wise to the world, was known in the family as the “wife who went along.” She made sure dinner was on the table at six p.m. sharp and supported the many lives her husband, Dr. William Thompson, led. A smallish, silver-haired peacock of a man who wore bow ties and dressed in three-piece wool suits in lavender or cotton-candy pink or chartreuse, he cut a striking figure and carried himself with the posture of someone who was confident that he was being admired. He came, he said, “from a long line of teachers and preachers,” and seemed to want to replicate all their labors at once.12
As dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Omaha, he ran the college while at the same time teaching psychology. As assistant athletic director, he controlled the university athletic programs and directed them with all the gusto of a former football player and sports fanatic. This role made him so prominent that “every cop in town knew him,” says Buffett, “which was a good thing, because of the way he drove.” He also designed IQ tests and psychology tests, and supervised the testing of all the city’s schoolchildren.13 Not content to enjoy a day of rest from bossing people around and testing their children, on Sundays he donned the vestments of an ordained minister and preached v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y in a deep, booming voice at the tiny Irvington Christian Church, where his daughters made up the two-person choir.14 The rest of the time, he broadcast his political beliefs, which were similar to Howard Buffett’s, to anyone who came within the sound of his voice.
Doc Thompson expressed his wishes with a jovial smile while insisting that they be obeyed at once. He talked of the importance of women while expecting them to wait on him. His work revolved around the inner self, but he was noticeably vain. He clung to those he loved, growing nervous when they were out of his sight. A chronically anxious hypochondriac, he often predicted that some sort of disaster would befall anyone he cared about. He lavished affection on those who satisfied his demanding ways.
The Thompsons’ older daughter, Dorothy, known as Dottie, was not one of those. According to family lore, during the first few years of Dottie’s life, when her father was especially displeased with her, he locked her in a closet.15 A charitable interpretation would be that the pressure of trying to finish his PhD with a toddler underfoot unhinged him.
Seven years after Dottie’s arrival, their second daughter, Susie, was born. Dorothy Thompson, seeing how badly Dottie was responding to her husband’s harsh child-rearing methods, supposedly asserted herself to tell him “that one was yours, I’m raising the next.”
Susie was sickly from birth. She had allergies and chronic ear infections and endured a dozen ear lancings during her first eighteen months. She suffered through long bouts of rheumatic fever, and her illnesses confined her to the house for four to five months at a time from kindergarten through second grade. She later recalled watching her friends playing outside her window during these periods, while she longed to join them.16
Through her many illnesses, the Thompsons constantly comforted, cuddled, and rocked their daughter. Her father doted on her. “There was nothing in his life remotely approaching her,” says Warren. “Susie could do no wrong, but everything that Dottie did was wrong. They were always critical of her.”
A family home movie shows Susie, about age four, shouting, “No!” and ordering around Dottie, age eleven, as they played with a tea set.17
When at last Susie was well and no longer a prisoner of her bedroom, she never chose to play sports or games outdoors but was always eager to make friends.18 It was people she had missed during those long days of illness.
“When you’ve had pain,” Susie later recalled, “the release from it can be totally freeing. It’s marvelous. To be free of pain is a great state of being. I learned that at a very young age. Knowing that, you can be very simpleminded about life. And then you get with people and think, boy, people are really fascinating.”19
As Susie grew older, she retained her girlish round cheeks and a breathy, deceptively childlike voice. During her teens she went to Omaha’s Central High, an integrated school with a student body of different faiths and colors, unusual in the 1940s. Even though she was part of a crowd that some considered snobbish, her classmates recall her as having friends among all these groups.20 Her exuberant warmth and her ethereal way of speaking could come across as “a little phony,” even “a little loopy,”21 but her friends said there wasn’t anything phony about her. Her interests ran to speech and performing arts rather than academics. She argued with passion and persuasiveness on the Central High debate team, where people noticed that her politics had strayed far from her father’s. She acted charmingly in school plays and sang in a smooth contralto in school operettas and as a mainstay of the choir. Her performance as the sweetly harebrained lead in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay so sparkled that her teachers recalled it for years afterward.22 Indeed, her charm and strength of personality made her “Most Popular,” a “lady in waiting” to the school sweetheart, Miss Central, and led her classmates to elect her senior class president.
Susie’s first boyfriend was John Gillmore, a quiet, bland boy whom she openly adored. By the time he became her steady at Central High, Gillmore towered over her by almost a foot, but despite her “kittenish” demeanor, she dominated him.23
During those years, she also began dating a friendly, intelligent boy she had met at a freshman debate competition. A student at Thomas Jefferson High School in Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Missouri River from Omaha, Milton Brown was a tall, dark-haired young man with a warm, wide smile. They saw each other several times a week throughout high school.24 While her close friends were aware of Milt, it was Gillmore who continued to be her steady date for parties and school events.
Susie’s father did not approve of Brown, who was the son of an unschooled Russian-Jewish immigrant worker on the Union Pacific Railroad. The three or four times that she dared to bring him to the house, he was made to feel unwelcome by Doc Thompson, who lectured him about FDR and Truman. Susie’s father made no secret of his determination to pry his daughter loose from dating a Jew.25 Like the Buffetts, Doc Thompson had all the prejudices typical of Omaha, where different ethnic and religious groups kept to themselves, and life for a couple of mixed religion would be taxing at best. Yet Susie dared to cross these social lines—while at the same time managing to maintain another life as a conventional, popular high school girl.
Susie navigated these choppy waters until she went to college, when she and Milt headed off to freedom—together—at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. There she roomed with Bertie Buffett, and both pledged sororities. Bertie coasted through her classes, and was immediately crowned as the Phi Delt “Pajama Queen.”26 Susie, a journalism major, had arranged her schedule so that she could see Milt nearly every day.
The two joined the Wildcat Council together and met at the library after he got off one of the several jobs he held afte
r school to pay his tuition.27 Susie’s unconventional choice to openly date a Jewish boy clashed with her life as a typical coed, and members of her sorority forbade her to bring Brown to a dance because he had pledged a Jewish fraternity. Susie, although hurt, did not depledge.28 But she and Milt began to study Zen Buddhism, looking for a faith that could reflect their common spiritual beliefs.29
Knowing nothing of this, Warren made his futile Thanksgiving trip to Evanston, then visited Susie in Omaha over the winter holidays. By then he had made up his mind to pursue her seriously. She had the qualities he’d always looked for in a woman. She described herself as “one of those few fortunate people who grew up with the feeling that I was unconditionally loved. That’s the most wonderful gift you can give anyone.”30 But the person she wanted to give her unconditional love to was Milt Brown.
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 before and then freeze in front of a group? So they teach you the psychological tricks to overcome this. Some of it is just practice—just doing it and practicing. We really helped each other through. And it worked. That’s the most important degree that I have.”
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 confident chatter about stocks, the aura of a prodigy, the tinny twang of the ukulele, were wrapped around a fragile, needy core: a boy who was stumbling through his days in a shroud of desolation. “I was a mess,” he says. “It was incredible the way Susie saw through to some of that.” Indeed, somebody who felt like a wreck and a mess was catnip to Susie. Warren would later say of her need to turn him into a cause that he “was Jewish enough for Susie, but not too Jewish” for her dad. And so she started coming around.
Warren, who was nearly blind to the way others dressed—even women—was so in love with Susie by now that he actually noticed her clothes. He would never forget the blue dress she wore on their dates or the black-and-white print outfit he called the “newspaper dress.”36 Amid the summer fireflies at the Peony Park pavilion, they stumbled around the dance floor to the sounds of a Glenn Miller tune. Warren had still never learned to dance and tried as hard as he could. He was about as cozy on the dance floor as a sixth grader at a sorority social. But “I would have done anything she asked,” he says. “I would have let her put worms down the back of my shirt.”
By Labor Day, when Warren took her to the state fair, they were a couple. Susie registered at the university as a sophomore majoring in journalism, signed up for the debate team,37 and enrolled in the Association for the Study of Group Dynamics, a psychology group.38
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