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“End Zone” Buffett explains the finer points of the game during a charity event for Jean Naté.
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Warren holds Susie close in July 2004, one of her few public appearances after recovering from oral cancer surgery.
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Buffett shows his feelings for GEICO at the company’s new Amherst, NY, facility in January 2005.
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Charlie Munger goes for a read in England.
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Buffett and former president Bill Clinton at a Girls, Inc. fund-raiser in Omaha, December 2006.
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Buffett with friend Sharon Osberg.
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Bill Gates Sr., Bill Jr., and Warren in China, 1998.
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Bitten by a cheetah, chased by a polar bear…photographer and conservationist Howie Buffett donates to wildlife preservation.
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At Buffett’s 75 birthday party at Sharon Osberg and David Smith’s house, he and Gates attempt to learn landscape painting. Afterward, Buffett stands by his finished work of art.
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After his colon-polyp surgery in 2000, Warren grew a beard for the first time in his life.
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Warren, Doris, and Bertie reenact their childhood photograph (see Photo Insert 1) with expressions appropriate to their feelings at the time.
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Buffett and Arnold Schwarzenegger at a NetJets conference for business leaders in England, September 2002.
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Buffett interviews San Francisco 49ers cheerleaders for flight attendant jobs at another NetJets event.
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Buffett concedes defeat to Ariel Hsing, the nine-year-old ping-pong player who trounced him on his birthday, August 30, 2005.
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In May 2004 in New York, Bono presents Susie with a picture he painted of her featuring U2 lyrics. Afterward he declared they were “soulmates.”
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Buffett’s friend Walter Schloss boogies the night away at his ninetieth birthday party in 2006.
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On his birthday on August 30, 2006, two years after Susie’s death, Warren marries a tearful Astrid in a private ceremony at Susie Jr.’s house.
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A scene from Peter Buffett’s Spirit: The Seventh Fire, a show about recovered identity. The Philadelphia Inquirer compared it to a Philip Glass opera, with “guitar rolls that would put U2’s The Edge to shame.”
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Bill and Melinda Gates share a joyful day with Buffett on June 26, 2006, when he announces that he will give most of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Susie Jr. drove off to meet Don and Herbert Allen at the hospital. She knew very well that no one could expect her father to deal with any kind of medical crisis. Big Susie had had a cardiac catheterization in 1997, and Warren got on a plane to go to San Francisco to be with her. When Kathleen Cole called to say that Susie was going to be okay, he turned the plane around in midair and went back to Omaha. Since then, Susie had been in the emergency room repeatedly with excruciating abdominal adhesions and intestinal blockages. In 1999 she had her gall bladder removed. Throughout all of her medical problems over the years, Warren had never once been able to endure the emotional distress of going to the hospital to be with his wife.24
Shortly after he and Don arrived at St. Luke’s and the radiologist took the CAT scan, Dr. Harsh saw it and said, “Kay needs to get to a trauma center.” The hospital helicoptered her to St. Alphonsus Regional Medical Center in Boise; Herbert Allen arranged a private plane—somewhat bigger than a riding lawn mower and flown by a couple of cowboys in jeans and T-shirts—to take Don and Susie to Boise.
While all of this was transpiring, Warren retreated to his condo. Big Susie had left earlier that day for a wedding in Greece and knew nothing of what was going on. Peter and Jennifer, Howie and Devon were still at Sun Valley; Peter and Howie came by briefly, but even at such a time it was unnatural for Warren to tune the unfamiliar instrument of his emotions to make an openhearted connection with his sons. Sharon Osberg was not at Sun Valley; nor, of course, was Astrid. With both his wife and his daughter also unavailable to him, it was Bill and Melinda Gates, Ron and Jane Olson, and Susie Jr.’s boyfriend who sat with him waiting for news of Kay. Their job was to help distract him from what was going on by talking of anything but her. Susie Jr. had called from Boise to say that she was going into surgery, but that was all.25
Kay was taken into the operating room, then brought out. Around midnight, Dr. Harsh came by to tell Don and Susie that things looked worse and Kay needed another CAT scan. They wheeled the gurney back into surgery and handed her watch to Susie Jr., who felt her stomach drop.26
Around two o’clock in the morning, since there had been no further word from Boise, Buffett decided to go to bed. Everybody left.
Ninety minutes or so later, the doctors moved Kay to intensive care. “We’re really not sure what’s going to happen,” they said. Susie Jr. called her father and woke him up. She told him to get the family on the plane. Buffett had to call everyone and organize their departure.
A couple of hours later, when the NetJets plane taxied into Boise, Warren called Susie Jr. and said he didn’t feel he could come to the hospital. She told him that he had to come; Don was distraught and needed him to be there. Even if Kay was not conscious and couldn’t see him, she would be able to sense his presence. Reluctantly, he acquiesced.
When he got to the hospital, his daughter met him downstairs in the lobby. She knew he was so frightened that he would have to be coaxed. “You have to come upstairs,” she insisted. “You have to come.” She led him to intensive care, where Don Graham, red-faced from weeping, was sitting alone with his mother. Kay, drained of color and unconscious, lay connected to monitoring devices that blinked little lights and made tiny noises. There was an oxygen mask over her mouth. Warren and Don clung to each other, sobbing. Lally Weymouth, Kay’s oldest child and only daughter, arrived. Eventually, Susie Jr. took her father downstairs. There was nothing more they could do. As the rest of Kay’s children gathered in Boise, the Buffetts boarded a plane for a sad ride back to Omaha.27
Two days later, the call came that Kay had died. Warren had already told Lally that he wasn’t going to be able to speak at Kay’s service. He would be an usher along with Bill Gates. Astrid took care of him at home, and work consumed him at the office. When he wasn’t working, Sharon played bridge with him or he played helicopter, anything to distract himself from the many shocks and horror of Kay’s death. So sudden, on such a happy occasion; not being there when it happened; the ambulance, the helicopter, Susie Jr. calling about the surgery; sitting in the condo waiting, the phone call in the middle of the night, flying to Boise not knowing; going upstairs to see Kay lying so still and white, barely breathing; the normally controlled Don Graham so distraught; the terrible trip home away from Kay, whom he would never see again; the phone call with the news; no Big Susie to shepherd him through it all. No more Kay, no more Kay Parties, never again.
And yet, the day after Graham died, Buffett arrived, as scheduled, to speak to an audience of college students at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. He climbed onto the stage wearing his stiff gray suit and looking only a little more awkward than usual, his breathy voice grating slightly. “Testing, one million, two million, three million,” he said at the microphone. This line could always be counted on to get a laugh, and it did. He then launched into a couple of Nebraska football jokes but, out of character, rushed the punchline and got only chuckles from the audience.
Then he seemed to catch his rhythm. “People ask me where they should go to work, and I always tell them to go to work for whom they admire the most,” he said. He urged them not to waste their time and their life. “It’s crazy to take little in-between jo
bs just because they look good on your résumé. That’s like saving sex for your old age. Do what you love and work for whom you admire the most, and you’ve given yourself the best chance in life you can.”
They asked him what mistakes he had made. Number one was Berkshire Hathaway, he said—spending twenty years trying to revive a failing textile mill. Second, US Air. Buffett spoke of his failure to call the Air-aholic hotline beforehand. Third, he said, had been buying the Sinclair gas station as a young man. That mistake, he reckoned, had cost him about $6 billion compared to what he could have earned on the money invested.
But his mistakes of omission—things he could have done and didn’t do—had plagued him most, he said. He mentioned only one—failing to buy FNMA stock, the Federal National Mortgage Association. That, he said, had cost about $5 billion as of that date. There were others: passing on the television station that Tom Murphy had tried to sell him; not investing in Wal-Mart. The reason that he had made mostly mistakes of omission instead of commission, he explained, was his cautious approach to life.
Buffett had talked many times before about mistakes. But when he spoke, as he often did, of his mistakes of omission, he never ventured beyond business mistakes. The errors of omission in his personal life—inattention, neglect, missed chances—were always there, the side effects of intensity; but they were shadow presences visible only to those who knew him well. He spoke of them only in private, if at all.
To the students, he explained his “Twenty Punches” approach to investing. “You’d get very rich,” he said, “if you thought of yourself as having a card with only twenty punches in a lifetime, and every financial decision used up one punch. You’d resist the temptation to dabble. You’d make more good decisions and you’d make more big decisions.”
He ran his life on Twenty Punches, too, with as little flitting as he could arrange. Same house, same wife for fifty years, same Astrid on Farnam Street; no desire to buy and sell real estate, art, cars, tokens of wealth; no jumping from city to city or career to career. Some of that was easy for a man so certain of himself; some of it came with being a creature of habit; some of it was a natural tendency to let things compound; and some of it was the wisdom of inertia. When he gave somebody a punch on his card, they became a part of him and that decision was permanent. Any crack in the facade of permanence was extraordinarily difficult for him to face.
A few days later, police arrived early in the morning to close nearby streets for the crowd they expected at the Washington National Cathedral, its gargoyle-bedecked flying buttresses silhouetted against a bright blue sky.28 Television crews began to set up for an elaborately orchestrated event that had all the trappings of a funeral for a head of state. By late morning, buses bearing Washington Post employees pulled up one by one. A blue-and-white-striped bus carrying members of the Senate arrived, and people began streaming in from cars and limousines. Gradually the front pews filled with dignitaries like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Lynne and Dick Cheney. Around the Cathedral famous faces were everywhere: Supreme Court justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer; celebrity journalists Charlie Rose, Tom Brokaw, Mike Wallace, and Ted Koppel; USA Today publisher Al Neuharth; Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and his wife, journalist Andrea Mitchell; editor Tina Brown; Senator Ted Kennedy; Congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.29 Hundreds, then thousands, of people filed in through the enormous bronze doors to the sound of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra Brass Ensemble, gradually assembling into what looked like the largest crowd the cathedral had ever held.30
From the nave, thousands of men in dark suits and white shirts formed a Mondrian backdrop for the women, a pointillist grid of black and white. The women wore houndstooth check and crisp seersucker; black suits with dainty white cotton blouses; sleeveless black sheaths with jackets and sleeveless black sheaths with bare arms; white skirts with black sweaters; and black jackets over dotted Swiss and black-and-white polka-dotted dresses. Their heads were topped with small black hats with discreet netting, black-and-white picture hats fit for Ladies’ Day at Ascot, black straw bonnets with swooping veils. The cathedral was awash in a sea of pearls, from pearls as small as peppercorns to pearls like huge champagne corks, black and white pearls on hundreds of wrists, necks, and earlobes; women wearing strands of pearls the width of a lingerie strap, a curtain tieback, a first-prize ribbon. Every detail paid tribute to the woman who had awed the world for years in a summation and celebration of her life that had become the second, the grandest, the most stately, and the final Black and White Ball.
As the service began, Buffett and Gates slipped into a pew next to Melinda. The music started. Historian Arthur Schlesinger spoke; Henry Kissinger spoke; Ben Bradlee spoke; Graham’s children spoke. Near the end, former Senator John Danforth gave the homily. Graham, he thought, never said much about religion, but she lived the way a believer is supposed to live. “She dismissed out of hand the notion that she was the most powerful woman in the world,” he said. “In Washington, especially, a lot of people strut, and Kay did not strut…. We do not attain the victory of life by selfishness. Victory is for those who give themselves to causes beyond themselves. It is very biblical and very true that everyone who exalts themselves will be humbled and he who humbles himself will be exalted. That is a text for all of us. It was lived by Katharine Graham.”
Melinda Gates reached up and wiped away tears while Buffett sat next to her husband with a frostbitten, grief-stricken face. The two cathedral choirs, dressed in black and white robes, sang Mozart. Carefully, the pallbearers lifted the casket to their shoulders and bore it down the aisle while the congregation sang “America the Beautiful.” The family followed the procession out of the cathedral to the Oak Hill Cemetery across the street from Graham’s house, where she would be interred next to her late husband.
Early that afternoon, more than four hundred people swept up the circular driveway to Graham’s house and walked around to the rear garden, where her children and grandchildren stood about, chatting with guests. At a buffet inside the tent, people ate finger sandwiches and sliced ham and tenderloin. They wandered around past the swimming pool, and found their way into the house to gather the collection of memories that it held. They stood in the living room where President Reagan had gotten down on his hands and knees to pick up ice cubes he’d spilled on the floor, and gazed for one last time at the books and knickknacks in the library where Mrs. Graham had pondered whether to print the Pentagon Papers. They paused by Napoleon’s china on the walls next to the round dining tables in the golden room where American Presidents from Kennedy to Clinton had dined. From Jacqueline Onassis to Princess Diana, if Katharine Graham invited them, they all came.31 The house itself was a kind of history.
Warren walked through Kay’s house for one last time to remember, but he did not linger. He left early and would never return.32
As the afternoon wore on, the rest of Katharine Graham’s friends and admirers told her good-bye. They withdrew down the long hallway gallery past the rooms where she had entertained them so often and slipped past the garden outside. Then slowly, sometimes reluctantly, they left the last Kay Party, and began their final trip down the pebbled drive.
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By the Rich, for the Rich
Omaha • July 2001–July 2002
Buffett flew back to Nebraska alone. He knotted every waking minute into a web of distractions. He read the financial reports that came into his office. He read the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. He watched CNBC. He talked to people on the phone. He played bridge in the evenings after work. He surfed the Internet for news online. In between, he played helicopter on the computer.
A week later he was crying on the phone, great gulping sobs, choking, gasping cries that left him out of breath. The convulsion broke through the dam that had kept his grief contained.
A moment later, after the torrent of grief had poured out of him, he was recove
red enough to speak. He regretted not being able to eulogize Kay at her funeral, he said. It shamed him. The man who had worked so hard to become comfortable on a stage felt that he should have been able to do that for Kay. And there would be more regrets, more second thoughts.
“If I’d been playing bridge with her that day she might not have fallen,” he reflected later, sadly. “I would have taken her back in her golf cart myself. She might not have died.”
But Kay probably would have walked up the steps by herself anyway. And nobody knew whether she died from the fall or whether she had fallen because she had a stroke.
Still, Warren was plagued by a sense of lost opportunities. He felt at times that, had he been with her, he could somehow have kept Kay safe.
As weeks passed, if her death was mentioned, his eyes teared and the conversation would come to a stop while he collected himself. Then, like a motor turning over and restarting, he would brighten and shift to other subjects.
During August, other events helped to turn his mind away from the tragedy. He was planning the tenth and final Omaha Classic charity golf tournament, which would take place in September. And he was already looking forward to the Buffett Group meeting in Biarritz, France, in October. In the meantime, he flew to Cody, Wyoming, with Big Susie for a long weekend at Herbert Allen’s J—9*33 ranch on the North Fork of the Shoshone River.
Buffett would much rather watch a western movie than visit a dude ranch. But as with Sun Valley, he went for the mix of elephant-bumping and people he considered friends. At Cody, he and Susie spent a leisurely, relaxed time with media CEO Barry Diller and his wife, Diane von Furstenberg; Don and Mickie Keough; film director Mike Nichols and his wife, newscaster Diane Sawyer; producer Sydney Pollack; actress Candice Bergen; and Intel CEO Andy Grove and his wife, Eva, among others.
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