Personal History (99 page)
Authors: Katharine Graham
T
HE END OF
the guild strike
was
gratifying for us, but not to be enjoyed for long. Just as it was occurring, Joe Allbritton arrived in town to buy the
Star
, striking fear in my heart. For quite a few years, the
Star
had been going downhill. As early as January 1970, a lengthy article had appeared in the
Washingtonian
magazine entitled “The Evening Star: The Good Grey Lady Is No. 2, and Not Really Trying Harder.” But in April of 1974, Allbritton, the wealthy Texan known then—and now—as a brilliant deal-maker, bought the paper from Jack Kauffmann and the three families who owned it. Jack also sold him a valuable television station in Washington as well as two others in Charleston and Lynchburg. The paper, to be sure, was losing money, but the stations were immensely valuable.
Though The Washington Star Company was clearly ailing, Joe represented an infusion of vitality into our principal competitor—not to mention an equally important infusion of new money and resources with his vast wealth. Joe had brains and great charm as well. In true Southern tradition, he called on us at the
Post
right away. Although the reinvigorated competition worried me, I actually believed it was healthy. Joe was a rival to be respected and feared, but I tried to and did remain on friendly terms with him. I wrote a friend, “Joe is the best thing that could have happened.… I know he is able, dedicated, and decent—and that we will have lots more competition than we’ve had in the past.”
Indeed, Joe did give us some tougher competition, at least for a while. I was so nervous about it that I would show Warren
Star
boxes on certain streets in the suburbs—more numerous to my nervous eyes than
Post
boxes. Warren often teased me about my hysterical worries. Why look at Audit Bureau of Circulation figures showing the
Post
ahead, Warren would ask, when we can worry about the number of
Star
boxes on this street?
Happily for me, Warren was more on the scene now and, far from a threat, was turning out to be a good friend and valuable adviser. He gave me added assurance about so many things that worried me, and he gave me broader vision. By the spring of 1974, Warren was sending me a constant flow of helpful memos with advice, and occasionally alerting me to problems of which I was unaware. In the beginning I didn’t realize how fortunate I was to have this mentor, but I grew very dependent on his advice, and liked it. In effect, he was beginning to teach me the fundamentals of thinking about business, for which I had so longed.
Warren was always very patient with me—particularly since, as time went on, I started to call him two or three times a day, sometimes worrying him with the smallest details of my life as well as with the largest issues of the company. Nonetheless, he was invariably kind, wise, funny, and helpful. And he was always there for me.
We were getting to know each other better all the time, and we enjoyed each other’s company enormously. As Warren and I started to spend more and more time together, people’s eyebrows shot up, and I was young enough then for our relationship to become quite an issue. And, indeed, he was eternally interesting and fun to be with. At Glen Welby, over one weekend when he and Susie came to visit, Warren and I took long walks through the farm’s fields. In crossing the back field, I inadvertently found myself nearly knee deep in a bog that had collected from the rain. Warren later sent me a Boy Scout manual with a note saying it didn’t cover such advanced subjects as exactly how far one should march into a bog before reassessing one’s position—“a rather severe oversight in what purports to be a definitive work.”
In late June 1974, I combined an analysts’ meeting in Los Angeles with a visit to Warren and Susie at their house in Laguna Beach. Warren’s family was convulsed with laughter about my visit, because Warren, who theretofore had never been known to go near the water despite having vacationed in Laguna since 1962, actually bought a beach umbrella and swimsuit so as to make my visit more enjoyable. He later said this was the “source of enormous merriment in our house … because of this incredible—compared to what my family was used to—standard of flexibility I would show around you.”
The visit was an intense and happy two days, during which he and I talked about many things, including the possibility of his coming on the board of The Washington Post Company. Earlier that year, Tom Murphy—the very able chairman of Capital Cities, a broadcasting-and-print company, then probably the best-run in the business, and a friend of Warren’s—had asked why I hadn’t invited Warren to be a member of the board, noting that he wanted him for his own board but that Warren was holding out to be asked by the
Post
. The very idea was like a bolt from the blue to me; it was the first clue I had that anything of the kind was on Warren’s mind. I felt dense for not having understood myself that Warren wanted to be on the board, but I was unsure of how to go about it or even if it was desirable, and if it was, how it would be viewed by the other directors. My reaction reveals how truly at sea I was and how little I knew about my new job as chairman of the company.
When the issue of the board surfaced during my visit, I said I wanted it to happen but was waiting for the right time, to which Warren, uncharacteristically impatient, replied, “What
is
the right time?” It was then that
I realized I had been afraid to cross the bridge and needed to do it, so I suggested that the next meeting of the board, in September, would be a good time, and we agreed.
As Warren was driving me back to the Los Angeles airport, I told him something very important to me. I said I would welcome anything he wanted to tell me if he told me gently, but that I didn’t respond well to sharp rebukes, which made me curl up in an angry retreat. So I hoped that any criticism from him would be delivered accordingly. I need not have worried. He understood me totally by then.
After the visit, I wrote him a letter that expresses the relationship we had grown into by the end of the first year of our friendship and clearly registers the beginning of Warren’s direct influence on me and on the company:
… I feel strangely as though we had been together several weeks—we talked so much, covered so much ground on the one hand—and on the other we laughed so much and had so much fun. To start with the latter, I loved getting to know you both in that special way that comes only with seeing people on their own terrain. Up until now, it’s always been in my native habitat—I tremendously enjoyed the role change.…
You are both so different from any two individuals I’ve ever known that I’ve been quite discombobulated until now. When Phil and I were first married, my sister asked him a series of questions—where was he born? (South Dakota), where did he grow up? (Florida and Michigan), where did he go to school? (Miami public schools and the Univ. of Fla.) “My God,” she said, “you’re the backbone of the country.”
I don’t necessarily place you on the backbone, but you are such singular products of this country—you could only have happened here in all the world. It’s what I love about the US of A and the life in general—the surprising, the unique, the individual.
Not to get too goopy—if I have a religion it’s this—the Judeo Christian civilization is founded on that sanctity of the individual. It leads to all sorts of other things—it led for beginners to democracy and to the shape of this kind of democratic society. And it led to some sort of rationale I can live with about the goal of each individual being to fulfill the unique potential within—and do it to the utmost.…
This is what you do, Warren—or you are in the process of doing. Your intensity, concentration and drive almost scare me, but
are luckily and happily relieved by those other things you also possess—decency, gaiety, enjoyment and warmth.
So many moments occur to me as the best, but I have to come down on breakfast as the big winner. It was also strangely symbolic. The first morning everyone was on their company manners. Susie was flipping eggs around (or into the sink) as if she had never done anything else in her life. You were making excessively fake gestures about eating them—as though you rarely missed a good hearty send off to the day. Thank God we only had to go through one charade before Susie made no bones about sleep walking, you reverted to Ovaltine by the spoon and I plowed my way happily and undeterred through several courses, reciting endless biographical chapters in between slices of delicious fattening bacon.…
The long hours of talk started so many new trains of thought, altered some I already had and redirected others. I long to resume it in September and hope I’ll be rested and renewed and have some of my own.
… I’m going to stop because—you won’t believe it, the pilot said that to our left was Omaha, Nebraska. Okay?
Love—O Kay
In his response, Warren promised to be helpful in any way he could, which meant he would be honest with me. As he said, “If that requires criticizing how you handle q and a or anything else I will be critical—always in private and very gently.”
On September 11, 1974, both Warren and Don Graham went on the board of The Washington Post Company. No two people were of more help to me over the next several years. And I needed all the help I could get. With most things regarding the business side of the company, I still felt uncomfortable, fragile, and vulnerable. Here, Warren really went to work on me. My business education began in earnest—he literally took me to business school, which was just what I needed. How lucky I was to be educated—to the extent possible—by Warren Buffett, and how many people would have given anything for the same experience. It was hard work for both of us—Warren admitted I needed what he called “a little remedial work”—but absolutely vital for me.
Warren saw that I was uncomfortable with the nomenclature and language of business. He later told me that I had a kind of “priesthood approach” to business, and seemed to feel that, if I “hadn’t studied Latin and all that, I couldn’t make it into the priesthood.” He didn’t ask me to take anything on faith, but took out his pencil and explained things clearly. He
saw that it would be helpful if we demystified a lot of what we were talking about, so he brought with him to our meetings as many annual reports as he could carry and took me through them, describing different kinds of businesses, illustrating his main points with real-world companies, noting why one was a good business and another bad, teaching me specifics in the process of imparting a great deal of his highly developed philosophy. He told me that, whereas Otis Chandler collected antique cars, he himself collected “antique financial statements … [because] just as with geography or humans, it is interesting to take a snapshot of a business at widely different points in time—and reflect on what factors produced change as well as what differentiates the specific pattern of development from others also observed.”
Warren is a great teacher, and his lessons “took.” I told him it seemed really possible that I might end up “able to add”—in which case “the empire might either collapse altogether or I might really get to be the most powerful woman in whatever-it-is. Trilby with Svengali lurking close behind.…” Though I didn’t learn as much as I would have liked, I was coming from such a deficit of knowledge that I nevertheless learned a great deal. Among other things, he impressed upon me that it is better to be a bad manager of a good business than a good manager of a bad business. Actually, what Warren favors is good managers of good businesses, but I got his point.
One day, some weeks after we’d started on my course of study, Warren mailed me the back of an annual report from the Disney Company, which pictured a child in a stroller at the end of a day at Disneyland, obviously completely wiped out, his head to one side, fast asleep. “This is you after the 10th annual report,” Warren had scribbled on it. I think I was a dutiful and diligent student, but, as Warren said, “I didn’t feel that I’d hit the Mother Lode in terms of interest forever on it. It was more like someone from a strongly religious family going to Hebrew school or something because one felt it had to be done.”
Warren’s taking me under his wing was difficult for the top executives in the company, who had their own problems and possibly were a bit intimidated by the new kid on the block—and how much attention I was paying to him. I may have viewed Warren as Pygmalion in terms of his having seen in me underdeveloped resources, but others, at least initially, considered him a Rasputin trying to manipulate me, or perhaps trying to run the company through me. There was some sexism in this attitude, too. Tom Murphy could consult Warren and no one questioned him, but if I consulted him, it seemed to be something threatening and sinister.
I have always had a compulsive plainspokenness, but I soon realized that the words “Warren thinks” were pure poison. On the other hand, I knew it was transparent that on subjects having to do with Wall Street and
finance my views had to have derived from talks with him. But the longer Warren was on the board, the more everyone grew to like him and accept him. Several other directors went to him for advice, and several became friends of his as well.
To me, Warren was a man who loved business, especially the newspaper business. He was a friend who didn’t have a lot of spin to put on our relationship. He and his style were exactly what I needed. I was learning but having fun at the same time—learning and laughing, my favorite combination.
Once, on a trip he and I took together to Nebraska, he handed me a blank sheet of paper and told me to draw a map of the United States and put Omaha on it. I began bravely with Maine and got as far as Delaware, and then it started to get a little vague. However, I got my contours all down and then tried to place Nebraska inside. It looked like one of those maps of America drawn at the time of Columbus. Warren started to pocket it, but I knew better than to leave that around and grabbed it back.
On this same trip, we stopped in for a more or less spur-of-the-moment visit to the
Omaha World-Herald
. The pressure of seeing Warren and me together started such wild rumors of sale that Peter Kiewit, the owner, immediately publicized the arrangement he had already made for tying up the newspaper in a trust in order to prevent any such takeover.