Snowed

SNOWBALL

Book review by Joseph P . Ritz 

Billionaire Warren Buffett has been the subject of books and articles since the public first became aware his investments made him one of the richest men on earth.

I thought of writing a book about him when I was about to retire from one of his companies: The Buffalo News.  I asked my publisher and Buffett’s longtime friend Stan Lipsey, who Buffett  had lured from Omaha, if the billionaire would confide in me.  He checked with Buffett.

I was told that Buffett had recruited a young, attractive woman financial writer to write an exhaustive book about him and his family.  He would not talk to me.

The book is The Snowball – Warren Buffett and the Business of Life, byAlice Schroeder. (Bantam Press)  960 pages, $35.

There is a reasonable wariness of a biography in which the subject has chosen the author. The book includes pages and pages of long reflections, reasoning and comments by the subject.  A less restricted author could well have shortened many of the quotes in the interest of readability and clarity.

Nevertheless, the book adds depth and a large measure of understanding as to how and why Buffett  became so concentrated on accumulating money and required the mothering of  the several close females in his life, including Katherine Graham, owner of   The Washington Post.

(After Susie, his wife of a quarter of a century, left him, she found Warren  a substitute who became Buffett’s mistress, housekeeper, caretaker and companion and  after Susie’s death, his second wife.)

Surprisingly, the book is not as fawning as I had feared.  In fact, for me, the teenage Warren was dislikeable misfit, a shop lifter of golf balls and equipment from a Washington, D.C. Sears. Buffett’s congressman father comes across as being out of touch with reality and the common good,  so conservative that he opposed everything FDR proposed, including Social Security and later, under Truman, the Marshall Plan. Eventually, he joined the John Birch Society.

  In  1973 the Omaha Sun weekly newspapers, then owned by Buffett with Lipsey as publisher, won a Pulitzer for its expose of  fund raising and lack of spending by Boys Town.

At the time, Buffett  wrote that the prize showed the need for more than one printing press in a community.

A decade later, he had apparently changed his view after buying The Buffalo News.  Aware that 60 percent of the rival newspaper’s revenues came from its Sunday edition, under Buffett, the News started its own Sunday edition, at first giving away copies knowing that its morning rival, The Buffalo Courier-Express, would  eventually have to cease operation, which it did in 1982.

In the interest of full disclosure,  I was on the editorial staff of the Courier during that period.

Even though it  became the surviving newspaper, members of The Newspaper Guild, which represents editorial and much of the circulation departments of the newspaper, today refer to Buffett derisively as “Uncle Warren.”  One reason is that after accepting meager raises during the battle with the Courier, the employees expected big raises when the News became the only daily in town.  They didn’t get them.

In fact, the paper began drastically cutting staff, including a big chunk of the news gathering staff.  When there were two papers, the Courier staffed city hall with two reporters; the News had a regular staff of four, which rose to six on important news events.  Today, one reporter covers City Hall, which is near to impossible since many of the important committees meet at the same time.

The other news beats had similar cuts.  Today such news staff cuts are common, as daily newspapers decline or close because advertising has gone elsewhere.  But in the 1980s and early ‘90s the News was reporting annual profits of $50 million, on revenue of $150 million.  Pretty good, especially considering that Buffett paid $35 million for the paper.

I recall a talk by Buffett before members of the news staff in the 1980s “This is not your corner drugstore.  There isn’t a competing drug store on the opposite corner,  We’re the only paper here.  We’re spending more than we need to on news coverage.”

That was fine, if the main object was to make more money,  But it meant less local news in the  paper.

Relations between the reporters and management at the News became so bitter that in the late 90’s, the annual Christmas party usually attended by both management and the news staff was called off.

You won’t find that in Snowball. It concerns itself only with the famed and the fortunate, not at all with the employees of the companies owned or controlled by Buffett.

#