Howard Buffett quickly gained a reputation as perhaps the least-backslapping Congressman ever to represent his state. He stayed miles away from the “rubber chicken circuit” of campaign money and vote-getting events that occupied so many Congressmen, and made it known his vote was not for sale or barter. He turned down a raise because the people who elected him had voted him in at a lower salary. He went around with eyebrows lofted at the perks that came with being a Congressman. The subsidized restaurants, the payrolls padded with friends, relatives, and mistresses, the “stationery store” that sold, at wholesale prices, everything from tires to jewelry—Howard was shocked by all of it and let that be known.
Moreover, with the country at war and the government running at a deficit, Howard was obsessed with the quixotic goal of trying to return the country to the “gold standard,” which the United States had dropped in 1933. Ever since, the Treasury had been printing money freely to finance first the New Deal and now the war. Howard feared that someday the United States might wind up like Germany in the 1920s, when people had to cart wheelbarrows of money down the street to buy a head of cabbage—the direct result of Germany being forced to deplete its gold stock to pay reparations after World War I.1 The economic chaos that resulted was one of the major factors that had led to Hitler.
Certain that the government was going to spend the country into ruination, Howard bought a farm back in Nebraska to serve as a refuge for the family when everybody else starved. A distrust of government bonds was so well entrenched in the Buffett household that when the family held a powwow about giving a savings bond to somebody for a birthday present, young Bertie, nine years old, thought her parents were trying to put one over on the guy. “But won’t he know they’re worthless?”2 she asked.
Howard’s rigidity impeded him from doing his job, which was to legislate.
“He would lose these votes in the House, maybe 412 to 3. My dad would be among the three. And it just didn’t get to him. He was very much at peace. It would have gotten to me—I get mad when I lose. I can’t ever recall seeing him depressed or despondent. He just figured he was doing the best he could. He went his own way, and he knew why he was there—for us kids. He had a very pessimistic appraisal of where the country was going, but he was not a pessimist.”
The way Howard invariably held aloft his principles—instead of working toward Republican Party goals by joining coalitions—strained relationships with his colleagues and took a toll on the family. Leila cared about fitting in; other people’s opinions mattered to her. She was also competitive. “We believed in him,” says Doris, “but it was hard to see him lose all the time.” That was an understatement. All the Buffetts admired Howard’s fortitude and credit their father for teaching them integrity. But each of the children absorbed in their own way a desire to belong that somehow muted or balanced the family streak of independence.
Her husband’s stance as the lone wolf of the party exacerbated Leila’s irritable mood. Still miserable about living in Washington, she tried to create a miniature Omaha and spent her free time with the women of the Nebraska delegation. She no longer had a cleaning lady, and felt put upon. “I gave it all up to marry Howard,”3 she would say, adding this lament to her stories of how she and Howard had sacrificed for their ungrateful children’s welfare. But rather than teaching those children to help around the house, she did everything, because “it was just easier to do it myself.” Feelings of martyrdom made her angry at the kids a lot of the time, especially at Doris, who was having her own issues about fitting in.
Although strikingly pretty, Doris says she never felt that way, and was insecure about whether she was good enough for the sophisticated Washington crowd of which she longed to be a part. She was invited to the French Embassy for Margaret Truman’s birthday party and began planning to debut as a Princess of Ak-Sar-Ben* with the crowd she would have been graduating with back in Omaha. Warren made fun of her for her pretensions.
Leila, herself a determined striver who cared deeply about appearances, would pore over every bit of news about the Duchess of Windsor, a penniless commoner who had been rescued by a prince.4 But, unlike the duchess, who spent the rest of her life amassing one of the world’s most impressive collections of jewels, Leila’s ambition and pride wrapped themselves in a self-conscious disdain for ostentation. She pictured the family as a middle-class Midwestern archetype, a Saturday Evening Post magazine cover, and berated Doris for being socially ambitious.
Still fourteen years old, Warren became a sophomore at Woodrow Wilson High School in February 1945, upon his graduation from Alice Deal.5 He wanted to be both “special” and “normal” at the same time. Much less mature than his classmates, he was being carefully watched by his parents, who were determined to see him straighten out. His paper routes were the source of his autonomy, such autonomy as he now had. And he had been reading—as well as throwing—the papers.
“I read the comics, the sports section, and looked at the stock pages every morning before I delivered the newspapers. I read the cartoon Li’l Abner every morning. I had to know what Li’l Abner was doing every day. His appeal was that he made you feel so smart. You’d read this thing and think, ‘If I was in that position … this guy is so dumb.’ Because here was Daisy Mae, this incredible woman who was just nuts about him, and was always chasing after him, and he just kept passing her up and not noticing her. Every red-blooded American boy in those days would have been just waiting there for Daisy Mae to catch him.”
Daisy Mae Scragg, the hillbilly heroine of the Appalachian cartoon hamlet of Dogpatch, was a bodacious blonde whose cleavage burst from an off-the-shoulder polka-dot blouse. The dim-witted strongman Li’l Abner Yokum spent most of his time trying to evade Daisy Mae’s marital designs on him. The more he spurned her, the harder Daisy Mae chased him. Even though rich and powerful men wooed her, to Daisy Mae there was but one man on earth, Li’l Abner.6
Besides elusiveness, Li’l Abner’s only apparent asset was his manly physique. Warren’s poor record with girls so far suggested that if he ever wanted to attract the interest of a girl like Daisy Mae, he had better do something to make himself more attractive. Now he developed a new interest, which conveniently gave him an excuse as well for hiding away down in the basement. The way that Frankie Zick could clean-and-jerk fifty-pound bags of animal feed for hours at a time at South Omaha Feed had impressed him. He got his friend Lou Battistone interested and they embarked on a weight-lifting program. At the time, weight training was not the stuff of serious athletes, but it had many qualities that appealed to Warren: systems, measuring, counting, repetition, and competing with yourself. In search of technique, he had discovered Bob Hoffman and his magazine, Strength and Health.
Strength and Health was Hoffman’s attempt to overcome the stigma against weight lifting through aggressive promotion. It was edited, published, and apparently written largely by Hoffman himself. Ads for his products appeared on nearly every page. “Uncle” Bob’s technical knowledge, his razzle-dazzle, the man’s unflagging ability to market himself, were striking.
“He was the coach of most of the Olympic team. He was the head of the York Barbell Company, and he was the author of the Big Arms and the Big Chest books. The basic thing he sold initially was barbell sets. If you went to a sporting-goods store then, everything was York barbells. You could buy all these different kinds of sets.”
Warren got a set of dumbbells and a barbell with a set of plates in increments of one and a quarter pounds that slipped on and off the bar, which he tightened with a little screwdriver that came with the set. He kept the weights in the basement and was “always down there clanking.”
But while Warren was clanking down in the basement, the Republicans were in hell. Franklin Roosevelt had managed to win a fourth term as President, ensuring the Democrats another four years in the White House. At the dinner table, the family listened to much ranting from Howard. Then, on April 12, Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and his Vice President, Harry Truman, succeeded him as President.
Roosevelt’s death sent most of the country into deep mourning, tinged with fear. Three and a half years into the war, the country had lost the man who made it feel secure, and it had low expectations of Truman. He retained FDR’s cabinet and sounded so humble that some thought he might be overwhelmed by the job. But to the Buffetts, no one could be worse than FDR. And to Warren, the death of a President meant another way to make money. Newspapers put out special editions, and he hustled himself out to the street corner, hawking papers while everybody mourned.
One month later, on May 8, 1945, came V-E Day, the formal end of the war in Europe, following Germany’s unconditional surrender. Again there were special editions to sell, and Warren echoed his father’s political convictions as a matter of course. But at the time, he was only passingly interested in these adult concerns, because his real obsession was weight lifting and Bob Hoffman.
But the most impressive celebrity in Strength and Health—apart from Uncle Bob himself—was not John Grimek, the greatest bodybuilder in the world. It was a woman.
“There were not a lot of women in Strength and Health. Pudgy Stockton’s about the only one that ever made it. I liked Pudgy. She was impressive. We talked about her a lot at school.”
That was more than a slight understatement. Warren and Lou were obsessed with Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton, a work of art in human flesh—taut thighs rippling as her chiseled arms lofted a huge barbell above her wind-whipped hair, bikini showing off her tiny waist and perky bosom to all the musclemen and gaping onlookers at Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach. Five foot one and 115 pounds, she could lift a grown man in the air over her head and do it without sacrificing any of her femininity.7
“She had the muscle tone of Mitzi Gaynor and the mammary development of Sophia Loren,” says Lou Battistone. “She was phenomenal. And we—I have to admit to you—we lusted for her.”
Until now, Daisy Mae had been Warren’s fantasy girl. He would always look for the qualities of Daisy Mae in a woman. But Pudgy—Pudgy was real.
It was not clear, however, exactly what you did if you had a girlfriend like Pudgy.8 The boys puzzled over ads for “Bob Hoffman’s guide to a successful happy marriage,” which featured “Premarital examination. How to examine your wife before marriage to make sure she’s ‘intact,’ as well as courtship, why people marry, and minor forms of lovemaking.” Just what were the minor forms of lovemaking? they wondered. Even the major forms were largely a mystery to them; the ads in the back of Strength and Health were the best the 1940s could do in terms of sex education.
In the end, however, Warren’s fascination with numbers won out.
“You know, you kept measuring that biceps to see if it’d gone from thirteen to thirteen and a quarter inches. And you were always worried whether you were loosening up the tape or anything. But I never improved from looking like the Charles Atlas ‘before’ picture. I think my biceps went from thirteen inches to thirteen and a quarter inches after thousands of curls.
“The Big Arms book didn’t do me much good.”
*Nebraska spelled backward.