"There is always something," Gov. Willie Stark famously asserts in Robert Penn Warren's 1948 novel All the King's Men. Everyone has a past. Everyone has a secret. Everyone sins.
Everyone except Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, apparently. If you have seen the 77-year-old "Oracle of Omaha"—wide nose, wry expression, avuncular sweaters—on MSNBC or The Charlie Rose Show, you may have asked yourself if this mild-mannered personage hides some ugly propensity, some buried scandal. Though the cragged voice may abrade the ear, he seems too good to be true. No one, particularly the world's richest man, can be this sedate, this transparent, this consumed with rectitude, right? Does he grapple with addiction? Does he turn in library books late? Is he a reckless driver?
There is always something, isn't there?
If we treat The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam, 960 pp., $35), Alice Schroeder's fluent, readable new biography as definitive, the answer is no. There is nothing, at least nothing major. Though Buffett instructed her, when faced with differing accounts of his life, to choose "the less flattering version," most of what she uncovers, in the end, is complimentary.
As Schroeder observes, Buffett is proof that "nice guys do finish first." She writes of Buffett's early career: "People found the contrast between his homespun tastes and his ever-growing fortune refreshing. His genial manner, self-deprecating wit, and air of calm put them at ease." Such is the Buffett brand.
The unostentatious lifestyle is mythical. Though Buffett has an estimated net worth of $62.3 billion, he still lives in the same Omaha home he purchased in 1958 for $31,500. He plays the ukulele and bridge. He subsists on hamburgers, cherry Coke and potato chips. The bling-adverse B-man's primary extravagance is The Indefensible—a corporate jet. His staff is still skeletal. He owns no boats. He is a vociferous critic of Wall Street. Two years ago he announced that he's giving away virtually all of his money to charity, most of it to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
To her credit, Schroeder is not adulatory. She sees some of her subject's imperfections. He shoplifted from Sears as a high school student. The magnate's long marriage to Susie Buffett is somewhat less than traditional. (Though she absconded to San Francisco, they never divorced.) Buffett received some bad press for explicitly rejecting Nicole Buffett, his not terribly sympathetic former step-granddaughter. The New York Post headline read: BUFFETT TO KIN: YOU'RE FIRED!
But he is—yawn—still a good guy.
Buffett's childhood provides Schroeder, who received unprecedented access to the sage investor, with some of her most charming anecdotes. As a child Warren had a hobby of calculating the odds on the life expectancies of hymn composers. As an adolescent he was obsessed with a book entitled A Thousand Ways to Make 1,000 Dollars.
Ultimately, Snowball leaves us with the sense that someone needs to write a novel about Warren Buffett. There is always something, but perhaps only fiction could answer what.
