The `Buffettgate' Scandal and U.S. Left `Movement': Part 8

By September 1973, the son of former right-wing GOP Congressman Howard Homan Buffett and the father of Peter Buffett, the co-president of the NoVo Foundation which funds many U.S. left “movement” NGOs—Berkshire Hathaway stock market speculation holding company owner Warren Buffett—owned around 10 percent of The Washington Post Company stock; and his share of the newspaper’s stock was then worth more than $9 million [equal to around $60 million in 2022].

So, not surprisingly, as the then-Washington Post Company’s principal owner (whose own father, a multi-millionaire GOP Wall Street investment banker and Federal Reserve Bank Chairperson named Eugene Meyer, had previously purchased the Washington Post newspaper in 1933 for $825,000 [equal to around $17.8 million in 2022]), the now-deceased Katharine Graham, recalled in her 1997 Personal History autobiography, “by the spring of 1974” the NoVo Foundation’s father “was sending me a constant flow of…memos with advice” and “I grew very dependent on his advice.”

And, although the then-nearly 44 year-old son of former Nebraska Congressman Howard Buffett was not a journalist—but just the owner of a Berkshire Hathaway holding company that also owned stock in advertising agencies that arranged the purchasing of ad space in newspapers like the Washington Post—Katharine Graham “started to call” Warren Buffett “two or three times a day;” and “on Sept. 11, 1974, both Warren” Buffett and Don Graham [Katharine Graham’s son] “ “went on the” corporate “board of The Washington Post Company,” according to the same book.

As Roger Lowenstein recalled in his Buffett book, the Berkshire Hathaway CEO and father of NoVo Foundation Co-President Peter Buffett “became a personal tutor to” the Washington Post Company media conglomerate’s then-owner Graham during the 1970s; and, as Katharine Graham noted in her Personal History book, some Washington Post journalists in the 1970s and 1980s apparently “considered” Warren Buffett to be “a Rasputin trying to manipulate me” who was “trying to run” the politically influential Washington Post media/newspaper “company through me.”

According to the Buffett book, Katharine Graham’s “colleagues thought that Buffett was manipulating her” and she “would quote Buffett openly and, in the view of some, ad nauseum;” and had a “way of responding to” the Washington Post newspaper “staff” by saying “`Let’s ask Warren.’” The same book also recalled in 1998:
“Buffett’s influence was felt in virtually every major decision…[Katharine] Graham began to rely on Buffett as more than just a business adviser…The two became intimate. Graham invited Buffett to her farm in Virginia and on Martha’s Vineyard…Graham began to attend meetings of Buffett’s…investors group…Buffett…took Graham to…the Hathaway textile mill in New Bedford…She considered him her `closest friend.’…He was in Washington at least once a month and kept a change of clothes in the Graham guest room…The Buffett-Graham alliance had a far-reaching impact on…Buffett’s investment…The reason he had invested in the Post was that its publishing and television properties…produced free cash flow…Graham…went to Buffett even on matters that were outside his expertise…”

Katharine Graham’s paternal grandfather, Marc Meyer, had directed in California all West Coast investments of the Lazard Freres investment banking firm, before moving into an E.72nd St. townhouse in Manhattan in the 1890s, when he began spending his workweek days at Lazard Freres’s Manhattan office. And Katharine Graham’s father, Eugene Meyer, began to play the stock market after he graduated from Yale University in 1893, with money provided by his father, by investing in then-lucrative railroad stocks like Northern Pacific—at the same time he spent his days at the Lazard Freres firm where his own father also spent his workweek days.

But in 1901, Katharine Graham’s father purchased a New York Stock Exchange seat for $50,000 [equal to around $1.6 million in 2022], left Lazard Freres and began to make money as a full-time Wall Street stockbroker, before using $500,000 [equal to around $15.9 million in 2022] from his stock-dealing profits to establish his own brokerage firm—Eugene Meyer J. and Company—in 1903.

During the next 30 years, Katharine Graham’s father became involved with the creation of two companies that profited enormously from World War I, Allied Chemical and Anaconda Copper; because all dye for U.S. Navy uniforms was supplied by Allied Chemical and the copper wire for the Allied military was supplied by Anaconda Copper.

In addition, prior to purchasing the Washington Post in 1933, Katharine Graham’s father had profited enormously from the economic panic of 1907; and--as both a business associate of the Guggenheim family, that then-owned copper mines, and an investor in the purportedly competing Anaconda’s Inspiration Copper subsidiary--from ending a 1910 price war between Guggenheim and Anaconda corporate interests; by getting them to agree to limit copper production and raise their prices—although such a price-fixing scheme “was clearly illegal under American Law,” according to former Village Voice writer Deborah Davis’s book, Katharine The Great: Katharine Graham and The Washington Post.

By the time her father purchased the Washington Post in 1933, Eugene Meyer’s Allied Chemical stock alone was worth around $43 million [equal to around $925 million in 2022]; and during the first half of the 20th-century Katharine Graham’s father, the World Bank’s first president as well, also owned a house in Crescent Place in Washington, D.C., which was worth $1.5 million in 1948 [equal to around $17.5 million in 2022] and a mansion on an estate in Mt. Kisco, NY.

Coincidentally, eleven years after the Eugene Meyer family’s Meyer Foundation gifted the Mt. Kisco mansion and estate to Rockefeller University in 1984, Rockefeller University sold the mansion and estate, that Katharine Graham’s parents had owned, to future U.S. Republican President Donald Trump, for between $7.5 million and $9.5 million [[equal to between around $13.8 million and around $17.5 million in 2022], in 1995.

And in 1948—around 26 years before the father of the co-president of the Brooklyn and Kingston, NY-based NoVo Foundation (which owns Berkshire Hathaway stock at the same time it funds many U.S. left "movement" NGOs) joined Katharine Graham on the Washington Post Company’s corporate board—Katharine Graham’s own father, also coincidentally, sold all the voting stock of his Washington Post Company to his daughter and her then-husband, Philip Graham, for $1 [equal to around $12 in 2022]. (end of part 8)