Howard Buffett

Howard Homan Buffett (August 13, 1903 – April 30, 1964) was an American businessman, investor, and politician. He was a four-term Republican United States Representative. He was the father of Warren Buffett, a billionaire businessman and investor.

Howard Buffett was born in Omaha, Nebraska to Henrietta Duvall Buffett and Ernest P. Buffett, owners of a grocery business. Henrietta was of Huguenot ancestry. Ernest P. Buffett's paternal ancestors hail from northern Scandinavia. Howard Buffett attended public schools and graduated from the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1925. While a student, Buffett was a brother of the Alpha Sigma Phi Fraternity. He married Leila Stahl on December 27, 1925. The Buffetts were active members of Dundee Presbyterian Church. After failing to secure a job in the family grocery business, he started a small stock brokerage.

Entering the investment business, Buffett also served on the Omaha board of education from 1939 to 1942. In 1942 he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in the Nebraska district in which Omaha was located. In that election, Buffett was seen as "a Republican sacrificial lamb in Nebraska’s second district when FDR was a popular wartime leader." Nevertheless, he went on to win the Republican nomination in the primary and then the subsequent general election.

He was reelected twice. In 1948 he again was the Republican nominee for another term, but was defeated for reelection; however, he was the Republican nominee for the office again in 1950 and won the office back. In 1952 Buffett decided against seeking another term and returned to his investment business in Omaha, Buffett-Falk & Co., in which he worked until shortly before his death. He also served as the campaign manager for conservative Senator Robert A. Taft in Taft's 1952 presidential campaign.

According to Warren Buffett biographer Roger Lowenstein:

Howard Buffett is remembered for his highly libertarian Old Right stance, having maintained a friendship with Murray Rothbard for a number of years. He "would invariably draw 'zero' ratings from the Americans for Democratic Action and other leftist groups."

Buffett was a vocal critic of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Of the Truman Doctrine, he said: "Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns." Buffett was also "one of the major voices in Congress opposed to the Korean adventure," and "was convinced that the United States was largely responsible for the eruption of conflict in Korea; for the rest of his life he tried unsuccessfully to get the Senate Armed Services Committee to declassify the testimony of CIA head Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, which Buffett told [Rothbard] established American responsibility for the Korean outbreak."

Speaking on the floor of Congress, he said of military interventionism that,

In the summer of 1962, he wrote "an impassioned plea... for the abolition of the draft" in the New Individualist Review. Buffett wrote:

In addition to non-interventionism overseas, Howard Buffett strongly supported the gold standard because he believed it would limit the ability of government to inflate the money supply and spend beyond its means. His son Warren Buffett is not an advocate of the gold standard.

He married Leila Stahl Buffett (d.1996), who was a descendant of the Stahl family from Estonia; they had three children:

• Warren Buffett (son): businessman, investor, and philanthropist, Chairman & CEO, Berkshire Hathaway
  • Peter Buffett (grandson): musician, composer, and producer
  • Howard Graham Buffett (grandson): Corporate board member of Berkshire Hathaway
    • Howard Warren Buffett (great-grandson): Faculty at Columbia University
  • Susan Alice Buffett (granddaughter)
• Doris Buffett Bryant (daughter)
• Roberta Buffett Bialek (daughter)

• Buffett, Howard Homan. Human Freedom Rests on Gold Redeemable Money, Financial Chronicle 5/6/48
• Buffett, Howard Homan. The Evil Men in the Kremlin Must Be Chortling as Militarism Runs Wild in America. Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952.

• Cf. Howard Homan Buffett – entry at the NNDB