Howard Homan Buffett

Howard Homan Buffett's record is small in the way mid-century congressional careers often are, but it has an unusual afterlife. He won four straight elections in a Nebraska district that trusted a stockbroker to speak for farmers and small business owners, and he did it while holding positions that put him at odds with the bipartisan foreign policy consensus of his day. That willingness to dissent, on the Cold War above all, is why libertarian writers kept his name alive decades after his death. Murray Rothbard called him one of his favorite anti-Cold War figures in Congress, and that single endorsement has done more for his reputation among modern readers than any committee assignment. He is also, unavoidably, the father of Warren Buffett, and the values he ran his household on, thrift, independence, plain dealing, have been cited by his son in shareholder letters, interviews, and speeches for over sixty years. That is a strange kind of honor, inherited rather than earned, but it is real and it is specific to him.