Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–260
anybody. Self-importance doesn’t resonate with anybody. Charlie Munger, you know, [Warren]
Buffett’s business partner—
ASPATURIAN: Whom you interviewed a few years back here in Beckman Auditorium.
TOMBRELLO: Yes. But you see, he wasn’t being interviewed; he was giving a talk. That’s one
thing. When I set up my arrangement with how I was going to deal with Charlie Munger, I
realized he needed an editor. That he was a brilliant man, and if you could keep him on script,
people would love it. But the trouble was, he wrote and delivered his own script at the Grove,
and apparently—I didn’t hear it—it was bloody awful. They just resolved that Charlie Munger
was hopeless. Well, I studied Charlie Munger carefully before I did that interview and realized
that if you keep him on message, he’s great. If you let him drift, no one’s going to be happy.
ASPATURIAN: It sounds like you’ve heard a lot of talks up there. What would you say were the
three best, if you had to single them out?
TOMBRELLO: Walter Alvarez, probably. That was clearly a very good talk. The first time I was
there, we heard a talk by a teacher who was, I think, teaching in L.A. There were grown men
crying at the end of that talk. He had gotten a bunch of kids at what must have been roughly
junior-high level and changed their lives. He read a letter that one had written for her admission
essay to college in which she said, basically, “My life began in the seventh grade.” It was a great
talk about how you influence children. Peter Peterson gave a great talk.
ASPATURIAN: Who is he?
TOMBRELLO: I think he was in finance or banking, but he started something called the Peter G.
Peterson Foundation. He put a billion dollars into it. He wants to change the nature of political
effectiveness in this country. And anybody, of course, who is in California, knows we
desperately need somehow to get beyond where we’re stuck. If you look at what’s been
happening in the U.S. Congress for the last couple of years, you realize that Peterson is clearly
talking about exactly the right thing. We have somehow got to get beyond the politics and get on
with what society needs. It’s very interesting that he came into it from the business side and is
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