Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty

by Daniel Schulman

  Meanwhile, Fred had even begun to harbor doubts about the patriotic commitment of his beloved alma mater, MIT. He had donated regularly to the school, and in 1955, he served a five-year term on its board of trustees, a period when Bill, Charles, and David attended college there. But he came to believe the communist infestation had taken root at MIT, as it had elsewhere in the country.

  Fred considered the university’s tolerance of a Dutch mathematician named Dirk Jan Struik particularly egregious. A member of MIT’s faculty since 1926, Struik was an unapologetic Marxist, who had joined the Communist Party in his native Netherlands. In 1951, Struik was hauled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he pleaded the Fifth. A couple months later, Massachusetts indicted Struik for conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the government. MIT immediately suspended him pending the outcome of the case. “They used my textbook on differential geometry, but I myself was not allowed to teach it,” he reflected years later. “… I’ve always said that that time was half Nazi Germany, half Alice in Wonderland.”

  There was scant evidence to support the traitorous acts Struik was accused of, and in 1956, the charges were dropped. MIT reinstated the professor, who resumed teaching at the school during Charles’s senior year. The decision infuriated Fred. The man was an admitted communist, after all, and here he was once again in a position to mold young minds, maybe even his son’s. The professor’s retention, Fred griped to a fellow anticommunist, “meant… that there would be an MIT Alger Hiss some day for sure.”

  Fred complained bitterly about Struik and wrote to MIT administrators warning of the communist influence on the campus where his sons were spending their college years. When an MIT fund-raiser visited Fred in Wichita, the industrialist told him he was “down on Tech” because the administration had done little to take a stand against Struik or other communists in its ranks.

  “Fred Koch used all of his influence and all of his wallet and everything else to try to get this guy off the faculty—and he failed,” said John McManus, the current president of the John Birch Society. As a young Bircher in the mid-1960s, McManus recalled meeting Fred at a society function, where the businessman was still fuming about his inability to purge Struik from MIT.

  By the early 1960s, the John Birch Society had some 60,000 members, 58 full-time employees, and annual revenues of $1.6 million. It was growing rapidly—and stirring up controversy across the nation. The Saturday Evening Post reported that its rabble-rousing members “are said to have infiltrated Republican organizations, disrupted school boards, harassed city councils and librarians and subverted PTA’s near and far.”

  The society’s fierce letter-writing and lobbying campaigns targeted issues ranging from U.S. participation in the United Nations (“Get U.S. Out!”) to water fluoridation, which members claimed was a tool of communist dominion. (In Wichita, a Birch Society–led effort repealed by referendum a city fluoridation plan.)

  Birchers also bitterly opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on states’ rights grounds, and believed that the civil rights movement itself was a communist creation to divide and conquer America. (“It always seemed to me that when the Communists… begin to light these racial fires all over the country as they are now doing, that it would be the beginning of a decisive move on their part,” Fred wrote to a fellow Birch Society council member in 1963.)

  The Birchers formed the vanguard of a far-right awakening in America, and the group’s extreme rhetoric, charges of treason directed at the nation’s politicians, and aggressive recruiting practices, frightened not just the political Left, but the Right as well.

  Such torchbearers of conservatism as the National Review’s William F. Buckley eyed the movement warily, seeing in the Birch Society’s rise the possible implosion of the conservative movement. Through the head-spinning conspiracies of Robert Welch—who had called President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” and claimed Soviet censorship of Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize–winning Doctor Zhivago was actually an elaborate ruse so that the subversive book would be embraced by the West—the Birch Society risked branding all conservatives as cranks and kooks.

  At first, Buckley and his allies took care to distance themselves from Welch without offending their fellow conservatives, who were joining the Birch Society in droves. Barry Goldwater, the charismatic Republican senator from Arizona and 1964 presidential nominee, was particularly mindful of his base of support within the society, which was populated with many deep-pocketed businessmen. He feared alienating men like Fred Koch, who had generously supported his political career: Upon the 1960 publication of The Conscience of a Conservative, Fred promptly ordered 2,500 copies of the polemic that propelled Goldwater to political stardom and put them in the hands of every opinion maker in Kansas. In 1961, Goldwater managed to praise the society’s members without endorsing the views of the group’s controversial Svengali, telling reporters he was “impressed by the type of people” in the society. “They are the kind we need in politics.”

  But by early 1962, as the society gained strength and numbers, it grew clear to Buckley and his allies that more drastic action was needed. By embracing Goldwater, Birchers threatened his chances of broader Republican appeal. Buckley, Goldwater, and other conservative leading lights convened that January at Palm Beach’s upscale Breakers Hotel, where they spent considerable time discussing the Birch Society problem. There, Buckley volunteered for the assignment of making Robert Welch into a pariah. That February he unleashed a 5,000-word haymaker in National Review, titled “The Question of Robert Welch,” which slammed the Birch Society leader for harming the cause of anticommunism. “How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points… so far removed from common sense?” Buckley wrote.

  Senior members of the society had already begun to chafe under Welch’s autocratic leadership. (Democracy, he famously said, was “a weapon of demagoguery and a perennial fraud.”) Buckley’s essay caused further unrest. But Fred remained one of Welch’s defenders.

  “I wrote Buckley and told him that possibly if the Communists ever took over he would be a prime candidate for the firing squad and that by attacking Welch he was hastening the day considerably,” he reported to the conservative journalist Elizabeth Churchill Brown.

  Fred’s hard-line conservative politics were controversial not only to the broader public, but also within his extended family, causing what one relative called a “schism” between the Kochs and the family of Mary’s younger brother, William Robinson, a prominent lawyer in Wichita. While Fred organized the Birch Society in the early- and mid-1960s, Robinson chaired the Democratic Central Committee of Sedgwick County (which includes Wichita). In 1964, the year Fred enthusiastically backed Goldwater’s presidential bid, Robinson attended the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City as a delegate.

  Robinson ran twice, unsuccessfully, for Congress, making a bid for the 4th district congressional seat in 1960 and challenging Bob Dole in the 1968 Senate race. “That was the death of the relationship between the Robinsons and the Kochs,” the relative said. Bill Koch, however, remained close to his uncle and aunt, especially in adulthood. “They were like surrogate parents. They were the loving parents that he always wanted.” Bill’s uncle was fiercely loyal to his nephew. “Billy is a very compassionate guy, unlike the rest of his family,” Robinson sniped in 1992.

  Fred’s conservatism influenced his children in different ways. Bill, for his part, never fully embraced the extreme politics of his father. He even considered following in the footsteps of his uncle, contemplating a Senate bid in Kansas as a Democrat in the late 1990s—an indignity that Fred, who had passed on by this point, was mercifully spared. Nor was the old man alive to see Bill augment his art collection with paintings by modern artists (including Picasso) who he considered communists.

  David inherited his c
onservative views on government from Fred, but he has implied that some of his father’s more conspiratorial beliefs about communism were out there. “Father was paranoid about communism, let’s put it that way,” David told New York magazine. Frederick—save for a 1980s run-in with the British bureaucracy over his plans to renovate a historic mansion in London—steered clear of politics entirely.

  Of the four brothers, Charles most heartily imbibed their father’s hard-line political views; part of this likely owed to his arrival back in Wichita in the early 1960s, after attending college and grad school in Boston, during the height of Fred’s John Birch Society organizing. One Wichitan recalled going on a blind date with Charles in the early 1960s, where he spent much of the evening discoursing on the evils of communism and discussing Communism on the Map—one of a series of propagandistic films screened at Birch Society chapter meetings, in which the nations of the world are shown slowly being covered by an ooze of pink or red. His date was not impressed. “I ended up leaving early and walking home,” she remembered.

  Like his father, Charles occasionally speechified about the dangers of collectivism and the encroaching welfare state. “The U.S. government is trying to win votes—not to satisfy consumers,” he told an audience of college students in 1965. “In this form of collectivism, the society controls everything that should be controlled by individuals.”

  With Koch family friend Bob Love, Charles opened a John Birch Society bookstore on Wichita’s East 13th Street, down the road from his family’s compound. He curated a section there on Austrian economics (a school of thought that heavily influenced libertarianism) and enjoyed introducing customers to the works of economists including Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.

  A family acquaintance recalled visiting the Koch family’s home one day in the 1960s, carrying a dog-eared copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the assigned reading in a college literature class. When Charles answered the door, his eyes lingered on the book’s cover. After an uncomfortable pause, he finally asked the visitor to leave the Hemingway book outside, since it could not enter the house.

  “Is there a problem?” the puzzled visitor asked. It wasn’t like he was carrying a copy of Tropic of Cancer.

  “Well,” Charles explained, “he was a communist.”

  The guest entered. Hemingway remained on the stoop.

  Communism may have been sweeping the world, but there was at least one threshold where, by God, it would not cross.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  May Day at MIT

  On May 1, 1961, two weeks after the Bay of Pigs invasion, a fraternity brother at MIT’s Beta Theta Pi house dug an old ROTC uniform out of his closet and fashioned an effigy of Fidel Castro. He impaled it with a bayonet, then hoisted the effigy up the flagpole at 119 Bay State Road in Boston’s Kenmore Square. Large speakers were placed on the fire escape of the four-story, red-brick row house, across Storrow Drive from the Charles River, and one of the Betas barked into a microphone leading the Koch twins and their fraternity brothers in chants of “Yankee Sí, Castro No!”—their anticommunist twist on the rallying cry of the Cuban revolution.

  With their fellow Betas, David and Bill, now college juniors and two days short of their twenty-first birthday, had cooked up a little counterrevolution of their own—a display of anticommunist fervor that would have made Fred Koch proud. With finals approaching, it seemed like as good an excuse as any to get loaded on keg beer and blow off some steam. Making the rounds on MIT’s Cambridge campus, Bill, one classmate recalled, advertised the protest on the blackboards of his engineering classes: “Anti-Castro Rally: Free Beer at the Beta House.”

  Fraternities and student dormitories lined Bay State Road, and as night fell, a small but rowdy crowd of about fifty formed outside the Kochs’ fraternity house. Soon, the sound of sirens was in the air and three paddy wagons screeched to a stop. But instead of subduing the crowd, the arrival of the cops attracted a new wave of onlookers. Diagonally across the street from the Beta house sat a large dormitory that housed Boston University coeds. The Betas knew it well. The mathematically minded fraternity brothers had developed a grid system for spying on the B.U. girls. On many an evening a Beta would suddenly call out a coordinate—say, 6-D—and the brothers would then scramble to train a set of Navy-issue binoculars on the sixth floor, fourth window from the right, where a coed had forgotten to draw the shades before disrobing.

  The Boston University students had mostly watched the Betas’ rally from their windows. But when the police arrived, they poured out of the dorm “like ants out of an ant hill,” recalled Kent Groninger, a member of the fraternity. The four blocks surrounding the Beta house suddenly swarmed with hundreds of rowdy, chanting college students. During the melee, Groninger and another tipsy Beta hauled a bale of hay a half-block to the corner of Deerfield Street, then lit it on fire. “The Boston Fire Department responded—big time,” chuckled Groninger. “They brought a number of trucks, the hook and ladder, the whole damn thing.” The police struggled to restore order, all the while being pelted with bottles and cherry bombs. “Holy shit,” Groninger said, recalling the events of fifty years ago, “it turned into a riot.”

  The Boston Police arrested more than thirty students, including a handful of Betas, and spent nearly two hours dispersing the crowd. No sooner had the students dissipated than a new anti-Castro protest erupted on the MIT campus across the river. A mob of two hundred students then marched up Massachusetts Avenue bound for Harvard Yard, where “the Engineers prostrated themselves before the statue of John Harvard,” The Harvard Crimson reported. The next morning, the front page of The Boston Globe blared: “MIT, B.U. Riot Follows Hanging of Castro Effigy.” News of the anticommunist student uprising even reached the Soviet Union, published in the Russian newspaper Pravda.

  The incident prompted a halfhearted MIT investigation. Later, the Beta brothers proudly took credit for the melee in the school’s yearbook—and singled out the Koch twins for inciting it. “The Betas enjoyed a very successful year,” the fraternity reported. “But our activities were far from being on the limited side of life. Led by the brothers Koch, we staged Mayday 1961, as an expression of our conservative and anti-communist sentiments (much to the dismay of the I.F.C. [Interfraternity Conference] and Fidel Castro, who hung in effigy).”

  “Great friends, wild parties, athletic triumphs, academic successes, and actually learning something useful”—that’s how David later summed up his college experience in an MIT alumni questionnaire. Bill joked that his most vivid college memories were “not fit for publication.”

  Like Charles, who graduated with an engineering degree in 1957, a year before his younger brothers enrolled at MIT, David and Bill pledged Beta Theta Pi and took up residence in the fraternity house.

  “Dave was always up for a party,” recalled Groninger, who was one year behind the Koch twins. Partying was largely confined to Saturday nights, when the Betas invited dates over and dressed in coats and ties for a formal dinner. Afterward, the beer and hard liquor flowed, while Johnny Mathis and other crooners echoed through the fraternity house’s spacious library. “Guys would get a little loaded, a little lewd,” Groninger said, hastening to point out that their partying was mild by modern standards.

  During these occasions the differences between the Koch twins seemed the most pronounced. David was gregarious, popular with women, and liked to be the center of attention; he showboated for his dates on the dance floor. Bill was more reserved. During Beta parties, he was more likely to be found off in a quiet corner deep in conversation. “Billy has a little warmer self. He’s not as egotistical as Dave. A little softer of a guy, humble,” said Groninger, whose pledge father was Bill.

  At times, it was hard to believe they were related, let alone twins. Beyond their lean and lanky frames, the brothers really didn’t look too much alike. Bill had white-blond hair and a pale complexion, while his brother had darker features. Neither of the brothers gave any indication that they
hailed from great wealth. (“Billy was kind of a goofus. He was not sophisticated,” said someone who knew him during his MIT years.) “They never flaunted it, they never spent a lot of money, and they never dressed differently than anybody else,” remembered Tom Burns, an MIT friend.

  The only real giveaway that they came from money was the fact that David owned a car (unlike most of his other classmates), a red Sunbeam Alpine convertible that he parked behind the Beta house.

  The heated rivalry between the brothers had cooled considerably by the time they arrived at MIT. Boarding school, and with it some years apart from David, had mellowed Bill. At Culver Military Academy, Bill wasn’t locked in constant competition with his more athletic and outgoing twin. This allowed him to cultivate his own persona and focus on what he was good at: academics. “He was very ambitious as far as his studies,” said his Culver classmate Robert Lindgren. “He was industrious, didn’t play much—all work.” He added, “He wasn’t much of a ladies’ man, and he didn’t pretend to be.”

  Classmates remember Bill as a quiet, shy, and analytical teenager, who ran cross-country and boxed, but who had little interest in the military-style order of Culver. “We used to consider ourselves, Bill and I, kind of renegades,” said Bruce Lassman, a Culver friend. “We didn’t do anything to be outcasts. Here’s a school where if you excelled you were a lieutenant or captain, but both Bill and I were corporals.” (Bill still ranked above his rebellious brother Charles, who graduated Culver as a private.)