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

by Daniel Schulman

  Fred found a seat in Dice’s spacious living room, where plush chairs and davenports had been arrayed in a semicircle. There with him were ten others, including T. Coleman Andrews, former commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, who had resigned his post in 1955, coming out as a vocal foe of the income tax; Col. Laurence Bunker, a former aide to General Douglas MacArthur; Wisconsin industrialist William Grede; W. B. McMillan, president of the Hussman Refrigerator Company; and University of Illinois classics professor Revilo Oliver, later a hero of white supremacists for his racist and anti-Semitic jeremiads.

  Robert Welch had convened the meeting. He was a former candy company executive who in the mid-1950s had quit his job to devote himself full-time to fighting communism. How could he continue peddling Sugar Babies and Junior Mints when America—the world—was in crisis?

  Welch was a child prodigy who had entered college at the age of twelve. He had dabbled in politics, launching a 1950 bid for lieutenant governor in Massachusetts on a platform of repelling the creep of socialism into state and federal government. He lost the race, but his dystopic vision of a subverted, subjugated America gained traction. To disseminate his ideas, Welch founded a magazine, One Man’s Opinion (later renamed American Opinion). And that was the problem: Welch was just one man. If he hoped to defeat the existential threat of communism, he would need an army.

  Fred Koch, whose fervent anticommunism had brought him to Welch’s notice, seemed like an ideal general. Since returning from the Soviet Union in 1930, he had watched his four sons grow up in a world where the words of his old Bolshevik minder seemed to be coming true. Fred now saw evidence of communist infiltration everywhere. Jerome Livschitz’s taunt—we will make you rotten to the core—echoed in his ears. His time among the Soviets, and his firsthand experiences witnessing a society fully under the boot heel of government, was regular table talk for the Koch boys.

  “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government and government policy,” David has said. “It’s something I grew up with—a fundamental point of view that big government was bad, and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic fortunes was not good.”

  Fred’s experiences in the Soviet Union, which in turn drove his interest in politics and economics, especially influenced Charles. “That sparked the evolution of Charles’s political views,” said Tony Woodlief, a former Koch Industries management consultant who knows Charles well. “You can blame it on Standard Oil.”

  The more Fred traveled the world, the more horrified he became at the growing influence of socialism and communism—to the point where, on the cusp of World War II, he even saw something laudable in the rise of fascism. “Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard,” he reported in an October 1938 letter to his mentor Charles de Ganahl, after an extensive trip that included stops in imperial Japan and (“violently socialistic”) New Zealand.

  The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.

  At the end of World War II, Fred believed that the next great clash would be fought between the forces of capitalism and collectivism, but to his frustration, few people seemed to recognize the peril. He saw it as his duty to raise the alarm. “I think these times are far more serious even than Civil War days,” he confided to a friend and retired military officer. “That war was merely to decide whether we were going to be one nation or two, whereas the fight that is going on now in this country is going to decide whether we are going to be free men or slaves.” (This was a bizarre comment to make, since the Civil War was fought, in large part, to eradicate slavery.)

  As he became increasingly outspoken about the menace of communism, Fred returned to Moscow in 1956 (his first visit in twenty-six years), joining a delegation of ten prominent Wichita businessmen on a “friendship tour” to refute Soviet propaganda about the evils of capitalism. “We have been painted as oppressive masters of the laboring people,” one of Fred’s companions said at the time. “We are nothing of the sort. Although we are wealthy in terms of worldly goods, we are humanitarians in every respect.” The quixotic trip only reinforced the immutability of the ideological battle under way.

  When Welch summoned Fred to Indianapolis, he did not tell the industrialist the reason for the meeting. He merely said that the topic was of the gravest importance.

  “The meeting will be completely ‘off the record’—you will simply be in Indianapolis, or just in the Midwest, on business,” Welch wrote to the small circle of prominent men he had picked to attend the conclave. “And since there is no way I can tell you of the ideas which I hope to see thoroughly discussed there, without writing volumes, you will have to take for granted that I would not ask such busy men to give up two whole days in this way unless I thought it would be worthwhile.”

  When all his guests took their seats, Welch made his entrance toting a thick stack of note cards. Tall, with thinning gray hair and pursed lips, Welch looked a bit like Mr. Magoo. He shook hands with the men and, knowing there was much ground to cover, took his place rigidly behind a podium that he had borrowed from a nearby church.

  “Before tomorrow is over,” Welch said, “I hope to have all of you feeling that you are taking part, here and now, in the beginning of a movement of historical importance.” Speaking for hours on end in his customary monotone, interrupted only by small breaks for food, Welch outlined the dizzying breadth of the communist conspiracy, reaching back to the Roman and Greek empires—civilizations that “did perish of the cancer of collectivism”—to illustrate the tragic fate that could be awaiting the West.

  “This octopus is so large,” Welch said, “that its tentacles now reach into all of the legislative halls, all of the union labor meetings, a majority of the religious gatherings, and most of the schools of the whole world. It has a central nervous system which can make its tentacles in the labor unions of Bolivia, in the farmers’ co-operatives of Saskatchewan, in the caucuses of the Social Democrats of West Germany, and in the class rooms of Yale Law School, all retract or reach forward simultaneously. It can make all of these creeping tentacles turn either right or left, or a given percentage turn right while the others turn left, at the same time, in accordance with the intentions of a central brain in Moscow or Ust-Kamenogorsk. The human race has never before faced any such monster of power which was determined to enslave it.”

  To others, this might have sounded like pure lunacy. But Fred knew better. Of the men who had assembled in Indianapolis, he perhaps had the most direct experience with communism. He had seen the beast up close.

  The communists had either executed or banished to Siberia many of the Soviet engineers Fred worked with in the early 1930s. Even the loyal Bolshevik Jerome Livschitz had faced a firing squad in 1936 for allegedly plotting with Stalin’s nemesis, Leon Trotsky.

  Fred suspected Stalin’s assassins had struck even closer to home. In 1930, Winkler-Koch trained a Russian engineer by the name of Hachatouroff, who while en route back to the Soviet Union, received word that his life was in danger. He returned to Wichita, where Fred gave him a job. But a few months later, Hachatouroff was found dead after falling from a hotel window. The authorities ruled his death a suicide. When Charles was old enough to hear the gruesome tale, Fred told him about Hachatouroff and about the brutality of the Soviet regime, where a man’s life was not his own and where almost any transgression was punishable with death. Fred said that he didn’t buy the official explanation of the Russian engineer’s demise. He believed the KGB had murdered him. “He was always convinced that they pushed him out,” Charles remembered.

>   Only as dusk fell on that first day in Indianapolis did Welch unveil his vision. Defeating this many-tentacled monster, Welch explained, required its own multipronged approach: the establishment of Christian Science–like reading rooms and bookstores, to educate people on “the true history of events and developments of the past two decades”; the organizing of front groups (“little fronts, big fronts, temporary fronts, permanent fronts, all kinds of fronts”); and support for conservative news outlets—Welch’s American Opinion, but also William F. Buckley’s National Review (then a mere three years old), the Dan Smoot Report, and Human Events.

  Additionally, Welch’s movement would make prodigious use of the “letter-writing weapon,” causing a “continuous overwhelming flood” of correspondence to descend on everyone from Washington lawmakers and executive agency heads to newspaper editors, TV sponsors, and educators. Welch intended to place their weight onto “the political scales in this country as fast and as far” as possible.

  It wasn’t until the following day that Welch gave a name to his movement: the John Birch Society. For those unfamiliar with Birch, Welch handed out packets containing copies of the 1954 biography he had written of the young Baptist preacher and Army captain, who was shot dead by Chinese communists in August 1945, a week-and-a-half after V-J Day. Welch considered Birch the first martyr of the Cold War. “It is my fervent hope that the John Birch Society will last for hundreds of years and exert an increasing influence for the temporal good and spiritual ennoblement of mankind throughout those centuries,” Welch told the men seated in front of him.

  Over the course of the two-day retreat, Welch succeeded in stirring the patriotic instincts of his guests, who had needed little convincing that the nation was on a destructive path. Before Welch even concluded his presentation, Hussman Refrigerator Company’s W. B. McMillan scratched out a check for $1,000: “Here, Bob, we’re in business.” Fred Koch enthusiastically signed on, too, later joining the John Birch Society’s National Council, along with most of the other attendees.

  After Indianapolis, Fred threw himself more vigorously than ever into the fight against communism. He besieged lawmakers with letters demanding they address the peril facing the nation, writing to one congressman that “inaction means in a very few years Red Chinese and Red Russian soldiers will be marching in our streets. In that event the dead will be the lucky ones.” And in 1960, Fred self-published a short tract called A Business Man Looks at Communism, which warned of an impending communist takeover. The pamphlet was an outgrowth of a talk on communism he’d given to Wichita Rotarians, and which he was subsequently asked to reprise on local radio station KFH. So many listeners called in asking for copies that Fred decided to expand on his remarks in a 39-page booklet.

  He produced a forceful, though deeply paranoid polemic intended to jar Americans from their apathy: “It is not the Communists who are destroying America,” he wrote. “America is being destroyed by citizens who will not listen, are not informed, and will not think.”

  One likely path to a communist coup, he wrote, was the “infiltration of high offices of government and political parties until the President of the U.S. is a Communist.… Even the Vice Presidency would do, as it could be easily arranged for the President to commit suicide.”

  Fred saw the specter of communism lurking behind everything from American foreign aid (“the U.S.A. is following Stalin’s spending prescription”) to tax-free nonprofits (“using the astronomical sums of money in their control to bring on socialism”), and from college campuses (“one of the breeding grounds of recruits for the Communist Party”) to churches (“ministers don’t become Communists but Communists become ministers”).

  Even modernist painters were part of the conspiracy: “The idea is to make our civilization seem degraded, ugly, and hopeless.” According to Bill Koch, Fred found Pablo Picasso particularly loathsome. “My father hated Picasso because he was a communist.”

  The American civil rights movement also figured into the plot. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred wrote, noting that he’d been told that the Communist Party had influenced the welfare laws in major American cities “to make it attractive for rural Southern Negroes and Puerto Ricans to come to those cities.” Later, when the communists wanted to seize control of urban centers, they “will use the colored people by getting a vicious race war started.”

  Fred reserved special scorn for labor unions, which endeavored to “have the worker do as little as possible for the money he receives,” he wrote. “This practice alone can destroy our country.” And he alleged that the “Communist-infiltrated union” whose members controlled the wire traffic in and out of the Pentagon had “probably” handed over America’s secrets to the communists.

  Fred initially printed 12,500 copies of his pamphlet, which he distributed to every weekly newspaper in the country, along with other interested parties. Demand was so great that by late 1961, it had entered its ninth printing. At least 2.6 million copies of A Business Man Looks at Communism would ultimately go into circulation.

  Readers of Fred’s anticommunist call to arms included FBI agents, who received numerous inquiries about the Wichita businessman. Worried Americans deluged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover with letters asking if Fred’s claims about the depth of the communist infiltration were valid—and in some cases wondering if his pamphlet was part of a subversive plot of its own.

  “Would you consider Fred Koch… a security risk?” asked one letter writer. “… I am astonished and appalled at the contents of this Publication.”

  Along with his pamphlet, Fred gave frequent speeches across the Midwest on the subject of communism. In 1960, he was the commencement speaker at Wichita State University, where he warned that the “tentacles” of socialism had crept “further and further” into the body politic, creating a national craving for government handouts that he likened to morphine addiction.

  The sad fact is that once people begin to get something for nothing then they want more and more at the same price. It destroys their independence, their self-reliance, and transforms them into dependent animal creatures without their knowing it. The end result is the human race as portrayed by Orwell—a human face ground into the earth by the large boot of benevolent Big Brother.

  Fred knew that many people viewed him as a red-baiting crackpot. Speaking out was uncharacteristic of him. He was a private man, who revealed little about himself, his family, and his company. But given the stakes, he did not consider silence an option. The time had come to fight. “Maybe you don’t want to be controversial by getting mixed up in this anti-communist battle,” he told members of Kansas’s Northeast Johnson County Women’s Republican Club. “But you won’t be very controversial lying in a ditch with a bullet in your brain.”

  Driving into Wichita from the west on Highway 54 during the 1960s, you could easily tell that you were entering Bircher country. IMPEACH EARL WARREN, the billboard on the edge of town implored. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was an early target of the Birch Society, which in addition to ads and billboards, launched petition drives seeking the judge’s ouster. Birchers reviled Warren for presiding over 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which paved the way for school desegregation, inflaming the South and enraging conservatives who believed the high court had violated the Constitution. (“If many of the opinions of the Warren Supreme Court had been written in the Kremlin they could not have served the Communist better,” Fred wrote in A Business Man Looks at Communism.)

  Fred had taken on a high-profile role within the society, as one of its national leaders. Family friend and fellow Wichita businessman Bob Love, the youthful president of the Love Box Company, also got involved with the movement. The pair had teamed up in the past to promote political causes. Love, who was closer in age to Fred’s sons, was a founder of Kansans for the Right to Work. Together he and Fred had led the successful effort to curb the power of unions in Kansas via a 1958 constitutional ame
ndment. Now, the pair commanded Wichita’s growing Birch Society contingent, whose ranks included many of the same business leaders involved in the right-to-work battle.

  Fred’s chapter met frequently in the basement trophy room of the Koch family’s stone mansion. “The room looks practically medieval,” recalled one visitor, a doctoral student doing his dissertation on the John Birch Society. “… Its walls are crowded with stuffed heads from the disappearing wildlife of Africa and North America.” During one meeting, the Ph.D. student wrote, a “speaker said that if the Communists take over, they will point to this as the place where the Americanist conspirators met.”

  Charles joined the Birch Society in the early 1960s, and he held occasional political discussions of his own in the basement of his family’s mansion, inviting over members of the local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom to wax philosophical about the nature of government and its role in pilfering liberties from the people. Charles seemed to steer clear of the more hysterical claims being made by his father and other society luminaries, preferring to talk about big picture ideas. “He didn’t take the conspiracy stuff very seriously,” one participant in these discussions remembered.

  But the “conspiracy stuff” gathered steam in Wichita, a Birch Society stronghold thanks to the efforts of Fred Koch and Bob Love.

  The city’s schools and colleges became an early target of Wichita’s Birchers, who critics accused of running stealth candidates for school board positions and employing McCarthyesque tactics in the classroom. A former Wichita high school debate teacher recalled that “the Birch Society was giving the superintendent of schools and Board of Education a lot of headaches with their complaints.” One source of their ire was the UNICEF collection boxes children toted around during Halloween: “The Birch Society just went nuts over it.” She drew their wrath when the topic of the United Nations came up in her classroom: “I got phone calls from parents just furious because of something some debater said about the United Nations—didn’t I know that the United Nations was evil and trying to take over the world and destroy our independence?”