Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (6 page)

“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.

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 amendment. 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?”

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 conservative 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.