Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (31 page)

Later that afternoon, David and Tim Phillips stood side by side on the stage while representatives from each of AFP’s chapters took a turn at the microphone, addressing “Mr. Chairman” like soldiers sounding off to their general. They told of organizing “dozens of tea parties” and “relentlessly” hounding their congressional representatives to keep their “hands off our health care,” spike cap and trade legislation, and jettison “the Employee No Choice Act.” They spoke of doubling and tripling their memberships and of becoming a “political force” within their states.

A current of exuberance pulsed through the room. David—who would later scratch his head at being pegged as the Tea Party’s
mastermind—smiled down from the stage and brought his hands together heavily.

In mid-March 2010, an official-looking convoy of two forest green police cars and an ambulance painted the same shade pulled up in front of the National Museum of Natural History on the National Mall in Washington. The museum was debuting the new $20.7 million David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins. Human evolution had long been one of David’s passions, and he had funded research on the subject for more than 30 years, including supporting the work of anthropologist Donald Johanson; with a pair of colleagues, the famed scientist had discovered “Lucy,” the 3-million-year-old hominid skeleton that established a key evolutionary link between apes and man.

Young men and women piled out of the cars, wearing green jackets with
CLIMATE CRIME UNIT
stenciled on the back. The Greenpeace activists busied themselves cordoning off a “climate crime scene” and distributing “Wanted” leaflets containing pictures of David and his brother. “While David Koch’s oil wealth may get his name on a museum exhibit, the Koch family legacy is one of environmental crimes,” the group’s wiry, goateed research director, Kert Davies, declared.

Richard Fink had warned the brothers that they would pay a price for stepping up their political involvement. The backlash had begun.

Davies had for more than a decade kept a folder on Koch Industries in the back of his filing cabinet, filling it periodically with newspaper clips and documents as they came across his desk. Starting in the fall of 2009, as the Tea Party gained steam, and as Americans for Prosperity became a primary foe of the climate change legislation that had narrowly passed the House but stalled in the Senate, Davies dusted off the file. He planned to drag the Koch brothers out of the shadows and onto the front pages.

Davies and his team of Greenpeace researchers had previously exposed Exxon’s role in bankrolling think tanks and research studies that sowed doubt about climate change. They now began to scrutinize the giving of the Koch brothers and their company.

What they found astounded them. Foundations connected to the brothers had, in the three-year stretch between 2005 and 2008, directed nearly $25 million to dozens of conservative think tanks, policy institutes, and advocacy groups that had challenged the existence of global warming. Exxon, during that same period, had contributed about $9 million to similar outfits. Charles and David Koch had outspent a public company with one of the world’s largest market caps by nearly 3 to 1.

The brothers controlled America’s second largest private company. Koch Industries produced Dixie cups and Brawny paper towels. It swallowed the industrial giant Georgia-Pacific with barely a hiccup. But why, Davies and his colleagues wondered, had so few Americans heard of them? Why were so few people aware of the subterranean tentacles of their influence?

“We decided, why don’t we expose them and make them a household name?” said Greenpeace researcher Aliya Haq. “The point was, let’s bring these guys out into the spotlight. Who are they and why don’t we know who they are?”

Greenpeace followed its Smithsonian stunt with the release of a report detailing the brothers’ hefty contributions to dozens of “climate opposition groups”; it accused the brothers and their company of “secretly funding the climate denial machine.”

The report was effective, if misleading. The brothers had for decades contributed to a wide constellation of conservative groups that amplified their free-market viewpoint. It was not exactly a secret. These same organizations—including the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Mercatus Center, and many others—had indeed broadcast doubts about global warming and government-led efforts to address it. And the brothers themselves
were certainly global warming skeptics. But it was a leap to suggest the millions the Kochs had donated to conservative think tanks and other outfits had been all or even mostly for the purpose of climate change denial. In reality, the Kochs’ funding had gone to bankroll research and advocacy on a wide range of other issues—many of them, to be sure, loathsome to the political Left.

Though the report painted a distorted picture of the Kochs’ giving, it entered the national conversation at a moment when political discourse had turned hyper-partisan. Around the time of its release, the long, acrimonious battle over health care reform had climaxed with a series of fractious “Kill the Bill” rallies held outside the Capitol in which the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity was front and center. The scene got so ugly that a protestor spat on Representative Emanuel Cleaver, a black Democrat from Missouri, as he made his way into the Capitol; an irate activist called out “faggot” as Representative Barney Frank, the openly gay congressman from Massachusetts, passed by. The Greenpeace report, coupled with news coverage linking Charles and David to the nasty health care brawl, set the stage for the Kochs to become cartoon villains.

On the Left, “the Koch brothers” became a political meme, a crude caricature of corporate fat cats subverting democracy and science as they secretly advanced their plutocratic agenda. The brothers were suddenly the Punch to Obama’s Judy in the partisan puppet show. They were just the latest incarnation of a familiar American archetype that stretched from Thomas Nast’s political cartoons through Lionel Barrymore’s Mr. Potter in
It’s a Wonderful Life
, and from the Duke brothers in
Trading Places
to
The Simpsons
’ Montgomery Burns.

If Greenpeace had set out to make Charles and David Koch infamous, the plan worked even better than the activists had dreamed of. “It was almost like we let this balloon go,” Davies recalled, “and then it just kept getting bigger and bigger.”

At the White House, the Americans for Prosperity onslaught had become hard to ignore. During the health care reform fight that spring, the Koch brothers’ advocacy group began targeting vulnerable congressional Democrats—including West Virginia’s Alan Mollohan, Pennsylvania’s Christopher Carney and Kathy Dahlkemper, Wisconsin’s Steve Kagen, North Dakota’s Earl Pomeroy, and New York’s Michael Arcuri—with brutal attack ads. The spots, featuring a breast cancer survivor, suggested that these Democrats supported a government-run health care plan that could end up costing Americans their lives by denying mammograms to women under the age of fifty. These ads were rife with falsehoods—but they didn’t have to be true to be effective.

“The issue was volume really more than anything else,” remembered Bill Burton, who was then serving as the deputy White House press secretary. “Their ads are not well produced; but if you put enough money behind even a bad ad, you’re going to get good results.” He recalled that the topic of Americans for Prosperity and its billionaire backers began to arise as the president’s top aides powwowed about the midterms and other political matters. “It would come up in communications and strategy meetings where we would talk about how to deal with it,” Burton said. “It would come up in meetings where we discussed how to handle this from the podium… and the result was what you saw the President saying out there on the stump about the money that was pouring into these races.” Obama’s aides settled on a simple strategy: Show voters that Americans for Prosperity was not the grassroots group it claimed to be, but a vehicle for a shadowy corporate agenda.

President Obama road-tested this White House–crafted messaging on the afternoon of August 9, 2010, during a fund-raising swing through Texas. In the ballroom of the Four Seasons in Austin overlooking Lady Bird Lake, where Democratic donors noshed
on watermelon salad with basil crème fraîche and a duo of crab cake and beef tenderloin, Obama declared:

Obama stopped short of name-checking the Kochs or their company, but that would come from his lieutenants in the weeks leading up to the midterms.

One of the first shots came from David Axelrod, the president’s chief political strategist. On September 23, in a
Washington Post
op-ed, Axelrod singled out the Koch brothers by name as he detailed the “audacious stealth campaign being mounted by powerful corporate special interests that are vying to put their Republican allies in control of Congress.”

He wrote: “Yet another group, Americans for Prosperity, is funded by billionaire oil men, David and Charles Koch, to promote Republican candidates who support their right-wing agenda and corporate interests. The group has gone to great lengths to conceal information about its donors and their motives.” Axelrod noted that a recent article by
The New Yorker
’s Jane Mayer had “revealed that this group has been quietly guiding the organizing efforts of the Tea Party—in other words, billionaire oilmen secretly underwriting what the public has been told is a grass-roots movement for change in Washington.”

No amount of forewarning prepared Charles for the experience of becoming a political punching bag. “I’m not sure it would ever cross Charles’s mind that… a sitting president would single him out,” said Charlie Chandler, the chairman and CEO of INTRUST Bank, whose board Charles has served on since the 1960s. “He thinks, ‘I’m from Wichita, Kansas!’ ”

The attention to his political activities made him uncomfortable and he couldn’t grasp why he was being portrayed as some greedy Republican overlord. He considered himself a member of neither political party and held politicians on both sides of the aisle in equal disdain. His cause was economic freedom—shoving the government out of the marketplace, so Americans could pursue their own economic interests and succeed or fail based on their own abilities—and he cared little whether there was a D or an R next to the name of the politician most likely to advocate for it. “He thinks he’s John Galt,” said a conservative strategist who knows Charles—and he must have felt like the persecuted hero of Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged
, too, as he came into the Obama administration’s crosshairs.

Richard Fink and the Koch brothers may have steeled themselves for things to get “ugly,” but they failed to prepare the company for the increased scrutiny. Even though Fink had carefully modeled a range of scenarios that might play out if the brothers ratcheted up their political involvement, which he presented to Charles and David, key players including Melissa Cohlmia, Koch’s communications director, and Mark Holden, the company’s general counsel, were kept in the dark about their plans and the potential fallout. As the Koch brothers became the scourge of the Left, the company was initially caught off guard. And it showed.

At first, Koch Industries seemed unsure of how to handle the wave of attention, what to respond to and what to suffocate with silence. In 2010, for instance, as Tax Day loomed, Cohlmia preemptively e-mailed reporters and bloggers to remind them that
neither the Koch brothers nor their company had provided funds “specifically to support the tea parties.” The carefully worded statement seemed only to reinforce the notion that the Kochs were not being fully forthright about their political activities and had something to hide.

As Charles and David increasingly became leading characters in the political story line, the company shifted from a defensive crouch to a wartime posture, punching back aggressively at what it considered media distortions. “We were caught off guard, but I think we got prepared pretty quickly,” said Cohlmia, a petite brunette of Lebanese extraction. Jane Mayer’s
New Yorker
article on the Kochs, titled “Covert Operations,” particularly infuriated David, who could not restrain himself from firing back in an interview with a reporter for the
Daily Beast
. “If what I and my brother believe in, and advocate for, is secret, it’s the worst covert operation in history,” he fumed.

Following the release of Mayer’s article, Koch Industries vigorously attacked her credibility on its website. The
New York Post
later reported on an “apparently concerted campaign”—of unclear origins—“to smear” Mayer through the conservative press, including an abortive attempt by a reporter from Tucker Carlson’s
Daily Caller
website to investigate the esteemed
New Yorker
journalist for plagiarism. When her story on the Kochs was nominated for a National Magazine Award, Mark Holden sent a lengthy missive to the executive director of the American Society of Magazine Editors slamming Mayer’s reporting as “ideologically slanted and a prime example of a disturbing trend in journalism, where agenda-driven advocacy masquerades as objective reporting.” Holden, meanwhile, had quietly launched an internal investigation into whether current or former Koch employees had provided information to Mayer.

By the end of the year, Koch Industries had set up a website,
KochFacts
, that was devoted to fighting back against the media
onslaught. Along with acerbic rebuttals, it published e-mail correspondence with editors and reporters that displayed supposed evidence of media bias or dishonesty. Koch ran web ads targeting specific reporters and it created a ticker that cataloged each mention of Koch Industries that appeared in
The New York Times
in order to track the paper’s “curious fixation” on the company. This was part of what one senior Koch executive described as “upping the transaction costs for the other side.” By punching back, he said, “some of the mainstream media are more selective about what they report about us. They know if they step out of bounds or don’t follow the rules or journalistic ethics and standards, we’re going to hit back at them. That’s what we do.”