Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (7 page)

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.

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.)

“He pretty much went his own way. He knew what he wanted and did it,” said Bertram Beach Culver III, another classmate and a member of the family who founded the school. “He was not unpopular but kind of set the terms on things like friendships. He decided if he wanted to be around you.”

At Culver, Bill began to accept the ways he differed from his brother, if not fully embrace them. But at MIT, they were once again thrown back together, living in the same house, attending the same classes, sharing the same group of friends. When old animosities flared, it was typically on the basketball court. The brothers’ towering size—both of them were verging on six feet five—made them ideal recruits, and they joined MIT’s junior varsity team as freshmen.

“Bill was always trying to keep up with Dave. He always felt inferior and always felt that Dave got the best of things,” recalled Bill Bloebaum, an MIT friend and teammate of the brothers. “If they bumped into each other at practice, Bill would quickly get verbal on it, but it wouldn’t bother Dave that much. Bill was the more emotional guy. He wore his emotions on his shoulder.”

A top rebounder with a deadly jump shot, David quickly emerged as the team’s star player, and one of the finer athletes ever to pass through the university. (He even set the freshman pole-vaulting record.) Bill was a second-stringer, who occasionally subbed for his brother and was better known for his on-court tussles than his basketball prowess.

MIT’s basketball team had a dismal track record—a 3 and 13 season was an average performance. They were called, after all, the Engineers, as if to highlight the fact that their skill lay off the court. During the 1959–1960 season, Jack Barry, MIT’s varsity basketball coach, inherited a team composed largely of
sophomores, including David and Bill. Recognizing their inexperience, he drilled the players on a single formation. “He always said that our team was not good enough to have more than one play, so we ran that one play all the time,” said Burns, who played the high post (David played the low post) in this formation.

Both David and Bill remember their charismatic coach fondly. “He organized the team to compensate for everybody’s weaknesses,” Bill recalled. “One guy couldn’t dribble, so he said, ‘You just stand here.’ Another guy could shoot from the outside but not the inside, so he said, ‘O.K., your job is shooting over here.’… He emphasized complete teamwork and instilled in us the attitude that we MIT nerds could win.” (David later donated $2 million to endow the head coach position at MIT.)

In December 1959, during Bill and David’s sophomore year, the Engineers piled onto the team bus for the hour-and-a-half trip to Hartford, Connecticut, to face off against Trinity College, where they were handed their first double-digit loss of the season. The next game—a highly anticipated matchup with their Cambridge rivals, Harvard—was a 50-point blowout so humiliating that the Crimson’s contrite coach apologized to Barry after the game. Just before Christmas break, though, things began to look up. The Engineers eked out a 1-point victory over Worcester Polytechnic Institute, when David drained the deciding basket. The team was riding high off that victory when they faced Springfield in early January. By the second half, David had scored 23 points.

Then disaster struck.

With minutes on the clock, he aggravated an old knee injury that sidelined him for the rest of the season. He watched from the bench as the team embarked on a dispiriting losing streak that netted the Engineers a 2 and 20 record.

“We were basically a disaster,” said Mead Wyman, a teammate and Beta brother, who remains close with David. “It was a long season.”

Things turned around the following year, when David returned to the court. Averaging 24 points a game, he ranked among the top 30 scorers nationwide and won a spot on the All New England team. “His moves were just so good,” Wyman recalled. At the conclusion of the Engineers’ impressive 11 and 8 season, MIT’s newspaper reported: “The backbone of the team on the floor was Dave Koch.”

Bill dropped off the team their senior year, while David was elected its captain, a role he had been passed over for as a junior. (“It was an attitude thing,” one of his teammates said. “He was more focused on himself junior year.”) David described his squad that year as “hustling, fighting, aggressive,” and he predicted at the start of the season that the 1962 team would be MIT’s best ever.

It was. The Engineers went on a 15-game winning streak to end the season, boasting a 17 and 4 record. David set a longstanding MIT record of his own that season, scoring 41 points during one game against Middlebury College. His record remained intact for 46 years, until it was surpassed by MIT’s Jimmy Bartolotta, who went on to play pro basketball in Europe.

On the final game of the 1962 season, against the University of Chicago, David walked off the court to a standing ovation. But the record-breaking season still ended in disappointment. The players and their coach believed the team was a shoo-in for the NCAA tournament. New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College was selected instead.

The season was filled with highs and lows, but one of the most memorable moments occurred earlier that year at a home game in MIT’s Rockwell Cage. The tall, beefy player guarding David had pushed him around for most of the game. The referees seemed oblivious, which made the opposing player that much more brazen in his manhandling of the Engineers’ star player. At one point, dispensing with any pretense of finesse, he roughly shoved David
to the ground. Moments later, a lanky form suddenly leapt from the stands and charged David’s startled opponent, leveling the big player with a single blow.

“Bill went out and knocked the guy flat,” remembered Bill Bloebaum.

Tom Burns recalled: “Bill was not going to let anybody push David around like that.” He added, “I think everybody was thinking, ‘well, that’s Bill. You can’t stop him once he gets going.’ ”

The Engineers received a technical foul, and Bill was promptly ejected from the Rockwell Cage.

Charles remained in Boston after completing his bachelor’s degree in 1957. He occasionally dropped by the Beta house to look in on his brothers and watched their basketball games from the bleachers. David and Bill attended parties at Charles’s apartment, and the three brothers sometimes dated together. They were closer than ever.

Like the twins, Charles thrived at MIT, where the environment was a welcome change from the highly regimented gulag of military school. “We didn’t even have to attend class—all we had to do was do the work. I felt liberated,” Charles has said.

Similar to his younger brothers, he displayed no pretensions of privilege. “You had no idea of the wealth he represented,” said Ellis Braman, a fraternity brother. “He was a great guy, very personable, very friendly. He charmed the girls. He was a good looking fellow—tall, blonde.”

The challenging engineering classes at MIT came easily to Charles, and on the nights before big exams, when his friends crammed, he’d often repair to a local beer and pizza joint and kick back. “Just smart as a whip,” Braman said.