Behind the Koch Brothers: New Book Spills the Secrets of Nation's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty
Charles and David Koch have funneled millions of dollars to conservative candidates and causes over the last four decades while working tirelessly to open the floodgates for money in politics. The Koch brothers’ net worth tops $100 billion, currently tying for fourth on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. Their rise to becoming two of the nation’s most powerful political figures is explored in the new book, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. The story is based on hundreds of interviews with Koch family and friends, as well as thousands of pages of legal documents. We are joined by the book’s author, Daniel Schulman, a senior editor at Mother Jones magazine.
TRANSCRIPT:
NERMEEN SHAIKH: To talk more about the Koch brothers, we turn now to Daniel Schulman. He’s a senior editor at Mother Jones magazine, and his new book, just out this week, is Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. The story is based on hundreds of interviews with Koch family and friends, as well as thousands of pages of legal documents.
Daniel Schulman, we welcome you to Democracy Now! Explain why you wrote this book.
DANIEL SCHULMAN: Well, in the 2010-2011 time frame, you really started to see the Koch brothers become demonized and villainized. And they really became these cartoon villains behind the curtain of politics, and they were a caricature. I started looking into their story a little bit, and the one thing that first interested me was there are actually four Koch brothers, not two. We always talk about Charles and David Koch. Of course, there are also Frederick and Bill Koch. These guys obviously have a phenomenally interesting political story, but their family story is just as fascinating to me.
AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t you tell us, in a nutshell, that family story?
DANIEL SCHULMAN: OK. Well, their father, Fred Koch, in the 1920s develops a process for refining oil. His firm ends up getting sued by the major oil companies of the era, and in order to find work, he ends up having to look for contracts overseas. That leads him to work in Stalin’s Soviet Union in the early 1930s, where his firm makes $5 million helping to modernize the Soviet oil industry. He’s horrified by what he sees there. And when he returns home, he vows to do everything he can to fight communism. He ends up becoming a founding member of the John Birch Society, ultraconservative group whose leader, Robert Welch, considered Dwight Eisenhower to be literally an agent of the communist conspiracy. Fred Koch is in the room, literally, when the John Birch Society is founded. Charles Koch becomes a member of the John Birch Society as a young man. His three brothers—his three other brothers.
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