Just outside Wichita, Kan., in the 1950s, a Koch family retainer opened the door to a pickup truck. Teenage fraternal twins—David and Billy—piled out.
They had been fighting again and neither would back down. To avoid the boys’ seriously hurting each other, the retainer, an ex-Marine, gave them boxing gloves and told them to “duke it out.”
Little did anyone realize at the time that throughout most of their adult lives the four Koch brothers (Frederick, Charles, David and Bill Koch, pronounced like the soft drink) would be duking it out constantly. Instead of boxing gloves, the weapons of choice would become private detectives, lawyers and lawsuits—including one against their own mother—in their later years.
The family feuds “would make [the TV shows] Dynasty and Dallas look like playpens,” Bill Koch once said. Frederick and Bill were bought out of the family business many years ago—Bill because he was ousted—leading to many lawsuits. Frederick left because he preferred art collecting and the purchase of historic buildings to business.
The “duking it out” vignette is how Daniel Schulman begins his book Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. Schulman is a senior editor in the Washington bureau of Mother Jones magazine and is a founding member of the magazine’s investigative journalism team. His work has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, Psychology Today, the Village Voice and other publications.
The colorful biography took two years to research and write and has 47 pages of notes and index.
Plus, it contains something for both sides of the political spectrum:
If you are a conservative businessman, you can see how brilliantly Charles and David built their father’s Midwestern empire ($250 million in yearly sales with 650 employees in the late 1960s) into the corporate giant it is today (the second-largest privately owned company in the world, with $115 billion in annual sales and more than 100,000 employees). It is in the lives of everyone, selling products from Dixie Cups, Brawny paper towels and Quilted Northern toilet paper, to oil, cattle and building materials.
Charles and David have done so well in business they are Nos. 5 and 6, respectively, on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans, with fortunes of $40 billion each.
If you are into conservative politics, you can appreciate how Charles and David Koch patiently have shaped American politics by providing millions of dollars in seed money to start the Tea Party and other organizations.