Dark Money

CHAPTER ONE

Radicals: A Koch Family History

Oddly enough, the fiercely libertarian Koch family owed part of its fortune to two of history s most infamous dictators, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. The family patriarch, Fred Chase Koch, founder of the family oil business, developed lucrative business relationships with both of their regimes in the 1930s.

According to family lore, Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer and publisher who settled in the small town of Quanah, Texas, just south of the Oklahoma border, where he owned a weekly newspaper and print shop. Quanah, which was named for the last American Comanche chief, Quanah Parker, still retained its frontier aura when Fred was born there in 1900. Bright and eager to get out from under his overbearing old-world father, Fred once ran away to live with the Comanches as a boy. Later, he crossed the country for college, transferring from Rice in Texas to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There, he earned a degree in chemical engineering and joined the boxing team. Early photographs show him as a tall, formally dressed young man with glasses, a tuft of unruly curls, and a self-confident, defiant expression.

In 1927, Fred, who was an inveterate tinkerer, invented an improved process for extracting gasoline from crude oil. But as he would later tell his sons bitterly and often, America s major oil companies regarded him as a business threat and shut him out of the industry, suing him and his customers in 1929 for patent infringement. Koch regarded the monopolistic patents invoked by the major oil companies as anticompetitive and unfair. The fight appears to be an early version of the Kochs later opposition to corporate cronyism in which they contend that the government and big business collaborate unfairly. In Fred Koch s eye, he was an outsider fighting a corrupt system.

Koch fought back in the courts for more than fifteen years, finally winning a $1.5 million settlement. He correctly

Jane Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three bestselling and critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction books. She co-authored Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988, with Doyle McManus, and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, with Jill Abramson, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was named one of The New York Times’s Top 10 Books of the Year and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Goldsmith Book Prize, the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. For her reporting at The New Yorker, Mayer has been awarded the John Chancellor Award, the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, and the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence presented by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Mayer lives in Washington, D.C.

Praise for Jane Mayer s Dark Money

Revelatory. . . . Persuasive, timely and necessary. The New York Times

Dark Money is more than just a work of political journalism it s a vital portrait of a nation that, as perhaps never before, is being shaped by a few very rich, very conservative businessmen. San Francisco Chronicle 
 
Absolutely necessary reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics. The New York Review of Books  

Deeply researched and studded with detail . . . Seems destined to rattle the Koch executive offices in Wichita as other investigations have not.   Washington Post

With such turmoil on the right wing of American politics, reading Dark Money is like reading the first chapter of what may be a great political page-turner.  
Chicago Tribune

Jane Mayer . . . is, quite simply, one of the very few utterly invaluable journalists this country has.   Esquire 

Amazing. . . . The most important political book of the year.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch 

Dark Money is almost too good for its own good. Los Angeles Review of Books

[A] comprehensive history. . . . Stunning.  
Salon