Free Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty by Daniel Schulman

the possible implosion of the conservative movement. Through the head-spinning conspiracies of Robert Welch—who had called President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” and claimed Soviet censorship of Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize–winning
Doctor Zhivago
was actually an elaborate ruse so that the subversive book would be embraced by the West—the Birch Society risked branding all conservatives as cranks and kooks.
    At first, Buckley and his allies took care to distance themselves from Welch without offending their fellow conservatives, who were joining the Birch Society in droves. Barry Goldwater, the charismatic Republican senator from Arizona and 1964 presidential nominee, was particularly mindful of his base of support within the society, which was populated with many deep-pocketed businessmen. He feared alienating men like Fred Koch, who had generously supported his political career: Upon the 1960 publicationof
The Conscience of a Conservative
, Fred promptly ordered 2,500 copies of the polemic that propelled Goldwater to political stardom and put them in the hands of every opinion maker in Kansas. In 1961, Goldwater managed to praise the society’s members without endorsing the views of the group’s controversial Svengali, telling reporters he was “impressed by the type of people” in the society. “They are the kind we need in politics.”
    But by early 1962, as the society gained strength and numbers, it grew clear to Buckley and his allies that more drastic action was needed. By embracing Goldwater, Birchers threatened his chances of broader Republican appeal. Buckley, Goldwater, and other conservative leading lights convened that January at Palm Beach’s upscale Breakers Hotel, where they spent considerable time discussing the Birch Society problem. There, Buckley volunteered for the assignment of making Robert Welch into a pariah. That February he unleashed a 5,000-word haymaker in
National Review
, titled “The Question of Robert Welch,” which slammed the Birch Society leader for harming the cause of anticommunism. “How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points… so far removed from common sense?” Buckley wrote.
    Senior members of the society had already begun to chafe under Welch’s autocratic leadership. (Democracy, he famously said, was “a weapon of demagoguery and a perennial fraud.”) Buckley’s essay caused further unrest. But Fred remained one of Welch’s defenders.
    “I wrote Buckley and told him that possibly if the Communists ever took over he would be a prime candidate for the firing squad and that by attacking Welch he was hastening the day considerably,” he reported to the conservative journalist Elizabeth Churchill Brown.
    Fred’s hard-line conservative politics were controversial not only to the broader public, but also within his extended family, causing what one relative called a “schism” between the Kochs and the family of Mary’s younger brother, William Robinson, a prominent lawyer in Wichita. While Fred organized the Birch Society in the early- and mid-1960s, Robinson chaired the Democratic Central Committee of Sedgwick County (which includes Wichita). In 1964, the year Fred enthusiastically backed Goldwater’s presidential bid, Robinson attended the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City as a delegate.
    Robinson ran twice, unsuccessfully, for Congress, making a bid for the 4th district congressional seat in 1960 and challenging Bob Dole in the 1968 Senate race. “That was the death of the relationship between the Robinsons and the Kochs,” the relative said. Bill Koch, however, remained close to his uncle and aunt, especially in adulthood. “They were like surrogate parents. They were the loving parents that he always wanted.” Bill’s uncle was fiercely loyal to his nephew. “Billy is a