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

very compassionate guy, unlike the rest of his family,” Robinson sniped in 1992.
    Fred’s conservatism influenced his children in different ways. Bill, for his part, never fully embraced the extreme politics of his father. He even considered following in the footsteps of his uncle, contemplating a Senate bid in Kansas as a Democrat in the late 1990s—an indignity that Fred, who had passed on by this point, was mercifully spared. Nor was the old man alive to see Bill augment his art collection with paintings by modern artists (including Picasso) who he considered communists.
    David inherited his conservative views on government from Fred, but he has implied that some of his father’s more conspiratorial beliefs about communism were out there. “Father was paranoid about communism, let’s put it that way,” David told
New York
magazine. Frederick—save for a 1980s run-in with the Britishbureaucracy over his plans to renovate a historic mansion in London—steered clear of politics entirely.
    Of the four brothers, Charles most heartily imbibed their father’s hard-line political views; part of this likely owed to his arrival back in Wichita in the early 1960s, after attending college and grad school in Boston, during the height of Fred’s John Birch Society organizing. One Wichitan recalled going on a blind date with Charles in the early 1960s, where he spent much of the evening discoursing on the evils of communism and discussing
Communism on the Map
—one of a series of propagandistic films screened at Birch Society chapter meetings, in which the nations of the world are shown slowly being covered by an ooze of pink or red. His date was not impressed. “I ended up leaving early and walking home,” she remembered.
    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.

CHAPTER FOUR
May Day at MIT
    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