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

and two days short of their twenty-first birthday, had cooked up a little counterrevolution of their own—a display of anticommunist fervor that would have made Fred Koch proud. With finals approaching, it seemed like as good an excuse as any to get loaded on keg beer and blow off some steam. Making the rounds on MIT’s Cambridge campus, Bill, one classmate recalled, advertised the protest on the blackboards of his engineering classes: “Anti-Castro Rally: Free Beer at the Beta House.”
    Fraternities and student dormitories lined Bay State Road, and as night fell, a small but rowdy crowd of about fifty formed outside the Kochs’ fraternity house. Soon, the sound of sirens was inthe air and three paddy wagons screeched to a stop. But instead of subduing the crowd, the arrival of the cops attracted a new wave of onlookers. Diagonally across the street from the Beta house sat a large dormitory that housed Boston University coeds. The Betas knew it well. The mathematically minded fraternity brothers had developed a grid system for spying on the B.U. girls. On many an evening a Beta would suddenly call out a coordinate—say, 6-D—and the brothers would then scramble to train a set of Navy-issue binoculars on the sixth floor, fourth window from the right, where a coed had forgotten to draw the shades before disrobing.
    The Boston University students had mostly watched the Betas’ rally from their windows. But when the police arrived, they poured out of the dorm “like ants out of an ant hill,” recalled Kent Groninger, a member of the fraternity. The four blocks surrounding the Beta house suddenly swarmed with hundreds of rowdy, chanting college students. During the melee, Groninger and another tipsy Beta hauled a bale of hay a half-block to the corner of Deerfield Street, then lit it on fire. “The Boston Fire Department responded—big time,” chuckled Groninger. “They brought a number of trucks, the hook and ladder, the whole damn thing.” The police struggled to restore order, all the while being pelted with bottles and cherry bombs. “Holy shit,” Groninger said, recalling the events of fifty years ago, “it turned into a riot.”
    The Boston Police arrested more than thirty students, including a handful of Betas, and spent nearly two hours dispersing the crowd. No sooner had the students dissipated than a new anti-Castro protest erupted on the MIT campus across the river. A mob of two hundred students then marched up Massachusetts Avenue bound for Harvard Yard, where “the Engineers prostrated themselves before the statue of John Harvard,”
The Harvard Crimson
reported. The next morning, the front page of
The Boston Globe
blared: “MIT, B.U. Riot Follows Hanging of Castro Effigy.” Newsof the anticommunist student uprising even reached the Soviet Union, published in the Russian newspaper
Pravda
.
    The incident prompted a halfhearted MIT investigation. Later, the Beta brothers proudly took credit for the melee in the school’s yearbook—and singled out the Koch twins for inciting it. “The Betas enjoyed a very successful year,” the fraternity reported. “But our activities were far from being on the limited side of life. Led by the brothers Koch, we staged Mayday 1961, as an expression of our conservative and anti-communist sentiments (much to the dismay of the I.F.C. [Interfraternity Conference] and Fidel Castro, who hung in effigy).”
    “Great friends, wild parties, athletic triumphs, academic successes, and actually learning something useful”—that’s how David later summed up his college experience in an MIT alumni questionnaire. Bill joked that his most vivid college memories were “not fit for publication.”
    Like Charles, who graduated with an engineering degree in 1957, a year before his younger brothers enrolled at MIT, David and Bill pledged Beta Theta Pi and took up residence in the fraternity house.
    “Dave was always up for a party,” recalled Groninger, who was one year behind